marmarama

I wouldn't say the Pixel line's hardware is rubbish, more that Google is focused on having a polished "it just works" experience rather than trying to differentiate themselves by having the fastest, biggest, newest hardware in the Android market.

The mobile market hit the "diminishing returns" point quite a while ago and for a lot of people - probably the majority - the only reasons to upgrade are security updates ending, or because a non-replaceable battery is getting to the end of its life.

I used to upgrade every 12-18 months religiously, but now my Pixel 5 is coming up on 3 years old and I'd happily keep it another few years with a battery replacement, if the updates weren't going to end shortly.

I could well be wrong about the AAC passthrough, and I should have hedged that statement with "allegedly" as I've not tested it myself.

To your other point though, I disagree - there are plenty of ways you could pass through an unchanged AAC bitstream, but still mix in other sounds when required. For example, having the sender duck the original bitstream out temporarily and send a mixed replacement bitstream while the other sound is playing. Or (and this would only work if you control the firmware on the receiver, but if you're using Apple headphones with an Apple device, that's not a problem) sending multiple bitstreams to the receiver and letting the receiver mix them.

I can only comment on my experience with my own equipment and ears, but in my experience, 990Kbps LDAC is noticeably more transparent than 256Kbps AAC for Bluetooth audio.

I can fairly reliably guess whether or not I remembered to switch my Sony XM4s out of multipoint mode the last time I used them (when in multipoint pairing mode LDAC is not supported and 256Kbps AAC is usually what gets negotiated). The difference is small, but over a few minutes of listening, the sonic signature when it's using AAC is just a little bit "off" and my ears don't like it as much.

Could I ABX the difference using the usual ABX setup with short samples of music I'm not familiar with? Probably not. Can I tell the difference over an extended period using music I know well, and that I often listen to uncompressed? Yes, pretty easily.

LDAC is not a particularly sophisticated codec, but it doesn't have to be when it has a 990Kbps bitrate. It's also possible that the FDK-AAC codec that I think both Pipewire and Android use for real-time AAC encoding is not the best tuned for 256Kbps CBR. AIUI in 256Kbps CBR mode, FDK-AAC has a hard low-pass filter at 17KHz, and I can still hear above 17KHz.

Yeah, I agree.

I bought them for their noise cancelling primarily, and they're excellent at that, but otherwise they're not great. The un-EQed frequency response is terrible for headphones in their price range: flabby, wildly over-exaggerated bass and no mids at all. Running without EQ I can barely hear lyrics - every singer sounds like they're mumbling underwater. I've had $20 IEMs with better tonal balance. They respond well to EQ but the on-board EQ doesn't have enough frequency bands to even come close to fixing them. Wavelet on Android doing EQ duty makes them listenable. Even when you do EQ them properly, they still sound a bit dull and lifeless.

No idea how they got so much praise when they were launched. The power of marketing budgets I guess. For a while I was gaslighting myself thinking I had a faulty pair or maybe there was something going wrong with my hearing, but having heard another pair, and doing comparisons with my other headphones - most of which are far cheaper - I realised that no, they're just not very good as headphones.

Yes. In E2 or E3 (I forget exactly which episode) there's an attempted misdirection, a "leading you up the garden path" moment, that was so obvious that for a moment I couldn't believe the script writers had done it. Then you realise that there's no way they'd ruin the rest of the season by actually revealing everything at that point, so therefore the opposite of what they're implying must be true. Which then kinda ruined the rest of the season for me. From that point on, virtually everything in the rest of the season was predictable, including the ending.

It would have been much better if the "garden path" moment had been left out entirely. It had no bearing on the plot itself and none of the characters paid it any heed; it was purely for the viewer.

It is worse than uncompressed, but 990Kbps LDAC is the closest codec to totally transparent I've heard for Bluetooth audio. AptX HD is nearly as good to my ears, and is better than 660Kbps LDAC. The differences are very small though, especially when compared with the differences on the analog side, e.g. the amp, and particularly the headphone design.

Apple side-steps the problem by, at least when you're listening to Apple Music, simply sending the AAC stream as-is to the headphones and has them decode the audio. I don't know why that isn't a more common approach.

I'm still somewhat bemused that we're talking about Bluetooth codecs at all. It surely can't be that difficult technically to get 1.5Mbps actual throughput on Bluetooth and simply send raw 16-bit/44.1Khz PCM. 2.4Ghz WiFi is capable of hundreds of times that speed. Bluetooth has been stuck at the same speeds for decades.

I have a Radsone ES100 Bluetooth DAC/headphone amp, and that supports LDAC, multipoint, and doesn't compromise the LDAC bitrate when you have multipoint enabled. You can even leave it plugged in as a USB DAC and still use multipoint BT with LDAC, and it switches smoothly between the sources depending on which device started playing a stream most recently.

I was distinctly underwhelmed by the BT implementation when I got my Sony XM4s, it's kinda weak by comparison.

I wanted to like Silo. The production was amazing, the cast was excellent, and the concept is very cool. But the storytelling didn't grab me. The twist in season 1 was telegraphed way too early and a bit clumsily, which left the rest of the season feeling flat for me.

The UI font in MacOS is called SF Pro. If you have access to a Mac you can simply copy the .otf font files over to Linux (they are in /System/Library/Fonts on MacOS) and install and use them there.

If you don't have access to a Mac, Google Roboto Sans is a very similar design (it was the default Android UI font for several years) and if it's not already installed by your Linux distro, it's freely downloadable.

MacOS font rendering is dreadful on non-Retina/HiDPI displays. If you want similar rendering on Linux, turn font hinting off, and set antialiasing to greyscale only, no subpixel rendering. It will look very similar, if not identical, to modern MacOS.

For non-Retina displays I vastly prefer FreeType's subpixel antialiasing and "slight" hinting to what MacOS does.

Have you tried turning off Wi-Fi power management on the Deck? The Deck's Wi-Fi is normally pretty good, but the Wi-Fi power management occasionally has issues with some combinations of router chipset and router settings, which can cause symptoms like what you're experiencing.

Full instructions are here: https://seekingtech.com/how-to-disable-wi-fi-power-management-on-steam-deck/

That's only true if China gets no further than attempting an amphibious landing on Taiwan. If China succeeds in creating a bridgehead on the island, then many of the same land-based weapons and systems that the US is currently supplying to Ukraine, or that Ukraine would like to have, come into play, including 155mm artillery, rocket artillery, tanks, air defence missiles, and land-based multirole aircraft like the F-16.

From a war planning point of view, unfortunately you can't assume that China's amphibious landing would fail. In fact, I think it's more likely that China would succeed in establishing some kind of foothold on the island in the early stages of a future Taiwan war than not. If the amphibious force is large enough, it would be very difficult to eliminate all the landing craft, especially if there is a successful misdirection.

This is without considering that North Korea could also simultaneously launch a land-based attack on South Korea to dilute any US response in either theatre.