u/huzzah_a_pimpernale

What books, magazine series, articles, etc have you found that helped refine your technique or made something "just click" with cars or driving.

Particularly for drifting but also driving in general.

There's nothing wrong with just tearing it up, but I'd imagine there's some well-respected drivers who've written down their knowledge somewhere.

I'm thinking of Dempsey's Championship Fighting. There's got to be something akin to that for cars, driving, drifting, and/or racing.

The Sentai summer sale was pretty nice this year. For the hate it gets on here (probably deserved tbf) CR actually had some decent sales recently although not a huge selection. I haven't been blown away by any MediaOCD discounts so far although it seems consistently ok.

From skimming through old posts is seems like it's generally worth checking for things going on-sale during a seasonal summer sale, Black Friday, or Cyber Monday.

Are there any other major recurring cyclical discounts/sales? Of course nothing is guranteed, I'm just asking about past deals.

The protoganist is musician, possibly a violinist, who has to try to keep different dimensions' Earths from colliding. He bounces between these different worlds (something like Earth Red, Earth Blue, etc) that each have time differences, like Earth Red might be 30 years behind Earth Blue or something. I believe he met his deceased parents on another world with a greater time offset. I don't recall if they were exactly the same worlds exempting the time differences or more like bizarro versions.

I vaguely recall the MC having some sort of a romance interest although in a very innocent sort of way as like a 14-17 year old.

I believe he learned how to play his instrument from his mother. And to mend whatever was causing the worlds to converge he had to play, to the point that his fingers bled and he played on. I can't even remember the context but somehow the scene is still vivid in my mind.

I believe the cover was mostly greyscale and may have had raindrops. In my mind it vaguely feels like there was some significance to glass or broken glass or a mirror or something. And like the music activated it? Or maybe water was the reflective surface? I just can't recall. I read this at least 10 years ago, quick likely more like 15.

I can't imagine there's that many books that meet this description. Any help is much appreciated!

It's not clear to me what the requirements are to rip Blu Ray region free. Personally idrc about UHD or triple or quad discs.

I know MakeMKV is by far the best software out there for ripping atm. But I can't figure out if I need LibreDrive support for region free support. It sounds like maybe I do, since drives apparently come with firmware that enforces region coding and LibreDrive is what allows you bypass that?

But then everything I read in relation to LibreDrive seems to be focused on UHD including the supported firmware listings. So maybe it is just about UHD?

But then Libre literally means free and Region Free means free so maybe it isn't?

I've spent hours researching and I feel silly but also more confused than when I started. I hope someone can shed some light on this for me. It'd be much appreciated.

I think this sub is the right place for a discussion on Blu Ray/DVD longevity given that it impacts long-term data hoarding. This is a lengthy post but I went down the rabbit hole and now I want to share what I found and see what others think.

I found this article which linked to MAM-A (now dead, preserved on The Internet Archive). MAM-A boasted pretty impressive longevity claims for DVD and CD and seemed to back it up.

MAM-A linked to The Canadian Conservation Institute's very nice article on CD/DVD selection and longevity. From there I found a more recent article discussing Blu Ray.

Of particular interest to this sub may be Table 2 from the latter article:

https://preview.redd.it/5wsu39ba9gfh1.png?width=1035&format=png&auto=webp&s=faf4785e8e6def629f9aa4a14ba4fe7e0fdf2457

Interestingly, for Blu Ray multiple write discs offer significantly better longevity than one time write discs which is the opposite of DVD. I hadn't seen anyone talk about that before. More on that later. However my main takeaway was that Blu Ray has a significantly shorter shelf life than some DVD formats (e.g. DVD-R (gold layer).

I took it at face value until I started combing through the sources. Iraci (2018) "Blu-Ray Media Stability and Suitability for Long-Term Storage" caught my eye as the main support that Blu Ray is significantly worse for longevity than DVD.

Iraci based his study on acclerated aging which involved putting discs in equipment at 80C (176F) and Relative Humidity (RH) 85% for a number of days. For DVDs the derived data appears meaningful because the DVDs didn't break down from the heat.

Now I'm not chemist or an expert with Arrhenius equations. But I think I get the basic mechanism behind accelerated aging: Temperature is literally average kinetic movement. Higher temperature = more movement = more contact between reactants = faster reaction speed = accelerated reactions ≈≈ real aging from reactions. Now, accelerated age testing is fine as long as the effects of the testing are primarily mechanical and the temperature does not denature the reactants themselves.

From the pictures Iraci included and from his descriptions it looks to me like the temperature did exactly that; it directly damaged the Blu Ray discs. Iraci even mentioned it:

>"Another concern was the number of visual problems that were evident after accelerated ageing, especially the BD-Rs. This indicates significant changes are occurring physically and chemically which is not desirable."

>"Accelerated ageing experiments have shown that Blu-rays have rather poor stability and much lower that some of the other optical disc formats when exposed to elevated temperature and relative humidity conditions" [emphasis added]

If the temperature just directly damaged the Blu Ray discs (esp. BD-R) as seems to be the case, then the accelerated aging test doesn't meaningfully predict anything. Unlike reactions such as b/w the disc and air or case that occur naturally and can be accelerated, the disc will not spontaneously denature at all unless a minimum activation energy (e.g. temperature) is met.

All this made me skeptical that we're dramatically underestimating the life of Blu Ray discs, especially BD-R. There are potentially useful implications here, such as that you may want to prioritize storing BD-R in a cool environment or avoid letting its optical reader get too hot. Don't leave them in your car in Arizona. Don't put it in your oven. Etc. But none of that means they're going to react more quickly with their environment or have accelerated decay or rot at room temperature.

If you have any related studies or articles please drop their DOI's or links. I'd love if any chemists or engineers want to weigh in on the science here. And anecdotal evidence from hoarders with large sample sizes are welcome.

I saw the post below yesterday and went to jump on it. For me the "Add to Cart" button is greyed out. I thought maybe I just needed to upgrade my membership and give it a day to update, but it's still greyed out. Did I miss it or is my computer just wonkey?

I made an anki flash card deck for french with native speaker clips that encompasses almost every word in the French language based off of the French government's Lexique project. Translation was initially done w/ DeepL, but while using the deck I've manually reviewed the first 8,000 or so cards and made significant alterations & improvements.

I originally made it for me, but I think the project is now pretty mature so I've decided to share it.

Shared Deck Name: Lexique Frequency List w/ Real Speakers

Link to the first 5,000 words: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/431157503

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This deck is non-profit. This isn't spam or AI slop. The project was quite work intensive and not to toot my own horn, but I think it's pretty respectable quality although I plan to re-upload the shared deck with occasional improvements. I spent almost 2 years making this after finishing the common 5,000 word frequency list.

For more detailed information on licensing for derivative distrubution IAW MIT & source licenses, please see the shared deck page or the github project description.

Pretty much the title. I made a flash card deck for french with native speaker clips. It encompasses almost every word in the French language based off of the French government's Lexique project.

My hope is that this flash card deck will be the only resource you'll need to reach the vocabulary level of an educated native-level French speaker (exempting slang, regional, and grouped lexigraphical meaning - c'est la vie).

I originally made it for me, but I think the project is pretty mature now so I've decided to share it. The quality is quite good, but don't expect perfection. This deck will have some inconsistencies and quirks and occasionally the audio quality may be poor. Rather than complain, you can easily fix subpar cards yourself. As issues are found, I am very happy to receive constructive feedback at the inbox listed on the shared deck page. Also, as I review and improve cards myself, I'll occasionally republish the shared deck with improvements. Also in case it isn't obvious, I'm a native english speaker so the translations are in english, however it's fairly trivial for someone to change the english field to their native language using something like HyperTTS (no affiliation) or something like the python wrapper I wrote to generate it with DeepL. You can really use any use any service or resource to do so, these are just the tools I'm familar with.

Shared Deck Name: Lexique Frequency List w/ Real Speakers

Link to the first 5k: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/431157503

____________

This deck is free in both the monetary sense and in the open source sense. This project was only possible thanks to a several non-profit community, organizational, and government projects. I think it would incredibly disrespectiful towards those efforts to try to exploit their work for profit. Anyone publishing derivative works from this project (both any version of the deck itself and github) is expected (and legally bound by licensing agreements) to publish it strictly for non-profit usage. My contributions are licensed under the MIT license however certain materials inherit original source licensing obligations. This deck and its resources were made with and are used IAW with the appropriate respective source licenses. In general, MIT and other FOSS licenses allow for redistribution and modification so long as credit is given to the derivative works sources. In this case there are additional requirements that derivative works also be non-profit. Please see the link or Github project page for more details.

I don't even know. I ran sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade and now Firefox is just entirely unusable. It reset all my preferences and set my search engine back to Google. For some reason my home page background is now pink. I can't close tabs unless I manually click the 'X'. Everything is terribly slow. Websites don't load unless I click and then refresh for after using any button. It's just completely annihilated.

Restarting my computer didn't help.

Does anyone have any advice? I'm on Debian 6.12.57-1 with Firefox version 140.10.2esr.