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ThunderPeel2001

Things That Improve Your Life

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Instead of MP3gain, use Foobar2000. It does replaygain for most audioformats that support it. It's not just a player.

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I'd heard about this a while ago after seeing a Twitter conversation between Doug Tabacco and Toblix, but I only recently bought it myself...

Downcast

I got sick and tired of Apple's official Podcasts app thanks to a number of reasons: its slowness, its apparent inability to rearrange itself to show me the most recent podcast, and its insistence on showing me EVERY EPISODE OF A PODCAST EVER even if it wasn't downloaded to my iPhone. But mostly it was the whole 'oh-my-god-how-can-you-be-this-ridiculously-slow' thing.

So I remembered Downcast, and decided to take the £1.49 plunge, and boy am I glad I did. Not only is it fast at everything, including navigation and download speeds, it also rearranges itself to show me which of my podcasts most recently released an episode, it auto-downloads a new thing whenever I hit a WiFi spot, and also auto-deletes it as soon as I've listened to it. I'm incredibly pleased with it, and would recommend it wholeheartedly if you're as annoyed by the Podcasts app as I was.

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I just found myself cursing the Podcasts app today (although I think it's necessary that it shows every episode, so I can go back and pick one) -- this could be good! Thanks! (Yet another thing my ancient Zune does a million times better than Apple -- ffs.)

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Oh, with Downcast it's still there, it's just hidden behind one extra button. So I have the episodes I've downloaded/selected for streaming on the initial page, and just below that is a 'See other available episodes' button which - cleverly - hides the episodes you've already downloaded so you don't ever get confused.

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For Android folks who like podcasts, I thoroughly recommend Pocket Casts and BeyondPod. I used the former for a while before I switched to the latter because I like the UI a little better, but both are quite solid. Well worth the price for the full versions - very extensive playlist controls, ability to use Presto's 3rd party plugin for modified playback speed, feed-by-feed control of number of back podcasts to retain/deletion behavior after you finish listening to an episode, etc.

Pocket Casts is paid-only, but cheap ($2.99 US). BeyondPod has a free/limited version, but the full version unlock is expensive ($6.99). Again, both are worth it if you listen to podcasts on Android but I'm currently using BeyondPod.

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James, the way the recommendation system works is that it finds people who rate movies like you rate movies and then aggregates their scores to guess at what you would rate the movie. This page explains it.

I knew it was based on similar ratings, and had seen that page, but I guess I wasn't thinking very clearly when I wrote the post. For some reason I thought it might have been based on some sort of statistical analysis of how certain scores tended to coincide, rather than finding your individual neighbours and deriving score predictions from other scores they've awarded (presumably based on an average weighted by TCI). My mind is disorganized and bad.

Anyway, my actual point still sort of stands: whether you hated or merely disliked a film could factor into how precisely your tastes align with another user's. Also, if you give a film a really low score, it will presumably bring down your neighbours' predicted scores for that film, which will matter to them, if not you.

(That's one thing that hasn't been mentioned yet: The awful and ugly UI.)

Yeah, it is rather drab and unintuitive.

Still, I like the site.

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I bought You Need a Budget 4 when it was on sale on Steam a few weeks ago, after a lifetime of just sort of trying to keep track of my finances in my head and occasionally checking my bank balance. I haven't been using it long enough to say definitively whether it's improved my life, but it's certainly made me more conscious of my financial situation, which is probably a good thing. Like any budgeting software, it's essentially a glorified Excel spreadsheet, but it's got a nice interface and syncs over Dropbox, and there's a companion mobile app so I can immediately record my transactions while I'm out and about (which gives me a perverse sense of satisfaction akin to checking in on Foursquare or something, except it has an actual purpose). It took me an evening of watching tutorials to understand how to use it effectively, and I'm still not entirely certain what's going to happen when everything rolls over to the next month. But this is the first time I've been able to sustain an attempt at a budget for more than a week, so in that respect I already consider it a success.

I also recently bought Downcast. It seems great except I don't like that podcasts downloaded through iTunes and podcasts downloaded through Downcast are apparently completely separate.

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I bought You Need a Budget 4 when it was on sale on Steam a few weeks ago, after a lifetime of just sort of trying to keep track of my finances in my head and occasionally checking my bank balance. I haven't been using it long enough to say definitively whether it's improved my life, but it's certainly made me more conscious of my financial situation, which is probably a good thing. Like any budgeting software, it's essentially a glorified Excel spreadsheet, but it's got a nice interface and syncs over Dropbox, and there's a companion mobile app so I can immediately record my transactions while I'm out and about (which gives me a perverse sense of satisfaction akin to checking in on Foursquare or something, except it has an actual purpose). It took me an evening of watching tutorials to understand how to use it effectively, and I'm still not entirely certain what's going to happen when everything rolls over to the next month. But this is the first time I've been able to sustain an attempt at a budget for more than a week, so in that respect I already consider it a success.

Yeah, I started messing around with YNAB -- it's pretty clever, actually. It's surprising how much of a difference pre-spending all your money makes. I should get back into that, really.

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Oh, with Downcast it's still there, it's just hidden behind one extra button. So I have the episodes I've downloaded/selected for streaming on the initial page, and just below that is a 'See other available episodes' button which - cleverly - hides the episodes you've already downloaded so you don't ever get confused.

Sounds like I need it, then! I was an early supporter of the Podcasts app, but it's let me down too many times now :(

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Like I said when I posted it, you don't have to rate from 1 to 100. If you don't like "60" meaning "Bad" you can change that too. You can rate from 1 to 5 if you want (for a 1 to 5 star rating system). Or 1 through 20 if you're doing things like James and rating in increments of 5. Just go to your profile and scroll down to "Manually control the colors & quips applied to your rankings with this tool" near the bottom.

Jesus, how on earth did you even find that option??

Capture-6_zps35f9b219.png

Edit: You still have to rank everything about of 100... :( All you change is the descriptions and the colours.

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This is quickly becoming the "cool technology" thread, so here's something which isn't just a new app for you to try:

MemRise is new (completely free) website that specializes in visual learning. It helps your brain remember things by creating images from what you see. I recently learned how to read a Chinese food menu and can attest to how well it works. (I can't imagine a situation where it's going to come in handy, but I hope it will one day!)

And going back to cool tech: Buy a CD from Amazon after 1998? Check Amazon Cloud Player for MP3 tracks Dayum!

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I would like to say that I genuinely do think that Downcast makes my life a little better. Every spare second I have, pretty much, is spent listening to podcasts, and the ease with which it works makes me happy.

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Qualys BrowserCheck is a nice little tool that will check your browser and plug-in versions and let you know if there are any known security vulnerabilities with those versions.

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Qualys BrowserCheck is a nice little tool that will check your browser and plug-in versions and let you know if there are any known security vulnerabilities with those versions.

I scoffed, than ran it, and discovered my browser was unsecure (now fixed). Thank you, sir!

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Jesus, how on earth did you even find that option??

Capture-6_zps35f9b219.png

Edit: You still have to rank everything about of 100... :( All you change is the descriptions and the colours.

Ah, you're right, but since Criticker divides things into tiers for the purposes of estimating how much you like things, if you want to rate from, for example, 1 to 5, you can just divide your ratings into five tiers and rate everything 20, 40, 60, 80, or 100 (or whatever).

As for personal finance, I really like Mint.com because it's free.

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SteamCleaner is an interesting idea but at the bottom it notes that anytime you verify the cache or the game has an update Steam will just redownload all those files. So... seems pretty pointless in execution.

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Not really? How often do you verify your game's cache? And the vast majority of the games I play haven't had an update in months if not years. And you can always tell Steam not to keep a game updated if you want.

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I recently learned how to read a Chinese food menu and can attest to how well it works. (I can't imagine a situation where it's going to come in handy)

When you get a Chinese-symbol tattoo?

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