I find every firmware update fixes something but also breaks something.
Great they’re working on it but super annoying also.
Some updates crash the mini refreshing my library, and since about 2.7 a lot of multi-CD albums don’t show the tracks in the right order anymore.
Still a fan, but definitely not the easy ride that iTunes + iPod was on that front.
Oh, and cool you can use it as a nifty HQ external DAC also.
I’m pretty happy with my FIIO Snowsky Mini.
It mimics a miniature Walkman and looks really great, and has a cassette playing interface that lets you totally ignore obtaining / managing album artwork. I really don’t care about seeing album art when I play music, but equally I hate seeing a ? or something when an interface expects you to have artwork. This solves that perfectly.
It’s only up to 256GB, and it only lets you scroll through all artists or all albums so navigation isn’t the quickest.
It sounds amazing. People go on about how good certain iPod classics sounded, but this is audibly better than any iPod ever was.
Doesn’t do gapless playback.
Can get them for £40-£50.
Back on Fallout 4.
Never tried non-console modding before, but Vivid Fallout & Another Green Mod got it looking real nice 👌
Your username is spinning me out. We always ask our cat if he’d like to “Eat da feesh” when we feed him any fish tins or treats, and we spell it just like that when we message each other to say he’s been fed too haha.
…Milo, is that you? 🐈⬛
For the reasons I switched to Debian see my other reply.
I use the computer for:
If you have a 15” Retina MBP, it’s been a huge pain in the ass, and multiple distros just stopped working after updates, often not long after installation. But also it’s been a good learning experience for the very same same reason. To work well in 2026 it needs the Nvidia graphics disabling - but the NVRAM defaults that Mac to Nvidia at startup for Linux, so even that bit isn’t straightforward! If you simply blacklist Nvidia it won’t boot.
I also bought a USB WiFi adapter as the Broadcom card doesn’t work initially on most distros, and can’t support WPA3 even when it does work.
Yes, at this stage. Although before now I’ve installed a few different things over the last couple of years as a learning experience also.
It’s not my main computer, but one I replaced. This freed me up to have a computer with no music or photos or anything on it, so I could test different distros and DEs and troubleshoot stuff without having any concerns about losing anything if I made a mistake or just erased and started over.
I’d never actually used Linux before 2023, much more familiar now.
Endeavour worked totally fine, no issues whatsoever… or no issue where Debian does better at least.
My 2 main reasons were:
Ignorance over the point at which hardware components become so old and deprecated that bleeding edge updates might just break something one day. Couldn’t find a definitive answer, but I knew if Debian 13 works fine now it should still be working fine in 2 years. That Mac has outdated Intel/Nvidia graphics that have always been problematic on Linux, and many distros won’t even boot the live USB on it, so it felt like if any computer was ever going to spontaneously have a post-update issue it would probably be that one.
Trying the give my ageing hardware the easiest ride in its senior years. The SSD is still original and approaching 14 years of pretty heavy use, so I thought to have it surviving as long as possible an OS that might only give 0-300MB of updates in a week would be a safer bet than an OS that would have many many more gigabytes of updates over a longer period of time.
I was using Endeavour, btw. Needed almost zero tinkering and was good to go straight away.
But I run Linux on an ancient 2012 MacBook Pro, so eventually swapped over to Debian, btw.
“There are more connections in the human brain than there are atoms in the universe”
Debian 13 with KDE Plasma has been super nice. Really nice looking straight out the box, zero setup required.
Feel like Ubuntu and Mint have less and less reason to exist with how great Debian is these days.
Yes, exactly this.
As a personal example, when I was very young, possibly about 5, I saw a “ghost” of my mum, at home one evening when she was out. My mum is very much as alive now as she was then.
I don’t clearly recall the event directly anymore, and we would generally agree a child is a less reliable witness than an adult (although believers would counter that the child’s brain is somehow more open to such things). Although I remember that I wasn’t making this up, and I could describe the clothing and jewellery I saw her wearing.
So does my experience prove ghosts exist? As always it depends on what you mean by that. Scientifically the experience doesn’t carry enough weight to prove anything. It does add credence to the view that people who are being truthful report seeing such things.
But also, most people who believe in “ghosts” think they’re the spirits of the dead - which my experience actually runs completely contrary to. So from one point of view you could say my experience of seeing a ghost disproves ghosts!
No. Or maybe. Depending on your definition of each particular supernatural thing.
Do I believe that every “UFO” spotted in the sky is a craft from an alien race? No. However, do I believe people genuinely see things that can’t be explained or identified in the sky, that could plausibly be extraterrestrial, inter-dimensional or top secret in ways we generally don’t currently understand? Yes, absolutely.
Do I believe that we all have souls that exist outside our physical form, that persist after death? Absolutely not. But do I believe people who aren’t lying genuinely see people or entities that we would generally refer to as “ghosts”? Yes. But beyond believing people really do “see” these things, I don’t know if they are always hallucinations or if people are witnessing some kind of other phenomena.
I’m a sceptic at heart. There’s nothing I won’t believe for ideological reasons, but evidence is key. Things that there is currently no evidence for could theoretically still exist, but will always require proof for me to actually believe in.
I’m British and quit Facebook and Instagram after Brexit.
Once the Cambridge Analytica stuff came to light, and I realised how these platforms could be (and were being) subverted politically to spread misinformation it was the final push I needed.
Seeing the Covid anti-vax stuff that followed only reinforced how I felt.
I never really used twitter, and decided to leave it that was when Musk took over.
I 99% stopped using Reddit after the 3rd party apps stuff and it became clear what their ambitions for the platform were (although I still check certain things there occasionally).
Sounds ideal!
To be honest I’ve been half-looking at audio players for 2-3 years but never pulls the trigger as all I had to go on was Amazon and Reddit reviews of how things sounded, which is so subjective as to be almost useless.
I saw the Echo Mini in the Guardian for an article about DAPs and trusted that a little more and finally bit the bullet.
Apparently someone from FIIO in the forums said the Echo Mini wasn’t capable of gapless, which feels unlikely when iPods from about 2006 could.
Your device definitely sounds like it addresses my biggest “wants” for mine.