Post ALA1x142HxAliSRPIO by Canageek@cybre.space
 (DIR) More posts by Canageek@cybre.space
 (DIR) Post #ALA1wzIUrDYGEjBvYe by kelbot@retro.social
       2022-07-04T21:27:52Z
       
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       Some additional thoughts about the thread I had the other day about doing a super lightweight primarily CLI pirate box thing. Ebooks would be a no-brainer. You could fit like a large % of the existing ebooks on there without any outrageous storage requirements probably. Some way of making tons of stuff available but also a way to present a "pirate editor's picks" of good stuff would be cool.
       
 (DIR) Post #ALA1wzo2xumxoZx7jc by Canageek@cybre.space
       2022-07-04T21:32:33Z
       
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       @kelbot I saw a calculation once that in plain text, you could fit every book in the library of congress on one CD-ROM. Now, I imagine there are a LOT more books now due to self publishing, but yeah, that seems a good place to start. Also if you don't mind 90s era compression, you can fit a LOT of audio in a gigabyte; the rule I was told back then was about 1 MB/minute, and with modern codecs you could probably get that same quality with smaller file sizes.
       
 (DIR) Post #ALA1x0L0zL9zSpNS7c by kelbot@retro.social
       2022-07-04T21:33:48Z
       
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       Then lets say you made this device or perhaps a dozen that are quite inexpensive. Then perhaps you went around town plugging them into hidden and unlikely to be discovered power outlets. Or maybe even make the whole thing a read only file system and power it with a cheap little solar panel/small salvaged battery, place them in inconspicuous spots. Running autonomously when they've got power and maybe they go offline for a bit with some consecutive cloudy days. Oh well. If they get discovered and taken offline oh well, find a better spot next time.
       
 (DIR) Post #ALA1x0QKfZPhjJrhPU by kelbot@retro.social
       2022-07-04T21:35:18Z
       
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       @Canageek For sure. If you wanted to get real serious about it you could do some real extreme compression like @ajroach42 is doing to get extremely small file sizes while still being "good enough" to be worth it.
       
 (DIR) Post #ALA1x142HxAliSRPIO by Canageek@cybre.space
       2022-07-04T21:37:32Z
       
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       @kelbot I generally think that @ajroach42 goes *way* too far in their experiments, and that no one will use it if the quality is that much worse then a torrent or streaming site, you know? But like the modern equivalent of a MP3 at 128 kbps would be a lot smaller and 95% of people can't tell the difference between that and lossless.
       
 (DIR) Post #ALA1x1kZjnCTqOLNbM by kelbot@retro.social
       2022-07-04T21:42:19Z
       
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       @Canageek IDK, I think it all depends on your goals. Too far maybe if you're going for what you consider to be good quality. But not too far if it can still be considered enjoyable or entertaining or if the purpose is to cram as much as possible into the storage available for the purposes of discovery. If you found something this way that was mega-compressed but you could still tell that you liked it then you could go search out higher quality files for yourself. The type of audio also makes a difference. Ultra compressed and tiny audio books and podcasts would be fine IMO. Music less so.@ajroach42
       
 (DIR) Post #ALA1x28gIATz39cdAu by ajroach42@retro.social
       2022-07-04T21:43:40Z
       
       1 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @kelbot 64kbps opus is fine. 32kbps in mono is also fine. Any lower than that and other people will complain.