I listen to an assortment of NPR podcasts, namely NPR's Book of the Day, Pop Culture Happy Hour, Wild Card with Rachel Martin, and the TED Radio Hour. I sometimes listen to Up First as well when I'm not in the mood to spend two hours listening to Morning Edition.
I have to be honest, I immediately decided to quit the service and subscribe to YouTube Premium as soon as I saw the news yesterday. I would've been fine if it was just the regular full-priced subscription offerings that were increasing in price, but to do it to the student plan as well? And for what, to cover the costs of Hulu? It's not like audiobooks are included with the student plan! Given that this latest price hike now puts Spotify's student plan within a dollar of YouTube Premium's student plan while being more expensive than almost every other music streamer's student plans, I decided to take the plunge and subscribe to YouTube Premium, because if Spotify's going to increase the price of their subscriptions and not offer a good reason to do it, then why even bother?
The issue is most people don't have a setup that will even care.
Bluetooth lowers audio quality, and very few people have DACs or even phones right 3.5 jacks.
I often imagine an alternate history where Apple kept the jack, maybe added a 4.4... audio quality would be so much higher now.
Think about all the audio engineers who don't even consider higher quality setups. All the bandwidth on earth don't matter if the original master isn't perfect.
I had the same frustrations recently with my MacBook Pro, with macOS constantly telling me about Tahoe despite OCLP--which I used to patch my unsupported Mac to Sonoma--currently not supporting that version of macOS. These notifications aren't able to be disabled, just like in Windows--trust me, I tried to do that. They irritated me so much, that I've actually taken to installing Ubuntu on the Mac just so I can avoid seeing them.
Have you tried the built-in Books app on iOS? I find it to be a simple book reader that allows for ePub files to be opened from the Files app without having to sync them manually using something like a Mac.
I have not, I still consider myself a iOS newbie and tend to avoid the Apple software because of their lack of features and usefulness. But I'll give Books a try, didn't realize it let you read local files, thanks a lot for the recommendation! :)
Apple Books is actually pretty good if you have epub. I have used it a fair bit in the past (I now use a Kobo, or physical books primarily). But Apple Books was the best I found on iOS. There were some others that were pretty good but they seem to be unmaintained and/or do some weird things that I didn't particularly like so I went back to Apple Books.
Gave Books a quick try, hardest part was probably how to send files from Linux to iOS, but thanks to ifuse it ended up being pretty easy, by (ab)using Chrome's download directory. Still haven't found a way of importing them into Books automatically, but better than nothing I suppose.
In case others are in the same situation, I ended up doing something like this:
idevicepair pair
mkdir ~/iphone
ifuse --documents com.google.chrome.ios ~/iphone
cd ~/iphone
cp /home/user/books/*.epub .
cd ~
fusermount -u ~/iphone
Then use Files app on the phone, navigate to the Chrome documents folder and click on the .epub file and after ~5 seconds or so it opens up in Books, and after that it's accessible via Books directly.
I usually just have mine in the Safari downloads folder. Then use Files to open them.
If you’re on Linux, using iCloud to add files there should be easy enough as well. Then I just added them as I needed them. I’m on a Mac though so it’s a bit easier.
I just started reading the book this morning. I go to Hacker News and this is the top post. Either I have a third eye, or this is nothing more than a coincidence. This is also my first comment here, so apologies if I accidentally break a site rule.
