You are welcome bro!
I guess most of us compared oneself to old classmates at one point, myself included, but you will never get the full picture and will most likely only see your “deficits” compared to them and end up frustrated.
Flashy cars and appartments or houses are no indicator of a fulfiled life and don´t mean shit anyway 
There are people owning anything you could imagine but are not happy inside, so imho it is best to focus on being happy and grateful for what you have and then you will automaticaly be a rich man, maybe not rich with money but rich with the actual important stuff
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You’re so very right, brother. Thank you for this reminder. Sometimes, you just need to hear/read it every now and again. I am blessed to have a beautiful family at home. I can find a lot of beauty in my life, but sometimes it’s masked by the fog of the rest of the BS. It’s important to cut through it every now and again.
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I completely get that. I had owned a house for about 14 years, then my wife had some health issues, and we needed access to the right doctors, so we sold it in 2018 and moved. We finally got a place last year. Seriously in the 2018-2022 window, I sold my home, moved from Omaha to Orlando, then moved back a year later, and rented, only to have my in-laws need some help, so we moved to LA for about 18 months. Then we moved back to Omaha. That was the wrong 4 years to be out of the housing market. My old house doubled in value during that time, and the gains would have nearly paid for my current place, instead I owe about $200k. All of that happened after I turned 50, so now I am hoping to pay the place off in under 10 years, so I can afford to retire.
I bought my second home at 35, since my first wife got the house I bought. My point is even when you accomplish those goals, life sometimes has other plans. My recommendation is to figure out what you want to do, and fit the rest around that.
Being happy about work counts for a ton. I had been pretty unhappy with work since about 2019, only to find the right employer last year. I have been doing the same job for 12 years, but sometimes the right or wrong boss can make or break it.
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Just a minor first-world audio rant, but…
The way Apple creates spotlight indexing files on everything it touches is a real bother.
There are scripts you can run to look for and erase the hidden files, but I’m pretty sure I’d have to run the script every time I connected an SD card to the system.
Case in point: The F.Audio XS02 is still the best sounding portable source I think I’ve heard for my preferences. It’s probably not worth much these days so I can afford to be wrong without over analyzing it.
The SD card has to be formatted as Fat32 to keep the player happy. This is no problem for macOS to read so all’s well so far. But after transferring files to it, the player is sensitive to showing all files and not only audio ones. So for every “01 Trackname” it also has the “hidden” indexing file of “._01 Trackname”
In other words for every actual music file copied over, there is also a dummy file that just pauses playback if the player tries to play it and brings up a “file error message” for a second before it moves onto a different file - of course there is a 50% chance the next file is a useless indexing file and will do the next thing.
Since swapping my main desktop to an old iMac, this issue has stopped me using that perfectly good player altogether.
Well tonight I’m going to put Windows on via Bootcamp. PURELY to be able to put music from my collection onto the SD without a bunch of stupid hard to erase files defiling the whole SD card.
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That’s terrible! At least you have tech knowledge and skill to figure out a workaround, but you shouldn’t have to. 
Thanks man! Now using the latest Windows 10 iso from Microsoft and nothing but default boot amp settings, the windows installation is just bootlooping. It installed fine, then wanted to install boot camp things, and broke itself. Maybe a lousy driver if I can safeboot it. So much for sleeping at a sensible time. I can’t leave problems like this for later, I’m always stubborn and “just one the cusp” of fixing the problem, or insist on trying to be.
I’m the exact same way, bro. I feel your pain.
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Used a restore point and had to do the whole “please just install windows without MS accounts and ad tailoring” again, ran the same thing and second time it all worked 
I just need to make an exFat partition that macOS and Windows can both read and put the music over to it, but THAT can wait until tomorrow! 
At least every loading wheel/bar was a chance to get a few more push and pull ups in for the “day”
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Hey, at least things started to break your way, right? I mean, its like 1AM there so you had a close call. Sometimes you just gotta quit while you’re ahead and live to fight another day. 
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Broke the back of my phone tonight. Car door hit it when I closed it. I’ve had my Galaxy Note 8 since it launched and now I’m going to have to pay for a new phone. I don’t want to buy a new phone. None of them have interested me enough to make me want to upgrade. And besides, there are audio products I want to spend my money on!
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The note 8 was for sure a functionality high point that things have declined from since as far as an overall package. Headphone jack, stylus, etc.
Maybe too late in your process but you could also create a Shortcut in OS to ask for confirmation to run the dot_clean command in terminal every time you copy to an external disk.
The reason macs do that _duplicate file is due to FAT32 system not being able to hold metadata
/system instruction within the file itself.
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Can I just say I get so annoyed with YouTube reviewers? Most of them have no idea how to make a review video. The reason people like Zeos and Crin are popular is because they know they’re not supposed to bury the lede. Tell us up front what is interesting or different or good or bad about the product! Tell us why we should care! Instead, you get reviewer after reviewer who opens their video with "here’s the specs of the product, here’s the build quality, I’ll talk about the sound but in a vacuum–it has some treble sparkle (compared to what? What makes it stand out?), and then maybe by the end I’ll get to some comparisons with other products (though not talk about how it fits in the larger marketplace) and then some conclusions where I finally say the things I should have said at the start!
First you have to tell me why I should care about this product! Only then do I give a shit about the build quality or whatever. Stop making boring videos!
EDIT: to be clear: you can tell us about the build quality up top if there’s something particularly noteworthy about the build quality. For example, “The ETA Mini Semi-Closed is a headphone that sounds like a $1k headphone, costs $500, and weighs 240 grams.” That would be the first thing out of my mouth. Interested? Intrigued? Yes, of course you are. Now you’re ready to watch the rest of the review. (I’m not actually making reviews, but do check out the ETA Mini Semi-Closed, it’s great.)
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Problem with doing that, is that for a lot of them they are trying to do YouTube for a living. Which means they need watch-time. Putting sound upfront will just cause people to not watch the whole video. Could some of them do a better job of giving overall market context for each product? Yeah. But a lot of what you want is counterproductive to the business model.
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Again, this doesn’t seem to hurt Zeos or Crin, in fact it helps them by making their videos more entertaining. (Besides which, from what I understand YouTube ad revenue is in the toilet and a lot of YouTubers are making their real money from Patreon and other sources.)
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Zeos and Crin aren’t good examples. Zeos openly states that no-one watches longer than 10 minutes and his revenue comes from Patreon. As far as I’m aware, Crin hasn’t said what his watch-time is, but he also built his following pre-YouTube. People just followed him there.
I don’t know what the watch time looks like for the reviewers I’m talking about either. (Resolve and GoldenSound usually do a pretty good job of this too fwiw.) At any rate, as I said in my first post I think people would be more likely to watch longer if they’re intrigued in the beginning as opposed to clicking away because they get bored straight off.
This is a good example of the right way to do it from the thumbnail on down:
“The best wireless headset… period”
“This headset will change everything”
These are things that are going to get you to watch. They don’t bury it, they’re right up front, before you’ve even clicked on the thing.
Granted, not every release is as notable as the Maxwell, but here’s another headphone in the same category:
Again, there’s the lede! They say it’s the best gaming headset… but it has one big flaw!
That’s how you do this! You don’t have a video that says “X headphone review” with the description “My thoughts on X headphone” and then you don’t say anything that’s notable about it, anything you’re supposed to take away, any kind of hook, until the very end. And I see that kind of thing a lot from audio YouTubers.
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That’s where we have a difference of opinion on what catches our attention. I see those and I’m less likely to watch. Case in point, I haven’t watched either of those, DMS’s video specifically because of the click bait like title. I prefer the “X product review” because it’s to the point and there’s no bs. I know what I’m there for. I don’t need to be drawn in with some gimmick.
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Different strokes for different folks, I guess. But, I mean, I feel like you can see which kinds of videos get more views and therefore are more popular.
Clickbait is used for a reason.
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