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dohpaz42

dohpaz42@lemmy.world
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Web Developer by day, and aspiring Swift developer at night.

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This may be unpopular, but arguing with or trolling people only serves to strengthen their bias, and you look as petty (if not more) than the people you’re trolling. It’s a lose-lose situation.

It’s a hard pill to swallow, but you convincing a Christian that they’re wrong about their beliefs is as effective as them convincing you their beliefs are correct. It’s two sides of the same coin. Instead of evangelizing about atheism, make it known you’re there to listen and if they have questions then you’ll be happy to give them answers. Criticizing ones core beliefs and values will only cause them to shutdown and stop listening. It doesn’t matter how correct you are; they will double down on their beliefs and you’ll become the bad guy.

For example, I have a group of neighbors who are all very religious. Most of them know where I stand, and how I feel. One of them even took the time to sit me down and express how worried about me she is. I listened. I politely explained my position, and we both went about our ways.

Most of these people are still good people at their core. They are misguided; I won’t argue that. But to them, they are doing the right thing. Just like you feel you’re doing the right thing. This ain’t the movies; nobody thinks of themselves as a villain. Everyone is both the main character and hero of their stories.

That said, all you can do is speak your peace and carry on. Other people will either agree or they won’t. No sense in wasting yours or their time otherwise.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

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Now cat a plain text file to your sound device as it exists in /dev (e.g., /dev/audio). Then do an audio file. You should hear stuff come out of your speakers.

PS. When your terminal looks like that, you should be able to type reset and press enter to fix it without a reboot.

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Not entirely true. There are bits in binary files that cannot be rendered correctly by text editors. In fact, if a text editor cannot read a bit, it might omit it or substitute it with a generic placeholder. Instead, what you would do is encode the file into a text format and the transmit it to somebody, who would then decode the text back into its original file format.

This is how email attachments and uploading/downloading files from the web work. Usually that text format is called base64. In email attachments, they go one step further and typically limit the encoded data to fixed length lines called chunks.

But yeah, sending raw binary data as text requires special formatting first. Opening it up in a text editor and copying and pasting is not enough.

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This is not unique to just audio files. What you’re seeing is a readable representation of binary (or raw) data. This will happen if you open an image, zip, or other non-text files.

Fun Fact: Microsoft Office’s .docx file is actually a zip file containing mostly plain text files in the XML format (XML is a markup language similar to HTML, and is used for describing data). You could theoretically unarchive a .docx file and modify the texts files by hand, and then rearchive the files back to .docx. Just be sure to back the file up before doing so. 😉

Data essentially are 1’s and 0’s (zeros) that are arranged in such a way that a program can interpret the data to be used by the program.

You’ve already seen the format that audio files get saved in. They are meant for music players, and as long as the codecs (a way to encode and decode data into a specific format for storage and playback) are supported, your music player will have no problem reading the contents of the file. Text editors will do their best to display plain text, and because text has a limited range of characters it can render, a lot of the data of raw files cannot be displayed. This is why if you opened an audio file in a text editor, and edited it, the file would be ruined. Same for images, zips, and exes.

If you want to see your binary data as text, you should use a hex editor. A hex editor will render each bit of data in hexadecimal format (0 through 16, where 11 - 16 are shown as the letters A - F). Hex editors also then attempt to show the raw data as text too, so you get to see the data in a safe way. They also allow you to change the values of the data, but unless you know what you’re doing, you risk damaging the file and making it unreadable by its application.

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Whoa whoa whoa. Don’t over promise.

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I will keep that in mind going forward. So thank you for the good mood. 😊

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Spending money on projects you either won’t ever do, or you won’t start for at least a year, so the materials sit around collecting dust.

Fun fact: I once was going to build this kick-ass workbench/cabinet for my garage. I bought the cabinet-grade plywood and lean backing, as well as the very expensive soft-closing drawer slides. That was probably 5 years ago, I think? I still haven’t opened the UPS package of drawer slides.

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But you get to check off one of those items on your long list of todos… if you think about it.

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No but he did sit down and have a beer with a guy once.

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