Link-o-Rama: The ugly underneath Amazon Prime, time to ditch Chrome, analyzing music and more…

Posted On 23 June 2021

Using Chrome to buy on Amazon Prime? Maybe think twice. Want to automate your playlists? Try Bliss.

• Post examining what happens behind the scenes when buying from Amazon, and the anti-trust suit against Amazon accusing it of raising prices for consumers.
• Bliss music analyzer, an open source library to make audio playlists by evaluating distance between songs. According to the site “works by first extracting common audio descriptors (tempo, timbre, chroma…) from each song into a set of numeric features per song. Once this is done, the distance between two songs can be simply computed using the existing distance() method” and then making playlists out of songs that are “close” together.

  

  I have, shall we say, strong opinions about mixtapes playlists. I’m not convinced you can put together great mixes based on an algorithm. However, I find the approaches people take trying to automate this fascinating.

• Wired says “It’s time to ditch Chrome.” No argument here. I use Chrome for work for various reasons, but for personal stuff I use Firefox. Sampled Vivaldi over the weekend. I love the things they’re trying with the interface, but found it super slow when using Google Docs — which I am, for better or worse, stuck with for various work and other projects.
• Ars looks at self-hosted alternatives to Google Photos. I don’t use Google Photos anymore but I could definitely use a better system than storing thousands of cat pictures (and a few of my friends and family…) on my phone.