#Need to Update My Firmware

[molagboop]

I would very much like to infoblast about Raven Beak's powersuit upgrade library with all the optimizations, QoL tweaks, security features, and the myriad integration systems Samus is currently lacking with her babby suit, but alas. Time restrictions.

[create-chaos]

I miss when printers and scanners just plugged in and started working

Why do I need wifi, just give me plugs and wires I don't need "smart" ink or instant delivery just let me put pictures from paper onto my computer and vice versa

[icemanzek]

icemanzek • Blog Tagging System

[#digital galleries near you!] Art tag containing both game art and non-game art

[#hottest deals on the net!] Promotional /announcements

[#firmware update needed!] Updates on projects

[welcome to my domain!] Posts regarding my website

[click to claim you’re prize!] Giveaways & contests

[#txt] text posts with text only

[lampridius]

Heeey :3

Could I request platonic Boothill with a young reader (about teen years) who he has a sort of found family relationship with? (father-child) Reader is an orphan and is also on the run and wanted but for different reasons. Reader knows how to fight and keep up so they aren't completely defenseless nor are they a deadweight but yk they are still somewhat a kid so they are bound to be reckless

⋆.ೃ࿔🌸*:･ 𝘩𝘰𝘯𝘬𝘢𝘪: ꒱ 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘳 𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘭 ✴ ───────── ❝ 𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙙𝙚𝙧 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩'𝙨 𝙛𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙙 𝙛𝙖𝙢𝙞𝙡𝙮 ❞ (𝙩𝙚𝙚𝙣 𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙙𝙚𝙧) －𝘭𝘢𝘮𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘥𝘪𝘶𝘴 ．．• ♡︎

─ .✦ 𝗯𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗺𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿𝘀: boothill ──── .✦ 𝘳𝘶𝘭𝘦𝘴 | 𝘮𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘵 | 𝘳𝘦𝘲𝘶𝘦𝘴𝘵 ──── .✦ 𝙣𝙤𝙩𝙚𝙨:

you’re a fast runner, faster than most kids your age, and definitely faster than you should have to be. boothill doesn’t comment on it much, but you know he watches - sees the way you clock escape routes before sitting down in a new town, how you keep your back to a wall when you sleep, how you eat fast like someone’s gonna take it from you.

he doesn’t ask for your story. not in words. he figures if you ever want to spill it, you will. and if not - well, you’re here, ain’t ya?

he didn’t mean to get attached. he swears that every time you pull some dumb stunt, some reckless fight-picking or rooftop-jumping nonsense that leaves his metal jaw clenching so tight it creaks. you know how to handle yourself. sure. but you’re still learning, and boothill’s seen enough kids get chewed up by the galaxy to know the line between “scrappy” and “six feet under” is real thin.

he calls you “kid.” sometimes “runt.” occasionally “you lil’ hellraiser,” with just enough fondness in it to let you know he ain’t mad. not really.

you ride alongside him more often than not now. he makes you learn how to shoot properly - not just the wild, desperate kind of fighting you picked up while on the run, but clean aim, control, restraint. he teaches you where to hide, how to lie with your body language, how to bluff without blinking. and when he patches you up after a close call, he does it with the same care he gives his own busted systems. quiet, focused. steady hands. like it matters.

when you mess up (and you do, because you’re still learning) he doesn’t yell. he gets quiet. scary quiet, sometimes. but then he sighs, takes off his hat, runs a hand through his hair and mutters, “son of a nice lady, kid… you’re gonna put me in the damn scrap heap before i hit my next firmware update.”

you grin at him through a bloodied lip and say something like “you’re the one who said i needed to toughen up,” and he just grunts, rolls his eyes, and hands you a painkiller.

he never calls himself your dad. you never ask him to.

but when you’re too tired to keep your eyes open and you end up slumped against his shoulder by the fire, he shifts just enough to make sure your head won’t slip, and he doesn’t move again until morning.

he’s not a soft man. not gentle by design. but the world’s taken too many kids like you and left too many bones in the dirt. and if he can help you make it one more day, with your boots on and your will intact, then he’ll do it - quietly, stubbornly, with all the grit and loyalty he’s got left.

you ain’t his kid.

but he’s your ride-or-die anyway.

and maybe, in this ragtag scrapheap of a universe, that’s as good as blood.

[flareonfloof]

if you're a robotgirl and need maintenance please stop by my workshop, we provide services ranging from routine firmware updates and joint regreasing to weapons system overhauls and everything in between

i'll even keep your limb servo control lines disconnected for longer than necessary if you ask nicely

[the-last-teabender]

All right, I've had a week and a bit to stew on this, I've done my short-form reaction for Celestial Toyroom. It's time for me to get my Reality War feelings fully out of my system.

A lot of people have covered a lot of other stuff. Belinda's ending is already exactly as talked about as it should be (which is a lot), and the end-of-episode reveal is performing as intended. We could have a conversation about increasing pleas to nostalgia; we could combat that with an interview I did with Colin Baker several years ago, in which he said he believes any good actor can play the Doctor once.

But all that is already being handled, and what I need to talk about kind of ... isn't.

How we watch television has been changing constantly, but that change has become quicker and more exponential in recent years. We saw it around 12 era when how and even when we track ratings was altered to a degree that we could no longer ignore - to a point that fans now had something new to fight about in the form of what "real" ratings even are.

When I saw a move to streaming outside the UK and the return of Russell T Davies (whom I see as a more business-centric showrunner than the others), I thought - oh, here we go. We're updating the firmware of this near-20-years-on revival. And it was needed, because even the fans now knew that how we watched television in 2005 isn't how we watch television in the 2020s.

And then David Tennant sprinkled salt at the edge of the universe, gravity became mavity, the Toymaker initiated a "state of play," and Christmas brought singing goblins. And I thought, oh. Here we go.

The thing is, Doctor Who is always in conversation with the world around it - society, culture, media, and (of course) its own production - for better or for worse. As I saw these threads on reality loosening, these looks inward, I started seeing a pattern develop. The show was acknowledging its presence as a show. The Doctor thought the music was non-diegetic. Mrs. Flood talks to us. The Doctor's own past appears on a television screen for his companions to observe.

And I thought, isn't it about time for this? Moving into this new way of watching the show, speaking to a new audience, isn't it about time to look inward on what this show has become? We've touched on it in recent memory - "We're all stories in the end," Robin Hood saying "I'm just as real as you are" - these nods to the idea that Doctor Who is our modern legend, a bit of a fairy tale in its own right.

And honestly season 2 doubled down on this. We saw the two new seasons in conversation with each other. Lux and The Devil's Chord make a pair; so do Boom and The Well, so do 73 Yards and Lucky Day. The Story and the Engine is a direct response to Dot and Bubble, and much like Rogue, The Interstellar Song Contest referenced modern adjacent television to the point of both shows airing right within their inspiration's run. (Rogue aired at the Bridgerton season 3 mid-season break, and of course there was Eurovision.)

Speaking of Lux, I was not the only one (nor even the first) to see echoes of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. It's no secret that Stephen Wyatt's script functions as a piece of metafiction: a commentary on how Doctor Who the show must dance and perform before the gods of the BBC (the Gods of Ragnarok) at the risk of death. With Lux, we once again see the Doctor forced to contend with his reality as a character for our entertainment; we also once again see onscreen analogs for the Doctor Who fandom, although less subtly than Whizz Kid in Greatest Show. (Admittedly something being less subtle than Whizz Kid is a hell of a feat.)

All the little pieces seemed to be fitting together in a way that couldn't be denied. On the cusp of a new era of how we engage with Doctor Who the show, Doctor Who the show was looking inward, regarding itself as the fiction it was. And where would this lead us?

... nowhere, apparently.

In my Celestial Toyroom brief, I describe The Reality War as watching someone knit a really impressive jumper, then panicking at the last minute and turning it into a shawl. Is it functional? Technically, yes. But you can still see what it was meant to be and it's questionable how all those stray threads were tucked in.

I think looking at Doctor Who at least partly through the lens of production ranges from essential (for stories like Black Orchid and The Mind Robber) to enlightening at the bare minimum (Day of the Doctor, Mawdryn Undead). Even in a well-realized episode, television production, actor availability, BBC goings-on, and what have you will have had some influence. Knowing that the horse crashing through the mirror in The Girl in the Fireplace nearly didn't happen and took a lot of fighting doesn't change the story, but knowing that such an iconic shot was nearly cut because it was too hard to produce is amazing context.

But The Reality War is not a story that can be divorced from production. We don't need leakers... well, we don't need leakers full stop. But we don't need leakers to tell us that Something Was Up. Even someone who doesn't follow the press or look at a single Reddit thread or YouTube video could likely tell things did not proceed as planned. It's like a character in your D&D campaign hoisting up a big part of the arc story, then the player leaving the game. It all happened, but now it cul-de-sacs and we have to pretend it all meant something else if we want to keep serving the fiction. But no matter how hard you try, by God it doesn't feel the same.

I'm not saying this is the only thing that troubles me about this era. The other things that trouble me either are already being discussed at length, or you aren't ready for 'em. And the canon-welder contingent will swarm in like reverse-raptors to put meat on the bones of this ending in retrospect, which - do that if that's how you enjoy the show, but I don't want to do someone else's heavy lifting. And I think these bones deserve to be examined.

We're likely not going to get the whole story of what happened until and unless Davies releases an RTD2-era Writer's Tale. I only trust leakers so much; I don't care how accurate they've been. But this is not an episode, or indeed a season, we'll ever be able to fully separate from its production.

Which, I suppose, is ironic. I've spent ever day since Wild Blue Yonder wishing for an era of Who that would acknowledge itself as a piece of media in the modern landscape. And I guess in a sort of wishmaster-y, monkey-paw-ish way, that's exactly what we got: an era that is ultimately the story of the show as a show. Just not really in the way I hoped or expected.

[ask-tenna]

So… I have a confession.

My TV is about twenty years old now, I think. We got it when I was a kid and when I moved out I brought it with me. It’s big in bulk but small in screen, it doesn’t do anything special, it has problems with burn-in, and since every show these days expects you to have a 1747381639173917p HD screen, the picture quality… isn’t always great.

So I started thinking, maybe I should get a new one? Maybe I should buy a TV where I can actually see where the ball is when I watch sports.

And then I saw you. And how… good you are.

And I thought… you know what? My TV may not be the newest, but it’s a loyal friend. It doesn’t spy on me, it doesn’t need firmware updates, it’s… basically perfect. The problem was with me.

So now it has a little star sticker on it. For doing such a good job. And it’s going to be with me forever.

Glad to hear it!

CRTs are reliable. They’ll always be there for you. And the best feeling they have is the one of being useful.

[bugged-ubuntu]

Why does my automatic cat feeder need a persistent internet connection and firmware updates? You dispense cat food, I don't want to connect you to my Instagram or send me text messages.

I swear im going to replace this with a gumball machine and an electric motor.

[autolenaphilia]

Blu-ray DRM is really devilish. I use a program called makemkv to rip them, because there is no other way to play them on my laptop, and there are no legit linux options for blu-ray playback, you have to crack the drm to play them. The easiest solution is makemkv to rip the movies into files, it works out of the box.

But if the level of drm (aacs) on a particular blu-ray is higher than what Makemkv can handle, the disk will update the firmware on your drive to revoke access to makemkv, so it can't access any blu-rays.

"One famous “feature” of AACS is a so-called host revocation. It was designed to ensure that only “approved” software can use your drive. Every Blu-ray disc contains a file that has a list of host keys known to be used by "unauthorized" software. This list has a version number. The moment you insert the disc into your drive, the drive checks if the list is newer than the one it knows about, and if it is, the drive re-flashes itself (updates firmware)."

And that happened to me. It was a blu-ray of the 1972 Hammer horror movie Fear in the Night that did it. The one program that works with my blu-ray player now couldn't access any discs, including ones it had ripped before. And there are absolutely zero linux programs that are authorized to playback blu-ray discs.

I had to flash my drive's firmware to allow something called libredrive, which allows direct access to files and bypasses the aacs drm firmware.

And that was quite the journey. I had makemkv installed as a flatpak via my distro's software manager. and I needed to use the command line. Flatpaks are a great packaging format. but they are primarily for gui apps. So i had to build makemkv from source. And then I had to figure out the commandline for the firmware flashing tool included with makemkv, which was hard because the instructions linked flat out lie. There is no "flash" command for sdftools, there is only "rawflash", you have to read the thread carefully to find that out. This page helped. I had to download new patched libredrive firmware.

And finally i figured out the command I needed ""sdftool -d [drive name] rawflash main,enc -i [new firmware file name].bin. And now I can use my blu-ray drive again. It's now libredrive.

So much work to finally be able to use the drive I paid for, and the blu-ray discs I also paid for. I'm not running some major piracy operation, I just want to be able to watch movies I legally own on my laptop. And drm stopped me, and I had to break it.

This is why DRM is so bad, and anyone who uses it deserves all the piracy they are trying to stop with it. It's scummy to take someone's money and then interfere with their ability to use the copy of the products they own and paid for. It's such atrocious treatment of the customer that anyone who does it deserves to have their stuff pirated.

[laverrepalette]

NINTENDOS JOY AND WHIMSY IS BACK ON THE MENU AMELIA N HAS MADE HER FIRST APPEARANCE IN THREE YEARS WOOOO I AM SO HAPPY

she always felt like the nikki from swapnote and badge arcade bunny of the switch to me- even if shes just on the news app to share big firmware updates i always rly liked her

seeing her reappear just before the switch 2 is such a great sign honestly im so happy. i love her. pls use her lots more. maybe even in the nintendo today app?

i need to put her on my tomodachi life living the dream island so she'll always have a home on my switch 2

[ejthenobody]

Random Thing I Feel Like Talking About: The Vandelay Soft Drinks in Hi-Fi Rush!

Warning: Hi-Fi Rush spoilers.

Forgive me if I format this a bit weirdly, I just feel like sharing about this very minor and random thing in my current absolute #1 favorite game, Hi-Fi Rush.

Anyway, in this game, you can find these various vending machines throughout pretty much every regular level, aside from the first as they're introduced in Track 2. The whole point of them is that you can smack the heck outta them to get a bunch of gears and batteries to recharge your Reverb gauge (your beeg special attack gauge if you don't know). Very helpful for the first playthrough when you need all the gears you can get in order to get all of your moves sooner rather than later, plus you can do some casual combo practice with 'em.

In the process of destroying these vending machines though, they spit out a ton of cans of the six drinks shown on them. All six drinks are branded and based on the six department heads at Vandelay, these being Korsi-Cola, Rekka Pure Energy (Get apple Juiced), Mimosa Sparkling Water, Carte Blanche, Kale-Ale Executive (I think?), and Roquefort Espresso.

Here's close ups of the vending machine's screen:

However, while messing around in Photo Mode today in Track 4, I realized something really, really cool: the drinks all actually have nutritional information on them!

But it's not just some basic scanned image grabbed from some random canned soft drink and slapped onto the textures, instead it's all stuff based on the personalities of the department head the drink is based on! Here are some pictures of each label:

I don't really know why but I just love each and every single one of these, not just for being funny and interesting, but also because they exist at all! It's such a minor detail that I feel like most people never notice, but it's just so charming to me that it's there!

Some details I wanna point out in specific about these cans are: 1) All of these labels say "Please Recycle!" at the bottom, except for Kale Ale which commandingly says "Recycle!"

2) Korsi-Cola is a caffeine-free cola which I both like the idea of as someone who loves soda but prefers non-caffeinated ones, but also I can't help but interpret this as the VAGUEST and MOST SUBTLE form of foreshadowing for at least the very end of the Decaf Firmware Update joke. And aside from just that running gag I like that it's caffeine-free and has a little label on it that says something along the lines of "a calm mind makes the right choice." It makes a lot of sense for Korsica's drink to be branded like that, namely due to what happens with her in the story and how she interacts with Chai directly before, during, and after her boss battle.

3) All of the info written on these labels and on the rest of the cans alludes to something about each character, some in more obvious ways than others. Roquefort Espresso says "Unleash Your Inner Beast" or something like that on it (along with Silver Extract as the other ingredient). Mimosa Sparkling Water has "Mimosa Flavor" as the second ingredient which is just the most vain way to put it. Carte Blanche (Zanzo's drink if you didn't put that together) as a noun literally means, "complete freedom to act as one wishes or thinks best."

I could keep talking for at least two more paragraphs but I think I'll stop here. Just wanted to share this because it's pretty funny and cool to me, and is just one of many, MANY things that shows much effort and polish went into Hi-Fi Rush.

[inthelittlewood]

Awesome Decked Out Stream btw! Congrats on the first win!

Also; Sorry if you’ve answered this question before but what piece of equipment do you use to supplement your microphone to do all the cool voice modulations? On stream you were talking to Rendog about it and I swore you called it a “gargexalar” which absolutely can’t be right but I struggle phonetically! I also recall you spoke of it on the Imp and Skizz Podcast, but I couldn’t grasp the name there either. Would love to know how to get a cool mic set up for personal voice work and it sound like you know/have some good advice! :D

It's called a GoXLR, it's from a company called TC Helicon who seem to have abandoned the product earlier this year by laying off all but a few staff, so just be mindful of that if you purchase one. It's works just fine but any major errors or windows updates in the future I guess could have the potential to ruin things (although due to its popularity there's already a third party software etc made by the community)

I'm still wanting to move to a Rode Procaster Duo but currently it doesn't have and won't let you control virtual audio channels with its faders (which is important for me as I split game, music, chat and myself on to seperate tracks) - they have said they're looking to implement this feature in a future firmware update but there's no ETA given yet.

So the GoXLR is great but I worry about it's future, where as the Rode isn't quite suited to my needs yet but once it is I'll likely switch as they're a long established audio company with no signs of discontinuing support

The other little device I've mentioned before is the Tube MPC which is a handy compressor / limiter for boost audio without making it distorted (I admittedly haven't used in a while since I finally found some nice settings for the GoXLR that give the same results)

Hope that's helpful 👍

(also ty for the Decked Out love)

[utopicwork]

Did a bit of LoRa testing, unfortunately the T-Watch is giving me a bit of trouble (it's giving me a generic protocol error I'll have to research when trying to update the firmware) so I'll need to use other boards. To that end I'm using the TLora boards, one of which I've got hooked up to a power bank from the SymMoDe prototype but the other of which needs a power source. The best way to handle that is going to be getting a USB A to C adapter so I can power it with my phone.

So if anyone would be willing to please contribute $20 to further PierMesh research and if it helps I'm sure I'll do other research with the adapter

Venmo: AGIEF

Paypal: agieocean@gmail.com

Ko-fi:

$7/$20 raised

[aesthetic-chills]

Tried Jailbreaking my Kindle Oasis...

And succeeded!

So, this video is making the rounds and I'm not surprised because it's really well done and the Kiki cover caught my attention immediately. Since Amazon removed the option to download the books we buy I'm always ready to give them the middle finger and decided to try.

In my case the Jailbreak was a success like I said before and I'm loving KOReader (which is what I'm using now to organize and read my books). The video is simple but I did find a few bumps in the road for my device so I decided to share a few things in case anyone else wants to do this.

I have a Kindle Oasis (2019 Ver.) with the latest Firmware which for this model is 5.17.1. Please beware the updated pinned comment on the video and the warning on the Kindle Modding Wiki "Mesquio does NOT work on firmware 5.18.1 and beyond" (at least for now).

My device did update while I was trying to Jailbreak it but (I guess) due to the Oasis model being discontinued I didn't get the 5.18.1 firmware, so I was able to go ahead.

This is the wiki that explains step by step and with images how to Jailbreak the kindle and how to install KOReader. Everything is there, just read carefully. You can find your kindle serial number on the "device info" settings.

Even with careful reading I downloaded the wrong KOreader version the first time lol, is not the end of the world.

When you go to the page to get the KOReader files, if you have the same Kindle Oasis as me you need to scroll down till "Assets", click "show all assets" and then download this one "koreader-kindlehf-v2025.04.zip".

If the Installation of the jailbreak seems to not be progressing at some point you probably have to turn off airplane mode at that stage (this seems obvious but this part of the tutorial was a bit confusing on the wiki, at least for me).

The video says that the process takes 10 min, but being honest it took me around 40 because of some mistakes on my part and I spent like 5 hours just deciding what pictures I wanted for the screensavers, so depending on how tech savvy (and obsessive) you are try to set more time aside for this just in case (I spent a big part of my Saturday doing this and it kept me busy while sick in bed with a cold so this was a welcomed entertainment).

To create my covers exactly how I wanted them (filling the entire screen or at the center) I used Photopea (is like photoshop but online, it has ads on the side but in my case I don't care, they need money somehow and I refuse to use Adobe products).

I created a new file with the Kindle Oasis resolution (1680 x 1264px and 300 DPI) and then just pasted the images I wanted there, resized and moved till I was content, and saved them as Jpegs on a folder called "ScreenSavers".

This folder can then be dragged to the kindle when is connected to a computer and KOReader will be able to use it as source for the sleep screen images. This was the result:

Now, I've seen some comments about KOReader not being aesthetically pleasing but I think it comes from the first look we get from it since all the folders there look like this:

KOreader is extremely customizable though, so I just created a folder called "Home" and chose it as the default Home folder. Now every time I click the Home button it takes me to my "Library".

You can display the books in lists, grids, etc., and customize basically all the info you want them to show (or not), how many books appear pear page, if you want to order them by series, author, etc.

You can also create collections.

Honestly, the amount of customization is endless (I was playing with all the menus for a few hours, but now everything is as I wanted it and I can just read and relax).

One thing I love is that you can look up terms or phrases from a book on Wikipedia and they come with images + you can download the Wikipedia articles to read offline later as an epub.

You can also customize what info appears on the cover screen (or remove this). In my case some book names are too long and make a double line so I decided to show just the % I've read on my latest book and the battery.

You have to write the words "read" and "left" yourself, or any text you want to add. The text for what my cover is displaying looks like this:

The progress bar is also fully customizable and you can choose what to display and in what order:

There's a LOT you can do with KOReader in terms of spacing, styling, fonts, etc. Stefan Svartling has many YouTube videos showing what's possible.

Now, how do I get my books into this thing? KOReader can connect with calibre so you can wirelessly send all your books to the Kindle or connect the device to a computer with a cable and drag the books.

Where do I buy books? Calibre comes with a "Get Books" function that allows you to search from different vendors or in the case of Public Domain books it lets you fetch them from places like Project Gutenberg for free.

In my case, I'm getting new books mostly from ebooks.com, they tend to be cheaper there than on Amazon. For example, Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne is 5,49€ on ebooks.com and 10.67€ on Amazon.

Please be aware, a lot of e-books are now sold encrypted with Digital rights management (DRM). This means you can only open them in certain devices and can't copy them to others. You can add plugins to remove the DRM and then send them to KOReader, but this is illegal in some countries, so always check what's the copyright law were you live.

ebooks.com has a DRM-Free (legal) category, so you can search if the book you are looking for is there.

Pros of Jailbreaking the Kindle:

All things mentioned above.

You can still access the Amazon books you had if you exit the KOReader interface.

If something goes a bit wrong you can factory reset the Kindle and it will be practically brand new, then you can re-download your books from your Amazon account.

Cons of Jailbreaking the Kindle:

It doesn't work right now on new devices with the latest firmware.

You void the warranty.

If something goes extremely wrong you could brick the device.

You could get malware if you download resources from untrustworthy websites.

If you have any questions feel free to ask!

[jennyfromthebes]

hi hello! as a live show taper, do you have an advice for where to start for someone interested in learning to tape? with the new tour announcement it seems like i'll be able to go to a bunch of shows in an area that's kinda light on tapers, so it would be really neat if i can learn enough to get some decent quality tapes from this tour, but as someone with no background in audio stuff it all seems a bit overwhelming from the outside!!

SO YOU WANT TO BE A LIVE SHOW TAPER: an overview by your favorite amateur tMG taper!

Before we start: my top resources here are the Taper's Section forum (yes, a real old-school forum!) and the taping thread in the unofficial tMG community discord server (it's an older thread, will have to scroll down to it in the tmg-forum section). I really hate to be the "join my discord server to get your answers" guy, but it's genuinely a great space to talk to some really knowledgeable regular tMG tapers and get a lot of good specific advice.

You can get really intense about taping really fast. It depends on how much time and money you're able to invest into it, and there are a million factors wrt approach, gear, investment, etc. For this post, I'm just going to do an overview of what I would recommend for a beginner-friendly setup that's not too big of an investment and is a step above a cell phone recording.

Gear: I love my PCM-A10 recorders because I can connect them to my phone and control and monitor them remotely, but the price tag isn't very beginner friendly - you'll likely find A10s going for ~$150 on eBay. Also, the ideal use case for an A10 is with external mics or to pull soundboard, not as an all-in-one to just set and forget. You'll want to look for something like a Zoom H2* or H2n, which are a smallish all-in-one recorder and can go for less than $50 on eBay if you do a little searching. (*Note: the H2 has a known issue where it stops and restarts with a small gap once it hits a limit, but you can patch that out by following this tutorial with this updated firmware link.)

Recording during the show: unless you have permission to tape, which is a whole nother can of worms, you'll have to get your recorder past security. Usually if you hide or disguise it somehow in your bag you can get away just fine. If you're in the front row for the show, you can usually discreetly prop up your recorder on the barrier or just set it somewhere that it won't move. If you can stay relatively still and not sing into it, putting it in a chest pocket on a shirt or jacket is also a good option. I always try to capture everything from the moment the lights dim, so I usually start my recording a little early and just chop off the excess at the beginning, but if you're worried about storage space or anything you can just try to be really aware and hit record as soon as the lights go down.

Processing: At a minimum, you'll need to name the file, chop it into tracks, and populate metadata. I do this in Audacity (free) and it takes less than an hour once you get a workflow down. However, you can also go crazy with processing if you want to - I do EQ and mixing in Reaper (free trial version) and audio repair and de-click in iZotope (paid software). You can do some fairly basic EQ work pretty easily in Reaper and it can make a decent difference with how the audio sounds - I typically do parallel compression and chop the low end in order to bring the vocals up a little bit and balance out any boominess. My order of operations is mixing (if applicable)/EQ > repair > tracking/metadata. I know EQ sounds complicated, but it's really just fiddling with some standard presets until you like how it sounds.

Uploading to the LMA: The Live Music Archive is specifically for decent quality lossless tapes - cell phone tapes are fine to upload to the Internet Archive as "community audio", but the LMA is supposed to be higher quality. WAV or FLAC is your lossless format, I always work with WAV throughout the whole process. There's a fairly standard convention for file naming, page info, etc that I think there's a tutorial on somewhere but I'm also happy to go into that if need be. It'll take a little bit to upload the files, so I usually just leave it running on my computer overnight. After uploading, it automatically derives the upload into different file types before it can be streamed or downloaded.

Congrats, you've done a tape! I'm happy to go into significantly more detail on any part of this, whether here or in the discord server - feel free to send further asks or drop me a DM and I'll do my best to answer, I just wanted to keep this post as a relatively high-level overview. Thanks for asking, I'm always thrilled when people express an interest in taping!

[post-punk-revival]

Me: Hey computer I'm about to start something, so just wanna check first, you don't need an update right?

Computer: No lol why on Earth would you assume that

Me: Well every time I start something time-consuming you suddenly realize you need a firmware update, throw a temper tantrum and crash everything until you get restarted

Computer: No I'm good this time

Me: Ok and you're sure

Computer: Yes I'm sure no update necessary

Me: Ok so I'm gonna pull up this 3 hour video and open a project then now?

Computer: Go ahead

Me: And you won't do that thing? Where you wait until I'm like a third of the way through both so it's more tedious to find my place again?

Computer: No

Me: Ok thanks I appreciate you

(45 minutes later)

Computer: I need an update