Yep, my own government (UK), have rolled out a digital ID app that only works with Play Services intact, so I had to jump through hoops to prove my ID so I could renew my driving licence. It's bullshit.
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Yep, I use it on my Mac. I also use Konsole instead of Terminal. I wish Dolphin was available, but sadly it's not.
Either my Kobo or my 55" LG OLED.
I've owned a bunch of TVs over the years, starting with a 12" Panasonic "portable" CRT that just about fit on a shelf in my bedroom. But none of them can hold a candle in just how impressive they look to that LG. Even my first LCD, a 32" Sony (which I still have) impressed me to begin with, but ultimately it just became a TV to look at. But I've had this LG for a year and it still blows me away when I watch something that's letterboxed and the black bars are so black that you can't tell where they end and the (extremely thin) bezel begins. And it only cost me £800.
The software updates piss me off though, so I've revoked its internet privileges.
But I don't think a bit of tech has brought me quite as much joy as my Kobo Clara HD still does, some six years after I bought it.
A had a Kindle for a year before, and while it was fine, it annoyed me how much I felt I owed to Amazon with it. Loading books from not-Amazon was a pain in the arse. Calibre could do it, but only certain formats were allowed to have cover art. Then it went tits up, so I replaced it with my Kobo and it was like breathing clean air for the first time in my life.
The Kobo couldn't give a shit where the books came from, it treats them all equally. The battery still lasts for weeks, even after six years, and just a couple of weeks ago I worked out how to sync it with Grimmory, running on my home server, so I don't even need to plug it in to copy books to it anymore. Just upload them to Grimmory, which automatically puts them onto the Kobo shelf, so when it syncs overnight it downloads them. And it has Instapaper built in now, so I can save articles to read on that nice, clear screen.
And all in something that cost me about £90.
Yeah, if you enjoy reading and are on the fence about an e-reader, get a Kobo. The old Clara HD is perfectly good, and probably quite cheap now.
Yeah, she's in the process of doing that now, but it's a whole massive arsehole that they baked into the process from the start; either intentionally or not.
And that doesn't get around the fact that if you use the default camera app, which most people will, there's no way to save the photos to anywhere other than the camera roll. And you can't integrate the way photos work with iCloud into something like Immich. As far as I'm aware.
I'm no expert in these matters by any means, but given my use-case for my older Macs I don't care about flashy features, I just want them to be solid. And I don't know as to whether you can get much more solid than Debian. I've tried a bunch of distros over the last couple of years, and seem to have settled on Arch for my Fucking About With PCs, and Debian for my Do Not Fuck About With This PCs.
My server only has 8gb of soldered RAM, but she trucks along just nice. Wasn't a huge fan of me uploading thousands of photos into Immich, but that more taxing on the CPU than anything.
My wife and I were talking about this a few weeks ago. I had iPhones from 2009 until early last year, so had a shit load of photos in iCloud. She got her first iPhone in 2012, and still has one, so also has a shit load of photos in iCloud.
Now that I don't use an iPhone, I've been able to save all my photos to bung over on my Immich server, largely because my Pixel doesn't give a shit what camera app I use, or where I save the photos.
My wife, however, is in a situation where she kinda has to keep using the stock camera, and the photos from that have to go into iCloud because there's 80gb of photos and she sure as shit doesn't have 80gb spare on her 128gb phone to even begin the process of saving them all. So she is, in effect, trapped into paying for iCloud storage every month.
And sure, in theory it's reasonably easy to shift across to another app - now. But for a long, long time the default was basically the only game in town. Being able to map another one to the shortcut on the lock screen is relatively recent. Is the new camera shutter button on iPhones able to open and control a third party app? I don't know.
Long story short, they made it super easy to get to a place where iCloud lock-in was the default, and it was only a few quid a month so fine, whatever. But as soon as you try to change, you've got to jump through a bunch of hoops.
Added to that is their fucky storage levels. You get 50gb for 99p, 200gb for £2.99, or 2tb for £8.99. We ended up hovering around 500gb of usage between us and my kid, so a 1tb plan would have been perfect. But nope, we had to pay £9 a month because there genuinely wasn't another way to do it at that time.
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Also, I gather he's always on hand to offer an egg at trying times.
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David Attenborough
The man's spent SEVENTY YEARS educating people about the world in which they live. He's been a relentless campaigner for environmental reform for literally decades. He has almost certainly done more to bring global empathy to the British than anyone else, and yet he's still remarkably humble.
Today is his 100th birthday, and he's still doing the thing he's been doing almost since he joined the BBC back in 1952. He's never sold out, never changed his tune, never aligned himself in any way that won't go some way towards helping to educate people.
And that's exceptionally rare.
I keep pondering grabbing one of those to put a Linux on. I want a tablet that isn't an iPad, and isn't Android, and those seem like the most cost-effective way to achieve that.
I've got a 2011 MBP running Debian that is about to be put into service as a backup for my Nextcloud server, which is being hosted on 2014 mini that's also running Debian. That one is my general purpose home server, running things like Navidrome, Mealie, Grimmory, Jellyfin, etc...
Then I've also got a 2011 mini running Mint, which I took to work to use solely for giving presentations for teaching competencies.
Those old Macs are resilient computers.
It's Opencore Legacy Patcher these days. A remarkable tool really.
I used it to run up to Sequoia on a couple of old Macs, which I've ended up just putting Linux on instead. But if you're an iOS dev, then OCLP is a decent shout.
That said, we're only a year or two away from macOS dropping Intel support entirely, and that'll be the end for OCLP.
I bought my first iPad back in 2011, and, being a Mac and iPhone user at the time, it was great. I've had a few over the years, and always considered them indispensible.
Then I got a 6th gen mini. I didn't actually buy it, it was a gift from my dad who has a tendency to buy Apple stuff tax free when he's on holiday on New Hampshire. My one was £600 at the time. For its utility it's worth maybe half of that.
The first thing that pissed me off was that Apple decided that it wasn't worthy of Stage Manager. I understand not wanting it to be able to run a multiple app desktop on such a relatively small screen, but you can't even hook it up to an external display. Or, you can, but it doesn't scale. It's just a bigger version of what's on the iPad's screen. The mini is a PERFECT candidate for Stage Manager. Small, portable, easy to carry about. But no, because Apple.
Then iOS 26 came along, and suddenly every iPad was getting Stage Manager. Finally, I can use my little iPad to its fullest potential.
No.
My one still doesn't support scaling. So I can have multiple apps, but just bigger.
Then I replaced my iPhone with a Pixel running Graphene, and started using Linux a lot more, and suddenly, out of the Apple ecosystem, my little iPad made even less sense. It can technically run SyncThing, but it's so restricted as to be functionally useless. So 95% of its use now is as a MIDI controller for Mixxx on my Mac when I'm doing my radio show.
£600 for a half-baked MIDI controller is pretty fucking steep.
Yeah, I figured as much. I do have Nextcloud on my server, and probably should get around to shifting most of what's in my SyncThing over to it.
My MacBook Air has MagSafe, and I love it. I sometimes charge with USB-C, but very, very rarely. Not least because it only has two USB sockets.
It's very similar. I found WinApps to be quite flaky, where WinBoat feels much more solid. However, a nice feature of WinApps is the ability to set the Windows apps as the default file type, and you can open files from the right click > Open With, which you can't do with WinBoat. Not that I've found, anyway.
I've used SyncThing for over a year from Graphene to, well, any computer I have. But I've never been able to work out: is it possible to set ST so that it doesn't take up space on a device, like how cloud storage platforms do?
Came in to post Tom Waits and was happy to be beaten to it.
My 2014 Mac mini has two internal hard drives because that era supported Fusion drives. Mine wasn't specced with a Fusion, but for about £10 I picked up an adapter from eBay so I could populate the NVME slot. As a result I've got a 1tb 2.5" SSD that houses /home, and a 250gb NVME drive that the rest of the OS lives on. But they could be set up in any way that suits.
The only real caveat with that Mac is to ensure the one you get has 16gb RAM, because it ain't upgradable (unless you're dosdude1). Also, it's GPU isn't much cop. But mine is running Debian and a bunch of services on 8gb and doesn't cause me any issues.
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Oh, speakers.
I don't need a speaker to be smart. I just need it to connect to my device so I can play music through it. I don't want to talk to a speaker if I can help it, and I certainly don't want to have to figure out how to ask it to play 'd|| tl | | |' by 65daysofstatic while I'm cooking my dinner.
If we must talk to our things, then sure, have little microphone pucks about the place. But the speakers themselves are perfectly fine just being speakers.
I use Soulseek to the exclusion of any other music acquisition services. Between it and Lidarr my Navidrome server is GLORIOUS these days.