Darren

Apple are shithouses under Cook, but they’re not that bad.

Yet.

Personally, I’m sticking with macOS as my primary OS until the point that Asahi solves DP alt mode and I can run two displays from it.

My 2014 Mac mini runs Mint, so I’m more than happy to dive in to Linux as my main.

I currently have a modded iPod mini with 128Gb of music, around 1Gb of which was bought from iTunes.

It works perfectly fine. Remarkably so, in fact. Damn things 20 years old, I can plug it into my M2 Macbook and sync music like always.

The Hobbit is one well crafted movie. Two if you want to hang out the story a little.

The Hobbit is not three fucking movies.

JD walks down the corridor to Peter Gabriel singing The Book of Love while I’m weeping like a baby.

And that’s that. There was no more Scrubs.

Fuck Nick Clegg. Fuck that guy into the fucking sun.

Back in 2010 he managed to surf a wave of genuine optimism from young British voters who wanted something less shit, and found himself in a position where he could have brought about some genuine change for the better.

Instead that cunt hitched his wagon to the fucking Tories, who straight away announced an increase to university tuition fees. And who then went on to spend 15 years raping and pillaging the country like only fucking Tories can.

So yeah, fuck Nick Clegg.

As a kid I guess I did, because I was borderline libertarian and something of a prick. But these days I’m older and a little more aware of people who aren’t me, so these days I don’t think about it at all.

I would prefer if rich people paid more, but that has no real bearing on how much I pay.

My wife occasionally sends me TikTok videos she finds interesting. I don’t have the app installed because I can’t be trusted to not end up scrolling for hours, and TikTok’s website is pure dog shit. Because they want you using the app.

Anyway, turns out yt-dlp works perfectly with TikTok 👍🏽

As a Kobo user who sends articles to my Kobo via Pocket A LOT, this is some hefty bullshit.

I have a 2011 MacBook Pro running MX Linux. It’s no match for my M2 Air, but it’s still surprisingly useful.

Was up the council recycling centre the other day, looking at some of the dumped computers, wondering just how many of them could still be very useful.

Blind doesn’t always mean no vision at all. Wearing a device that’s always looking where your head is pointing means having a device that can describe your surroundings to you. And as they pointed out, it can magnify what you’re looking at so you can read it.

Not massively useful for the current vision Pro, I’m sure, but future devices, smaller devices could be very cool.

A nice beef gravy. Delicious.

Given what a shitty cabal of arseholes Apple has become, it kills me how good my M2 Air is. It’s a genuinely incredible bit of hardware.

Same goes for sexual abusers too.

Doesn’t matter how good that first Lostprophets album is, I just can’t listen to it knowing what Watkins got up to, so I’ll listen to music by people who didn’t fuck a literal baby.

I periodically delete my Metallica collection so I can re-download it for no other reason than fuck Lars.

To be fair, an iPad can be used for way more than the average punter will do with theirs. I used to broadcast my radio show with mine, using a mini as a midi controller for my mic. It was pretty cool.

But yeah, for all the workarounds and hoop jumping I had to do, Mixxx could do it all on a regular computer, for free.

So these days mine is a social media / note taker / third screen for my Mac. Very much not worth the £600 Apple are rinsing for this thing. I can’t imagine how disappointing it must have been to shell out for an M1 Pro in the belief that Apple were about to beef up iPadOS. Then they…didn’t.

I did the iPad-only thing for a year back in 2019/20 and while it was fine, I spent much of the time low-key irritated by the shit I had to jump through hoops for. Shit that a regular computer can just do.

By the end of my experiment it was abundantly clear that Apple had 0 interest in making iPadOS more useful for anything more than whatever its apps could do. Five years on and my opinion hasn’t changed. I still use an iPad (mini), but mostly because it was a gift which comes in handy for note taking.

There was one paragraph about AI. Hardly a ramble.

Over on Twitter I was keen to chat to people with large follower bases in order to perhaps hook in to some of that. On Mastodon I generally have no idea how many followers people have because it really isn’t important to me any more.

If someone is interesting, and their engagement good, then I’m happy to be a follower.

I’ve found almost the exact opposite.

Engagement on Lemmy is mostly fine, but I chat with people all the time on Mastodon

I think the key is to meet people on their level, to find people who share your interests and sensibilities. Follow plenty of folks and chat to them and before long you’ll have a grand little community.