I’ve been on there two years now, so 🤷🏽‍♀️

Meanwhile, I’m technologically thick as shit and have no trouble using Mastodon at all. If I know someone is on there I’ll find their profile and follow them. Done.

It ain’t that complicated.

Also; tribalism.

Did you switch to it from Android or iOS? Because as someone who’s only used iOS since 2010, I imagine it’ll be one hell of a shock.

I’ve take to using yt-dlp to download things I want to watch to a Plex folder, just so I can watch on Apple TV without having to tolerate a barrage of cunty adverts.

It’s kind of a pain, but it does mean that I’m spending far less time idly scrolling through YouTube.

I’m currently in a weird thing with Apple. I’ve been using Macs since ‘07 and iPhones since ‘10, and while they make absolutely incredible hardware, I’m sick of how much they rip off their customers, and I’m sick of being able to see the ways in which they adapt software to push you towards the thing that makes them the most money.

As a result I have an M2 MacBook which is the best laptop I’ve ever owned, and I’m close to putting Asahi on it to see if I can use that flavour of Linux as a daily driver. Come February, when my iPhone 13 mini is due for upgrade, I’m giving serious consideration to picking up a used Pixel 8 so I can use Graphene instead.

You know this thing is tiny, right? It’ll be shockingly easy to pick up and press the button. Even with cables hanging out of it.

I use a 2014 mini with all cables hanging out the back, and it’s really easy to pick up.

It’s literally just the same body as the OG Magic Mouse, which had a bay for a pair of AAs underneath. All they did was remove the bay, put a rechargeable battery in there, and a socket to charge it. It takes a couple of minutes to give it 9 hours of juice.

There’s no grand conspiracy.

My MacBook has just two USB-C sockets. When I bought it I picked up a couple of A adapters on Amazon for a few quid each. It’s never been an issue. Even less so with a desktop, as you’re able to leave the adapters in all the time.

The power draw of these things when sleeping is negligible. They’re basically off, so there’s no real need to shut them down with any regularity.

I can use my MacBook for a whole day and still have half the battery left. Their power efficiency is genuinely remarkable.

Have you thought about using Arch?

I use Arch, btw.

The other day I got to pondering whether people who work for ad serving companies have ad blockers on their work computers.

And with GMail and Chrome, it is still.

I get that ready cash availability at the time is absolutely a factor, but it does make you wonder whether spending $5k more on the competitor would save a bunch of money in shit that John Deere won’t let you repair for yourself down the line.

Is Case to farming equipment what Brother is to printing?

Am I going to have to buy a Case for the two holes a year I might need to dig?

And longevity. I have a 2011 MBP thats now running Debian and is still a tank. I’ve had two MacBooks since I got it but the damn thing refuses to die.

My daily laptop is an M2 Air which is ridiculously powerful for my needs, so when Apple drop OS support for it I’ll put Asahi on it and keep it trucking until the wheels fall off.

And that 2011 will still be going.

I use DDG, but yeah, it can be tough to find answers.

I spent much of yesterday getting Debian to work on my old MacBook.

In theory it’s relatively straightforward, but there are so many little niggles and roadblocks that it really sours the experience.

I set up a user account upon install, as it asked me to, but when I tried to do something with sudo it just kept telling me that I wasn’t in the Sudoers group. Mine is the only account on the machine, why isn’t that set up by default? So I searched for a solution, which appears to have a bunch of different ways to do it, but none of them quite worked, or worked first time. The first few solutions involved using the terminal, but in the end it was easier to open the document in the file manager and edit it as a root user. Linux users are hard for using a terminal when they could just open a document in a text editor.

In the end I got everything set up how I wanted, but it probably shouldn’t have taken a whole day of irritation.

Oh man, fuck that shit into the sun.

That’s the same spec as mine, though I also replaced the DVD drive with a second SSD.

And yeah, in theory you dual boot, but in practice I managed to bugger mine up, so it’s 100% Mint.