DJDarren @ DJDarren @thelemmy.club

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10

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872

Joined

2 yr. ago

I have also stolen this idea and give it as much as one (1) week before I forget that I'm doing it.

I'm a fat guy, so I'm not here to shame Trump for being fat. But my brother in christ, the man can't keep himself healthy, let alone an entire fucking country.

I've also just realised that the BetterTouchTool method doesn't translate over Universal Control. So my Mac mini's trackpad can't activate the BTT shortcut on my MacBook, and vice versa.

Yeah, I know column view is an option, I'm just wondering why - for a company as focused on trackpad manipulation as Apple - they never brought that to Finder. And since my original post I've noticed that swiping doesn't work in Settings either.

It just seems like a bizarre omission.

For future reference, Pixelmator is a great app for what you want to achieve, though it does cost more than simply using Freeform.

I bought it years ago, but the iOS and iPadOS versions are still updated. The macOS version of Pixelmator Classic I have has been deprecated in favour of Pixelmator Pro, but my older version still works.

cleaning the kitchen in the evening

To add to this, I set a five minute timer. I have ADHD, so even starting on cleaning can feel like a mountain to climb. That five minute timer is a really good way to see just how much you can get done in that amount of time. And as an added bonus, once you've started you figure you may as well finish.

Because a huge part of their business model over the past twenty years has been the upsell.

I bought my first MacBook in 2007. It had 2gb of RAM as standard. I asked about upgrading it, the guy told me to pick some up online as it would be waaaay cheaper, and he was right. Did the same for the MacBook Pro that replaced it a few years later, but in the meantime they moved to the soldered model so had to swallow the cost of the 16gb 'upgrade' in my M2 Air.

To be fair, the cost over time of my Macs has been incredible. My 2011 MBP is still trucking along, these days running Linux Mint. With the cost to upgrade the RAM and replace the HDD with an SSD, all in it cost me around £1200. Less than £100 a year for a laptop that still works perfectly fine.

I thought that too, but just looking at his channel it seems that he's only done the storage on an M1 mini, not RAM.

It’s telling that my piracy of music all but disappeared when Apple Music came along. (Almost) Everything I want to hear is right there on my phone. I don’t have to switch between different services to find artists.

Now, whether such enormous consolidation of the record companies, allowing that kind of setup, is a good thing is another discussion…

Yeah, I’ve thought about this too.

Apple update their OSs annually now because the shareholders demand constant evolution, meaning the devs have to constantly be on top of changes to the OS. And it’s fucking exhausting how badly it affects us all.

Alright, check out Muscles Georg over here, with all his muscles!

Sadly.

At which point he becomes a Republican.

I was in Corfu last week when the news of the Epic store came about, so tried to install it on my UK registered iPhone. All I got was a notification telling me that my phone isn’t eligible.

So yeah, no Fortnite in my phone for me. Not that I really care about that, I just like fiddling with shit.

All of which is to say, once I finally get around to picking up a half way reasonable Bluetooth speaker for the kitchen I’m putting a fucking hammer through that fucking show. Useless lump of crap.

We have an older Echo Show in the kitchen. I hate it. It’s genuinely one of the single most ill-conceived, user-unfriendly products I’ve ever experienced. It’s straight up dog shit.

My wife originally picked it up because Amazon were flogging them for something like £30 as a loss-leader. Figured it would make a useful bedside clock and smart speaker in one. It’s a shitty clock, and absolutely fucking useless on the bedside because it keeps flashing shit up in the dark. You can’t load any photos on to it, so you’re stuck looking at whatever artwork/“tips”/ads it wants to show you.

I don’t understand how Amazon created a device that looks like a little picture frame, that would be an ideal bedside clock, and apparently at no point did they consider that people might want to use it like that.

We since got a Google thing that’s essentially the same device (free with an energy tariff), and y’know, Google did a good job with that thing. Just sits in the bedroom being a clock and smart speaker, dimming nicely when the lights are out, never advertising shit at us.

I use it as a Bluetooth speaker, which also sucks because it’ll randomly refuse to disconnect from my phone even though I did it through my phone’s settings. It’ll be disconnected, then I’ll be sat in the lounge and I’ll hear it reconnect, like some kind of cunt.

And they’ve programmed it to talk ALL THE FUCKING TIME. “NOW CONNECTED TO YOUR PHONE”. Yes, I fucking know it is, I just told you to do that.

It is legitimately the worst bit of tech I’ve ever used, and I’ve used a Virgin Media cable TV box.

So Ee-van-guh-lion, yes?

This puts me in mind of Arkell vs. Pressdram.

Podcasting

I love listening to podcasts, but almost never the ones that everyone goes on about. I like ones made by people with a passion for storytelling, or ones that serve as people’s journals, y’know?

I’ve made my own podcasts over the past 15 years or so, but a few years back I gave up. The barrier to entry lowering so sharply meant an influx of them, making it basically impossible to get mine heard. So I’d spend 8/10 hours making my 15 minute episodes sound as perfect as I could for them to get 5 listens. I tried to tell myself that I was doing it for me, but ultimately I wanted people to hear my efforts.

So I got burned out and at some point just abandoned the whole thing.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s wonderful that anyone can pick up their phone and bang out a professional sounding piece of audio, but between that and the likes of Spotify throwing cash at the already big names, it became impossible to stand out without having your own marketing budget.

I’ll never forget when the internal speaker went on my first iPhone, a 3GS. I put off getting it repaired because I was so used to having to send my previous Nokias and HTCs back and being without my phone for a couple of weeks. But the warranty was about to expire, so I bit the bullet and booked an appointment to get it sorted.

Walked in to the appointment and walked out ten minutes later with a brand new phone.

That sold me on Apple’s customer support.

I will say though, that the support seems to have tanked over the past few years. That they’ll jump on any blemishes on the device as a reason to not honour the warranty. Like how the screen in my XR had a tiny burn right at the edge (I was a welder at the time and stupidly had it in the top pocket of my overalls), which they used as reason to not work on it when it kept freezing. They demanded I pay £150 for a replacement screen first, which I refused, so they returned it to me. They’d taken off the screen protector, so I then had to argue with them for weeks to get them to replace it.