Darren

I honestly wouldn’t mind paying for it if it didn’t feel like such a fucking rip-off.

For example, for £19 a month I could sub to Netflix top tier. For that, I and three others could watch their stuff in UHD, all at the same time. And sure, Netflix content might be somewhat average these days, but it’s still reasonably high quality and costs a decent packet to produce.

By contrast, YT Premium for family is £20 a month, with which I can access a bunch of videos that, while enjoyable, do not cost Google anything to make. Yes, hosting costs money, and yes, they (theoretically) pay the video creators. But it doesn’t feel like £20 a month, y’know?

Part of the trouble is that they lump YT Music in to the same subscription. But I don’t want or need that. I have Apple Music with its lossless catalogue, and library that I’ve built up over many years. If YT offered a straight up ad-free plan that I could share with my family that cost a tenner a month, I’d probably go for it. It would mean being able to watch videos on Apple TV without having to fuck about downloading them to my Plex folder first, because they’ve injected SO MANY ADVERTS in now that the YT app is completely unusable.

Until a few months ago I was all-in the Apple ecosystem. iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV. Seeing them launch things like Universal Control was amazing.

Then I jumped out, got a Pixel, put Graphene on it, and started messing with Linux.

… Only to discover that Universal Control is essentially just Input Leap, which can trace its history back to 2001 and the launch of Synergy.

Apple are absolutely a marketing company. Don’t get me wrong, they add some much-needed polish, but they essentially just rejig existing tech and lock it down so it only works on their devices sold in the last few years.

Removed by mod

The thing that really gets to me is how we’ve gone from “Here, let us sell you a computer that you can push to its limits however you see fit” to “We will sell you a device and ensure you use that device within a given sphere of acceptability”.

I own this phone/computer/tablet/console/whatever, so why the fuck do I have to adhere to their rules? Rules they’ve changed since I bought the device, of course.

God, I wish.

They have stated that they’re more than willing to work with any manufacturer who is prepared to make a device that meets their security standards. But as it stands, Pixels are the only unlockable devices that meet that standard.

Someone like Fairphone could do pretty well from a tie-in with Graphene. But it’s up to them.

I went from 15 years of iPhones directly to Graphene, without really messing with Android in between, so my experience has been a STEEP learning curve, followed by a fairly hum-drum experience. But honestly, that’s fine. I want my phone to take more of a back seat and not be something I keep needing to worry about.

My banking app doesn’t work in Graphene, but the website does, so I don’t really mind.

It could that there’s a whole bunch of shit I’m missing, but mostly it’s… fine.

My kid went through the same phase all kids do of refusing to go to bed.

So one night he’s grabbing on to the baby gate at the top of the stairs like a con in a prison movie, screaming and yelling. I’m at the bottom of the stairs trying to ignore him.

He fixed a stare directly at me, stopped screaming, and shit in his pants.

So yeah, 100% of parents have arsehole kids.

installing anything

I’ve been using Mint and KDE Neon on two of my machines for the past year, and I still have to search for how to install an app image properly.

Its one of those things that isn’t the end of the world, and I guess there are increasing numbers of Snap/Flatpak packages. And, of course apt. And whatever application manager your distro comes with.

But some software is available either to be compiled by the user, or as an app image. And I don’t understand why that image can’t just be dropped in an application folder and run, the same way it works in macOS.

But I’m a relative noob. I assume there’s a historical reason.

Surely not Elton?!

It pains me to say, but the stock Google camera app is by far and away the best option I’ve yet found on Graphene. Which has to pair with the Photos app, or you can’t actually do anything with the photos it takes.

However, you don’t have to sync either with Google (though you do have to sign in), you can set Graphene to only allow them access to the folder they need (while they think they have wider access), and you can turn off network permission.

I looked into Ubuntu Touch last week as a potential alternative to Graphene on my Pixel 9.

The most recent Pixel it supports is the 3.

So Graphene it is then…

My bank app doesn’t work with Graphene, which is a pain in the arse, but not the end of the world. I mean, they still have a website I can log into.

I’ll be keeping the fuck away from books then!

I believe macOS 26 will be the last that’ll run on Intel hardware. So functionally, a year from now, Hackintosh is dead. Well, Hackintosh running the current macOS, of course. I imagine there’ll be a thriving community working to keep existing hardware chugging along.

It’ll be interesting to see the momentum of Linux on Macs though. If Asahi manages to crack those last few hurdles with the M1/2 hardware, it’ll be a rock solid OS, particularly as ARM64 software becomes more common. Suddenly you’ll have a bunch of incredibly capable Macs going cheap because they can’t run the largest macOS.

Did you post all three of these via Starlink?

I adore Viz.

They once printed the finest letter ever penned.

Also, this advert for flat-roof pubs will never not make me hoot.

This is Patrick

I set up Wallabag on my Kobo last week and really don’t like it when compared with the default Pocket implementation. Having to mess about getting it set up, and having to install KOReader just to replicate a function I already had and used extensively is irritating as hell. And it’s not as good either.

Fuck Mozilla. They didn’t have to buy Pocket, and they didn’t have to shut it down. The pricks.

Which 4th May is this from? Because if it’s from 2007 then that’s a perfectly reasonable mid-range machine, but if it’s from last month then I really hope he’s only using it as a personal Linux box for tinkering.