djdarren

How did you get a screenshot of my ex wife’s old Samsung netbook?

She called me up once, asked if I could have a look at it because it was slow as hell. Opened IE and I’m not kidding when I say that literally 1/3 of the tiny screen was toolbars.

a Soulslike Metroidvania

Is this the gaming equivalent of increasingly niche music genres?

The company I work for has, until now, not really given much of a shit about cybersecurity. Sure, we had some basic stuff in place, and had managed to avoid any issues, but it’s fair to say that the boss’ focus isn’t on the computing side of things. But we recently took on a big contract from a BIIIG customer, and that customer has a contractual requirement that we achieve the UK government’s Cyber Essentials rating at the very least.

So out with the old Win10 PCs and in with some new Win11 units. They’re still shitty, but at least they’re compliant.

Trouble is, because the company broadly didn’t care, I was able to put Kubuntu on mine. You could argue that my PC was the most secure because I ran timely updates, where my colleagues were still using unsupported Win10.

Well, I’ve lost my Linux privileges because now the IT guy needs everyone to be in line, and on the same hardware.

So I’ve spent the past few weeks poking and prodding at Windows 11 to figure out how to bend it to my will without admin access. It’s been quite good fun actually. Aside from the whole using WIndows thing.

Until a couple of years ago I was hard in the Apple ecosystem. I saw things like Universal Control come along and how cool it was that I could control my iPad from my Mac; but only if both were new enough to support it.

Then I began to dabble in Linux, before immersing myself in it. And then I realised that Universal Control was just Deskflow, (or one of the numerous forks of the same project). Which led me to realise just how many of those incredible Apple innovations over the past 10/20 years were mostly just polished versions of things people could do with far cheaper hardware.

Take iPhone mirroring. That’s been available to Android users as SCRCPY for god knows how long. But if you use Linux or Windows and an iPhone, it’s not for you. For a long time, my iPad got very little use because I can’t integrate it with Linux very easily at all. And that’s by design. That’s how Apple sells more stuff.

For me, the utility is in being able to turn a bunch of lights on and off at the same time. We have a number of lamps, or light strings or what have you, rather than one or two big lights. Put them all in Home Assistant and I can set all the ones I want to turn on half an hour before sunset without having to touch a button. And 99% of the time it’s fine.

Equally, I can have a few lights turn on in the bedroom shortly before I go up to bed, then turn off half so there’s enough light to read by, then turn off every light in the house with the press of a button. And it is a button, because I don’t have a voice assistant set up.

Also, I have a bunch of temperature sensors around the house.

None of it is essential, but it’s a nice quality of life upgrade for my wife and me.

< Homeautomation always seemed stupid to me

Home Assistant is a great way to achieve home automation without handing everything over to random organisations. Not perfect, but better than relying on Amazon.

I remember when a new microsoft OS was a great thing that brought wonder and excitement instead of bullshit.

Trouble is, what can the OS makers offer these days?

Apple brought it on themselves by insisting that their platforms had to be updated annually, presumably because it made it easier for them to blacklist older devices more frequently. An unsupported device is basically landfill, right? So you’ll have to toss it and buy a new one. Because…reasons.

But really, what are the functional differences and benefits to the end user of moving from Win10 to Win11? Of moving from macOS Sequoia to Tahoe to Golden Gate? I’m not massively au fait with Windows, but from my experience, the only real difference that could be sold as an upgrade is “Moar Copilot!”.

We’re at a point where hardware from five years ago is every bit as functional as hardware released today. So all of the companies have latched onto AI. But users don’t really care about AI. And that leaves Microsoft and Apple and Google with… nothing. This is particularly obvious in the mobile space, where they’ve run out of hardware features to hang a new device off of. Even the cheapest new smartphone has a still/video camera with surprisingly high quality sensors. They can all connect to high speed wifi and cellular networks. They can all do all of the things people need of them. What else can they add?

But the shareholder value must increase.

It’s exhausting.

It was, but not as much, and with far more subtlelty.

I’ve spent the past couple of years moving away from Apple devices and commercial software, into self-hosting as much as possible. While at this stage I wouldn’t go back to my previous set up, there’s no denying that it’s nowhere near as stable and easy to maintain.

Home Assistant, for example, is an incredible tool; that fails to turn some lights on and off far more often than Alexa ever did. It’s frustrating. Not so much that I’m going to bin it off and go back to relying on Amazon, but enough that I mostly just end up feeling kinda pissed off that the big companies have pushed me into a place where I’ve had to learn how to be a part time sysadmin, alongside my 9-5.

IT IS CORBJEANS DAY MY SEXY DUDES

You can publish iOS apps without Xcode?

What kinda fucks me up - though I accept that I’m not a developer, so can’t profess to fully understanding all of this - is that to make apps for Apple devices you have to have a relatively new Mac that can support a version of Xcode that can in turn support the latest version of iOS.

So you have to pay them £100 a year to be a registered developer. AND you have to shell out £1500 (minimum) every few years for a new Mac in order to stay current. And then they tell you have to throw them a tithe every time your app makes any money at all, even if you’re not selling your app through the App Store, or using Apple’s own payment systems.

That’s triple dipping, right?

My home server is 100% up, because I never check it and that’s how it works, right?

Literally the only thing about Symfonium that’s lacking is having to manually scan the library when adding new music. I use Feishin on my desktops, which some manages to do it in the background.

I was talking about the Windows UI on Mastodon the other day, particularly in reference to how I have it set to dark mode on my PC at work, but when I hit Send/Receive in Outlook I get a bright white, XP-ass-looking box pop up. Someone replied, “the older the settings boxes look, the more useful they are”. And I can’t disagree.

the PS3 is now 20 years old

OutRAGEOUS misinformation…