Darren

When I had an iPhone, Vinegar was the best few quid I ever spent. Between that and the adblocker I used, I got ad free YouTube with the default iOS video player. Glorious.

I have a fan plugged into a smart switch that I’ve set to turn off when I fade up my mic while doing my radio show. It’s the most glorious use of throwing the internet at a home appliance I’ve yet come up with.

Eh, I dunno. The vast majority have no idea what a VPN is. If a VPN ban benefits Rupert fucking Murdoch then the tabloids will wang on about how they’re used by paedophiles and people smugglers and that’ll be that.

I was complaining to my wife yesterday that it’s not easy to find torrents for the Aus version of Taskmaster.

She told me to be patient, their internet is shit so it’ll take a while to get it off their servers.

My Mum died recently and my step dad is shit with tech, so their password book was invaluable in helping us gain access to her Apple account and her phone. It meant we were able to get to her iCloud passwords, so now we have access to everything.

So yeah, password books are actually pretty handy.

On the phone itself? I don’t think it does. The Wallet app doesn’t work at all for NFC payments in GrapheneOS, because Google are shit heads.

I bought a Garmin to accompany my Graphene Pixel, only to discover that my bank doesn’t support Garmin Pay.

So, MagSafe wallet attached my phone it is then.

I do the same with yt-dlp, though mine is still a little more manual. I have my subscriptions in FreeTube, which I use to select what I want to watch. Copy the link, run my script, then trundle to the lounge where I can watch them on my big TV.

There’s a mindfulness to that process that’s helpful to me. A conscious decision, as opposed to mindlessly absorbing content.

There’s a lot to be said for stepping back from online debates and asking whether your voice is actually valuable, or whether you’re just yelling into the void and getting yourself all pissy.

For me, I try to take the view that there’s already enough negativity, so I try to be as positive as I can in my online interactions. If someone gets needlessly arsey with me, I’ll try to sympathise with them. If they don’t react well to that, I’ll leave the thread. I’m not changing anyone’s mind, not even yours.

NJB is the shit.

I will never, never visit Fake London.

I don’t use iOS any more, but I found that a combination of Safari + adblocker + Vinegar was the golden setup. No ads, and you get to use the default iOS video player.

Perhaps it’s because I’m old, but I kinda hit a wall a few years back where I stopped giving a shit about what famous people had to say on the internet. So on that basis, the move from Twitter to Mastodon was easy for me. Less easy was leaving behind people who I liked, but life is change, and we leave people behind all the time.

Yeah man, that shit can be hard and time consuming.

I used to do a podcast. Each episode was around 12 minutes. I’d spend a good eight hours a week on those 12 minutes, around my actual job, and would get about ten people listening. And you know that within half an hour of hearing it, they’ve forgotten it and moved on to the next thing in their queue. It’s hard to maintain enthusiasm for that.

No no no, it’s pronounced “PNG”

Get thee to messenger.com then. Save it as a PWA and its like having the app but you give Meta as little as possible.

Because it’s almost certainly an old, low spec device that they’ve bought a job lot of on clearance.

Who could forget the op-ed Carter wrote for The Onion.

As it currently stands, my Plex setup costs me nothing because all I do it stream from my server to my Apple TV. So it works well enough for me.

Can’t slow down videos I’ve downloaded to my Plex server. 👍🏽

As someone who uses and enjoys a MacBook, but who has recently moved away from iOS; one of the biggest problems I have with tech right now is how much ALL of the companies cripple their products so as to not cannibalise another. And I think Apple are the worst for it.

I have a 6th gen iPad mini. Its form factor is perfect for hand held reading, social media, and the like. If I could plug it into a monitor and use Stage Manager to carry out light computing tasks it would be perfect. But Apple decided it simply wasn’t powerful enough, so didn’t enable it. It absolutely could do that, but that would have been one less selling point for the Airs and Pros. So Apple restricted it.

I’m old enough to remember when you’d buy computing stuff that had no restrictions beyond what it was physically capable of. You could buy a shitty graphics card and you could play a game, but if the card wasn’t up to the task it would run like crap. There are games and apps you literally cannot buy for lower end models of Apple devices. If you’ve already bought it on a device that can run it, it’s not available to another that can’t.

All so they can maintain their air of quality.

Fuck Apple. They make great hardware, but they’re run by cunts.