Darren

chinese burger meal

This is just avoiding the issue of having a short attention span.

And how do you improve your attention span? By not having distractions available to you.

There are dozens of us out here patiently awaiting a bunch of reasonably powerful new Linux machines.

Even then, it’ll be the fault of the people coming over with fuck all to try and rebuild their lives.

I use Castopod for when I’ve uploaded my radio show. At the moment it’s hosted on my site that’s on Hetzner. It only costs me a tenner a month, so I’m wondering whether it’s worth trying to work out how to host it all locally so I can have far more storage and it not cost me anything.

I don’t really use Windows these days. Mostly in a VM to make sure something I’m fiddling with is compatible for the poor folks at work who have to use it. So I can’t say I have any real opinions on 11 one way or the other. I couldn’t really point to one thing that’s vastly different or improved.

I guess, from that point of view, 11 feels mostly like it’s MS adjusting the OS to better suit their revenue stream, rather than improving workflows for the consumer. Which it is, I suppose.

We use a Canon at work, behind a print server called UniPrint, or some shit. I figured out how to use it to print from a USB drive long before I finally caved and mailed the guy who maintains it to ask how to get my KDE Neom machine to successfully send a print job. I figured out how to see it, I could check the toner levels, but I could not send a print.

Works now, because he changed a setting.

Bastard printers.

I genuinely couldn’t tell you what the current gen Xbox is named, though to be fair I don’t really pay that much attention these days.

But yeah, Windows can’t really have much of a default theme update when there are a good four different window styles throughout the various settings panels.

Looking at it from a perspective other than “Windows shit, use Linux”, MS’ biggest issue here is that the vast majority have no compelling reason to upgrade. Currently.

To the average punter, W11 offers nothing that W10 doesn’t already have. There’s no new technologies that they care about, no new tentpole software that they’re dying to try. Nothing. It has copilot running rampant through it, but most people don’t know what that is or don’t give a shit.

Give Apple their due, when they announce an OS update, they focus hard on the ways it improves over the current offering. Ways it can interact with your other devices, for example. Or even just a whole new design.

But MS advertise nothing beyond “This is new, come get it!”, then wonder why no one cares.

Removed by mod

I love a good whiskey

So do I, but we’re talking about Jack Daniels here.

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.

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.

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.

So far as I’m aware, their label hasn’t dropped them. Their agents have, but fuck agents. Someone with some stones will snap 'em up in a heartbeat.

Start with their second album, We Live Here. It’s got some incredible, visceral punk on it. The Price of Life, and Humble As the Sun are top notch, but a touch more polished.

God bless Lolo for massively distorting my teenage expectations of what boobs look like.