Mint on my ancient MacBook because I didn’t really know any better and it’s working just nice for me, and Asahi/Fedora on my M1 mini, because it’s the only option.

I’ve been on there two years now, so 🤷🏽‍♀️

Meanwhile, I’m technologically thick as shit and have no trouble using Mastodon at all. If I know someone is on there I’ll find their profile and follow them. Done.

It ain’t that complicated.

Also; tribalism.

I’ve take to using yt-dlp to download things I want to watch to a Plex folder, just so I can watch on Apple TV without having to tolerate a barrage of cunty adverts.

It’s kind of a pain, but it does mean that I’m spending far less time idly scrolling through YouTube.

I’m currently in a weird thing with Apple. I’ve been using Macs since ‘07 and iPhones since ‘10, and while they make absolutely incredible hardware, I’m sick of how much they rip off their customers, and I’m sick of being able to see the ways in which they adapt software to push you towards the thing that makes them the most money.

As a result I have an M2 MacBook which is the best laptop I’ve ever owned, and I’m close to putting Asahi on it to see if I can use that flavour of Linux as a daily driver. Come February, when my iPhone 13 mini is due for upgrade, I’m giving serious consideration to picking up a used Pixel 8 so I can use Graphene instead.

Have you thought about using Arch?

I use Arch, btw.

As a fellow school child in the ‘90s, I can confirm that almost anything anyone did was gay. Holding hands with a girl? Gay. Liking video games? Gay.

There’s a reason Office Space is such a popular movie.

“Nightmares are dreams too”

“I come to work to get stuff done!”

Yes mate, but you’re not getting paid enough to hurt yourself cutting corners.

I hear this all the fucking time from people who want to rush ahead and show off how productive they can be for a boss who has no idea they exist. Drives me mad.

We ditched Prime a few months back after they pulled the adverts fuckery with Video. It wasn’t a terribly difficult decision, what with buying less and less from Amazon over the past couple of years.

What it has highlighted though, is how effectively Amazon has fucked our high streets. You want boot laces? Then your options are one chain store or online somewhere and that’s it. Which I guess has made me more mindful of what I’m buying.

Yeah, exactly that.

So I back up my own shit on my own external drive, just in case.

Probably not as bad as some of the other examples here, but the company I currently work for has its 10tb shared drives backing up to a server that’s right next to it in the same cabinet. Those two servers, plus all of the networking hardware and a variety of ancillary devices are all plugged in to one socket via a bunch of extension cords.

Yes, the boss has been told to get it sorted, but he’s the kind of older guy who doesn’t give a shit.

We use Google Forms and Sheets at work, precisely because easy for a bunch of us to access, and our boss is tight as fuck, so it being free is a massive draw.

I keep looking to other ways to perform the few functions we use, but ultimately I lack the knowledge and resources to roll my own.

Yeah, that seems about right.

Anyone who doesn’t think that the end goal for the Cybertruck isn’t military/police contracts hasn’t really been paying attention to how tech firms grow.

I’m mostly surprised that no US police departments have any of them yet.

Elon basically saw the Robocop action toys from the ‘90s and thought “Yes, I want that to be real”.

Part of the problem is that we’re advertised at constantly, so when the latest, greatest iPhone or Galaxy or Pixel comes along we feel like we need it. Because if we get the £1200 phone the resell value in two years will still be high, right? It actually makes sense.

But the only way to afford that is to borrow the money to pay for it.

I picked up an iPhone 13 mini last year, on a two year contract, for £29 a month. And that’s ok by me. By the end of my contract I’ll go SIM-only and my bill will drop to around £10 a month, which I’ll rock until Apple finally release another mini phone.

So this 13 mini will be the last phone I ever use…

I’m going on holiday to Greece next month, so have decided to forgo my usual weekend ales until then. Partly to be a little more comfortable in my swimming shorts, but also because £10/15 a weekend adds up to a few cold pints of Mythos by the beach.

But I was amazed at how fresh I felt last Monday morning after not having drunk any beer over the weekend.