Darren

Honestly, the base level M1 mini is still one hell of a computer. I’m typing this on one right now, complete with only 8gb RAM, and it hasn’t yet felt in any way underpowered.

Encoded some flac files to m4a with XLD this morning. 16 files totalling 450mb; it took 10 seconds to complete. With my work flows I can’t imagine needing much more power than that.

it felt more like what you’d expect from a labor-of-love indie game

I thought that too. It was like a long cutscene and I loved it.

If only the goal of the tech firms was to make the world better while making enough money to achieve this, rather than their goal being to make as much shareholder value as possible while ekeing out improvements on a schedule that fits their need to maximise profits.

This past month has felt like two years.

I’m tired of big tech deciding when we should upgrade because they deliberately create things that break, degrade and becomes obsolete far shorter than whatever should have.

I think about Apple quite a lot in this regard. Not because of planned obsolescence or anything so nefarious, but because they genuinely make some of the best consumer hardware you can buy, and because it’s so good it costs a decent wedge. Then, five years later, when that good hardware is still as good as the day you bought it, they quietly drop OS support for it because they need you to buy another one.

And most people will smile and thank them for the trade-in discount they’ll get to help them spend more money, while that older, still perfectly usable hardware is shipped off to a massive shredder to take it off the used market.

I use Macs, I understand this process very well. But I’ve also done my fair share of putting OCLP on older hardware in order to wring a few more years out of it, and of putting Linux on even older Macs because they still work perfectly well. I mean, I have a 2011 MacBook Pro that’s running Linux Mint so well that you wouldn’t have any idea that it’s a 14 year old laptop.

The second best thing Apple are good at is convincing their customers that the equipment they own is old and knackered. And that’s kinda sad.

I was thinking about this the other day, while loading music onto my modded iPod. If I could go back in time and stick a pin in tech growth, it would be 2006, before the iPhone came along. Don’t get me wrong, I think the explosion in smartphones that came after the first iPhone is broadly good and has the ability to be democratising. But that’s not really what shook out.

The world in 2006 had digital cameras and small, portable music players. We had SMS for easily staying in touch with each other, and we did have smartphones - just not as smart as they are now. From a communication perspective, we mostly had what we needed. Hell, by 2006 3G connections were pretty universal, so we could do video calling if we had a phone that supported it. Having a bunch of devices that all did specific things meant that we spread our reliance around a number of companies. Now, with our camera, MP3 player, computer, and communication device all being controlled by one company, if that company turns to shit we have to jump to a less shitty firm, but we have to abandon all of the conveniences to which we’ve grown accustomed.

As someone who recently jumped from 15 years of iOS to GrapheneOS, this last one is particularly painful.

And sure, everything has gotten a lot faster since then, but there’s a part of me that kind of enjoys the inconvenience of slower, finicky hardware that sometimes needs a nudge in the right direction.

I’ve been using Moshidon. One day I’ll find an app as good as Ivory on iOS, but in the meantime Moshidon is fine.

I have a Brother printer at work that’s old enough that I don’t have a single thumb drive small enough to work with it. Haven’t tried in a while, but iirc it tops out at 8gb and the smallest I have is 32gb.

But it works fine over the network, so I’ll just carry on ignoring the firmware update it’s been begging me to install for two years.

Safari + AdBlock + Vinegar makes for a great YouTube experience.

That said, Freetube on my Pixel is wonderful.

I had my 13 mini for two years, and in that time I never once felt like the battery was on the way out. At worst it would be around 20% when I went to bed.

I had a 13 mini until a month ago. It’s one hell of a phone, and honestly, I’d still be using it if iPhones didn’t keep their value so well and Apple weren’t such a shit company.

This is a master(bation)piece.