ouch!

As a recovering Apple user, the hardware really is very, very good.

I have an M2 MacBook Air that is, quite frankly, the fastest computer I’ve ever used. Running Window in a VM within it gave me the fastest Windows computer I’ve ever used. I’ve had it two years and still get all day out of the battery. It can export a two hour AIFF recording of my radio show from Reaper in around 10 seconds. In the two years I’ve had it there have been perhaps three occasions where I wished I’d opted for a Pro instead.

I also have an iPad mini which is a ridiculously useful little tablet, when used in conjunction with my MacBook.

However, over the past year I’ve been drawing further away from their ecosystem, to the point that I mostly only use the MacBook to present my radio show because it’s fanless so doesn’t cause any noise issues when my mic’s open. And that’s as a direct result of Apple being a trash company run by corporate fuckheads who would sooner capitulate to fascists than actually fucking stand for something.

So yeah, very few of us do actually support them.

Very nice!

We had an apprentice at work a few years ago who had never seen those movies. The first was released the year he was born.

I shrivelled into a corpse as he told me that.

You can already run Graphene entirely without Play Services. You have to install them yourself after you set up. It’s just that if you do install them, they’re sandboxed.

I’m not an expert by any means, I moved directly to Graphene after 15 years of iPhones without really touching Android in between, so I mostly scrabboed about, found a path that worked and stuck to it.

But the way I use it is with Aurora to install apps from the Play Store. You can use it anonymously, or you can log in to your own Google account.

In terms of other Google services, you can install then, whereby Graphene will run them in a sandbox. You have control over how much data they can have. For me it strikes a happy balance between knowing that I have some semblance of control, but also having the convenience of things like Maps. And Google’s camera app is much much better than any of the others I’ve tried. Which is annoying.

They want to fuck Venezuela but don’t have the emotional maturity to ask them out on a date.

Have socialist policies lifted people out of poverty in Venezuela?

Perhaps if the US lifted its sanctions on Venezuela, maybe they’d find out.

Ah, that’ll be why it feels rock solid then…

To be honest, they offer different use cases, so no, probably not.

Syncthing can be used collaboratively, inasmuch as I could share a folder with my wife, for example, but I think the primary use of it is to enable syncronisation of a folder between several personally accessed computers. If you do share with others, you’ll have to share a separate folder, so will end up with a bunch of different folders all being shared with different computers.

Not to mention that Nextcloud offers other functionality that isn’t necessarily possible with Syncthing. That said, I guess you could save your calendar to a folder in Syncthing and have it sync between devices. So I suppose it could replicate some of the functions.

Syncthing

I think I use Syncthing more than any other tool. I have a bunch of different computers, and all of them are running a Syncthing server, all hooked in to the same folders, all sharing the same documents. I have it running on my GrapheneOS phone too, so my photos folder gets shared as well.

It can be kinda fiddly to set up the sharing, making sure that you point the shared folders at the right place on your system, but once you’ve got it dialed in it’s invaluable.

For example; it’s where I keep my Calibre library, so no matter which of my computers I’m on, I can open Calibre, drop a book in, and know that it’ll be ready to load onto my Kobo. I do a weekly radio show, so I keep all of the documentation around that in a folder that I work from locally, whether I’m on my MacBook or Linux desktop.

The only downside to it is that (as far as I can tell) you can’t store everything on one device to download to others as you need (like iCloud Drive or Dropbox), so if your Syncthing folder takes up 30Gb on your 2Tb server, it’ll also take up 30Gb on your 128Gb phone. So it does mean having to be a little judicious with what you drop in there.

Basically, I love Syncthing. It means that I have access to everything I need access to, without having to shell out money each month to rent space from a cloud provider. And because I have all of my devices sharing all the folders with all the others, even if one drops offline, the others still get updated damn near immediately.

I used to be all-in on Input Leap, despite some weird, buggy behaviour I kept experiencing. Someone mentioned DeskFlow to me, which is another fork of Synergy, and which has been far more solid for me.

You don’t have to run any Google stuff at all, if you don’t want to.

He also tried to execute him, but yeah, generally cool.

Vin-di-CATION!

I bought a Pixel 9 with the sole intention of putting Graphene on it. I wasn’t massively down with giving Google money, but my provider offered it to me for £30, then £30 a month on contract. Can’t argue with that.

If you have a Pixel, then GrapheneOS is the sensible choice. Not least because it currently only works with Pixels anyway.

One of the lads at work was freaking out because he had tickets to a festival on his phone, and it wouldn’t charge. I spent three minutes digging in the port with a wooden toothpick and wouldn’t you know there was fuck all wrong with his phone.

It’s mad that I have to search for how to turn my iPad off every bloody time.

Also, Apple don’t seem to have an appetite for supporting gaming on macOS, beyond a few big name titles announced once a year to reig ite interest.