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DJDarren

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DJDarren ,
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I mean, today’s 10,000 and all that, but you’re on a technology forum and haven’t heard of the Rabbit R1?

DJDarren ,
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Yes, obviously, but that thing has been everywhere over the past month or so. I’m just surprised that they were completely unaware.

DJDarren ,
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Oh aye, I wasn’t suggesting that they have to know ALL of the tech to be able to post on a tech forum, I’m just surprised that they’re completely unaware of it, given it’s ubiquity on the tech forum over the past month or so.

OneDrive automatically backups folders in Windows 11 without users' permissions ( windowsreport.com )

According to the latest reports, Windows 11 has made an independent choice by automatically turning on OneDrive folder backup for Desktop, Pictures, Documents, Music, and Video folders without your permission. This signifies that, whether you approve or not, everything is becoming coordinated with the cloud....

DJDarren ,
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Not everything. By default the contents of your desktop and documents folder, both of which are easy to switch off if you want.

DJDarren ,
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IANAL and could be wrong, but it is not the case that the T’s&C’s we all have to agree to aren’t necessarily legally binding, because people can’t be expected to read and understand them all.

With that in mind, it doesn’t matter what the user agrees to if they have no practical alternative available to them.

DJDarren ,
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I’m in the UK, where the law may be less mental over things like this.

DJDarren ,
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They are not, but they do sell products over here, so are subject to British law.

Even Apple finally admits that 8GB RAM isn't enough ( www.xda-developers.com )

There were a number of exciting announcements from Apple at WWDC 2024, from macOS Sequoia to Apple Intelligence. However, a subtle addition to Xcode 16 — the development environment for Apple platforms, like iOS and macOS — is a feature called Predictive Code Completion. Unfortunately, if you bought into Apple's claim that...

DJDarren ,
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I’m not gonna stand up and declare that 8gb is absolutely fine, because in very short order it won’t be. But yeah, currently for an average use case, it is.

My work Mac mini has 8gb. It’s a 2014 so can’t be upgraded, but for the tasks I ask of it it’s ok. Sure, it gets sluggish if I’m using the Win11 VM I sometimes need, but generally I don’t really have any issues doing regular office tasks.

That said, I sometimes gets a bee in my bonnet about it, so open Activity Monitor to see what’s it’s doing, and am shocked by how much RAM some websites consume in open tabs in Safari.

8gb is generally ok on low end gear, but devs are working very hard to ensure that it’s not.

DJDarren ,
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When I bought my first MacBook in ‘07 I asked the guy in the store about upgrading the RAM. He told me that what Apple charged was outrageous and pointed me to a website where I’d get what I needed for much less.

I feel that if Apple could have soldered the RAM back then, they would have.

DJDarren ,
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I've been a user of Apple devices since I got my first MacBook in 2007. I now have an iPhone, iPad, a selection of Macs of various ages, and a couple of Apple TVs. As much as I'd like to switch to Linux, I don't really see it happening because I like Apple's hardware too much.

With all that in mind, I think the EU are doing sterling work. Shame my country voted to leave it...

DJDarren ,
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I quite believe this.

Was looking on /r/Apple last week and was shocked by the number of people who are apparently full on free market champions or Apple shareholders or both. That place has always had it's fair share of them, but they seem to have been ramped up to the max now.

DJDarren ,
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Speaking personally, I don't think they're dumbed down. They're pretty straightforward to use, sure, but they do what I need them to.

In terms of the hardware; I have a 2011 MacBook Pro at home that's still just about as solid as the day I bought it. The battery's dead, but that's to be expected for its age. I'm typing this on a 2014 Mac mini that's running the latest macOS perfectly through OCLP. My main computer is a 15" M2 MacBook Air that is a genuinely impressive machine. If anything, Apple have kinda shot themselves in the foot, making devices that last far longer than their software support allows.

DJDarren ,
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Until last week it was running Sonoma. Then I put Mint on it, which somehow buggered up the macOS partition.

Long story short, it’s not run High Sierra for a couple of years now, not since I discovered OCLP.

Are you embracing AI? ( viewber.co.uk )

There’s something of a misunderstanding in the UK property industry that agents are luddites, clinging to fax machines and Rolodexes, but quite the opposite is true. Sales and letting agents like nothing more than finding new efficiencies – whether through careful outsourcing, digital signatures or virtual tours, begging the...

DJDarren ,
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Landlords are vermin, AI is peddled by vermin, and spambots are vermin.

Amazon Mulls $5 to $10 monthly price tag for unprofitable Alexa service, AI revamp ( www.reuters.com )

Amazon (AMZN.O) is planning a major revamp of its decade-old money-losing Alexa service to include a conversational generative AI with two tiers of service and has considered a monthly fee of around $5 to access the superior version, according to people with direct knowledge of the company's plans.

DJDarren ,
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That’s good, because it’s dog shit.

DJDarren ,
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I’ve had a few Alexas over the past five years or so, and I honestly don’t think I’ve ever used any of them to actually buy anything. They’re all glorified Bluetooth speakers for my phone.

DJDarren ,
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Download the Alexa app and have at it.

Microsoft Edge nags users with a 3D banner to change Windows 11's default browser ( www.windowslatest.com )

Would you use Edge as your default browser on Windows 11 if Microsoft nags you with a 3D banner? Microsoft thinks you would. In a new experiment, which appears to be rolling out to Edge stable on Windows 11, Microsoft has turned on a banner that uses 3D graphics to promote the browser....

DJDarren ,
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and you open it directly or through files like PDFs

As a Mac user, for whom PDFs open in Preview - because they’re effectively an image format - I find it wild that, to this day, Windows defaults to opening them in a browser. Windows has an image viewer right there.

I have Win11 in a VM so I can make certain company documents play nice for the Windows users at work, and find it genuinely entertaining how fucky MS have made it. I found the other day that if you link to a document in Excel, but put the link in wrong, it’ll open Edge to warn you about it. Until that point I hadn’t opened Edge at all in that VM. I installed Firefox from an .exe I downloaded in macOS then immediately set it as default.

It’s always nice to shut that VM down and go back to using an OS that doesn’t nag me all the fucking time.

DJDarren ,
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It’s not that it opens the link in a browser, it’s that it opens the link in a browser that isn’t the default, and that I’d never used.

macOS has its problems, sure, but I can’t think of a single time when it’s ignored my preference for software.

DJDarren ,
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I can only speak for Preview, but yeah, of course. It’s really useful.

DJDarren ,
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I don’t know what to tell you, Preview is an image viewer that is the default way to view PDFs on a Mac, and does so in a way that I’ve not seen bettered. It opens them without any formatting errors, allows for text selection and copying, and allows for rotation and cropping, as well as combining multiple documents and splitting them up. You just drag pages out and into the Finder to create a new document, or drag a second document into the thumbnail bar to combine.

The rotation ability is the reason I started using my old Mac mini at work. The crappy Dell PCs we’re normally given only have the free version of Acrobat installed, and I got sick of being sent landscape scanned document PDFs in portrait, so used my own MacBook to rotate them.

DJDarren ,
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I’m sure he’ll consider their demand thoroughly, and with compassion.

DJDarren ,
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I use Opencore Legacy Patcher to run unsupported macOS on my older Macs. They used to have an excellent Reddit group that was easily searchable and rammed full of really good advice on how to fix common issues.

A couple of years ago they shuttered the group and moved everything over to Discord, and it’s been hell ever since trying to figure out how to fix something if it goes wrong.

You search for your issue, find someone talking about it, then have to pick through the dozens of replies either side to try and figure out if there’s anything useful. There are dedicated support threads now, but hardly anyone uses them, so they’re not helpful.

I really, really hate Discord as a support medium, and can’t for the life of me work out why the OCLP mods chose it over Reddit.

DJDarren ,
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Like many others who no longer use Twitter or Facebook, one of the biggest impacts to me is suddenly not having a reasonably proactive way to contact companies for support. It’s amazing how many companies have offloaded their support staff to half a dozen overworked social media operators. Try phoning and you’ll get “busier than usual” phone lines, and if you can even find an email address it’ll auto-reply to say that it’s no longer monitored.

It’s a shit show.

DJDarren ,
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Oh, and to add something that’s just occurred to me…

If you had a problem and couldn’t find a solution while the support was on Reddit, you could easily start a new thread that might bring you the help you needed. Now, with Discord, you have to hope that someone who knows how to help just happens to be browsing the feed at that moment, otherwise your post is getting lost in the ether, because who the fuck is searching for problems in order to offer assistance?

DJDarren ,
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To be fair, they have a similar problem with iPad, but they can flog those at a price point where many people are happy to grab one to see how they can make it fit.

The overarching opinion of iPads is that they’re just big iPhones, and because they can share apps, it took a long time to get to where we are now, where most iPad apps are actually developed for it. But ultimately, they’re still iPhone apps, just rejigged to take advantage of the bigger screen. As someone with an iPad and a MacBook, who’s had a really good go at making an iPad my main computer, the platform just isn’t there. So if I do use it, it’s always in the knowledge that what I’m doing is probably easier on my Mac.

VisionPro feels the same to me. Sure, I could surround myself with work, but pinching and tapping nothing in the air has zero tactility and is far less satisfying than clicking a mouse and typing on a keyboard. And comes with having to wear a headset. So in the end, most people will just do the work on their Mac.

DJDarren ,
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I don’t think the cost is too high at all. But I also don’t think it’s a consumer device right now. It’s a dev kit with none of the cost savings of production at scale.

DJDarren ,
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2008, the global financial crash, the subsequent shift of trillions of all the currencies towards the already-rich, then Covid hammering the final nail in the coffin of proving that governments care about the people only inasmuch as they provide value.

We’ve had sixteen years of people getting poorer and poorer, shit getting more expensive, and the news outlets they read pointing towards immigrants/gays/leftists as the problem.

The right take those messages and amplify them. They tell people that only they can speak truth to power, when the reality is far more nuanced than that. But people don’t want nuance, they just want to be able to pay their bills. The people aren’t stupid though, they know that the windbags can’t really change anything, but the status quo hasn’t done shit to help them, so fuck it, we’ll vote for the other guy.

“They’re all the same anyway”

DJDarren ,
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It feels to me like the Tories (and their wealthy mates) have now got to the point where they don’t feel they can rinse the taxpayer for much more without everyone seeing them for the craven vampires they are, so they’re happily stepping back for one or two terms.

In that time Labour will struggle like fuck to get the country back to where it was 14 years ago when the Tories walked back into Number 10, the papers will blame Labour for everything being shit, and the door will be open for the Tories to come back in and carry on the pillaging with coffers that are worth the effort.

DJDarren ,
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Isn’t that where Big Head lived in Silicon Valley?

DJDarren ,
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Exactly. Get drunk, sit back, and let the madness wash over you.

DJDarren ,
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I'm still salty that Covid robbed us of Dadi Freyr winning in 2020.

DJDarren ,
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I won’t hold my breath on Apple using this. It’d destroy their upsell from 8gb process in one fell swoop.

DJDarren ,
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Charlie has an excellent face. Can you tell him that for me please?

DJDarren ,
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The trouble with YT Premium is how much they’re charging for it.

We used a VPN to get Ukrainian family YTP for a fraction of the price they charge here in the UK. We pay something like £4 a month now for both of our accounts. That would be the better part of £20 a month if we’d done it legit. Fuck that noise.

Sure, it comes with YT Music, but I’ve literally never used that. I have Apple Music and an iPod. So £20 a month JUST TO REMOVE ADS.

Nah, fuck ‘em.

DJDarren ,
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Oh Christ. It’s been a while since a meme spoke to me quite so clearly.

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