My company finishes at 4. 3:56 every day I clock out so I can get out of the yard before everyone else and not get stuck in traffic.

My mama didn’t raise no fools. Well, apart from my little brother.

It’s telling that my piracy of music all but disappeared when Apple Music came along. (Almost) Everything I want to hear is right there on my phone. I don’t have to switch between different services to find artists.

Now, whether such enormous consolidation of the record companies, allowing that kind of setup, is a good thing is another discussion…

Yeah, I’ve thought about this too.

Apple update their OSs annually now because the shareholders demand constant evolution, meaning the devs have to constantly be on top of changes to the OS. And it’s fucking exhausting how badly it affects us all.

This puts me in mind of Arkell vs. Pressdram.

I loved To The Moon, which fits your requirements, I think. The sequels are fine, but the stories are pretty well standalone, so you could play just the first one and leave it at that. And it’s only £1.70.

I finished that last week, and yeah, it’s wonderful.

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”.

My mate Gary who puts them on his enormous Plex server. He’s a good lad.

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

I was ok with the Angry Birds franchise right up until the shitty kart racing game they pumped out. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more wretched collection of bare-faced advertising and micro transactions as that fucking piece of shit.

The game was crammed full of new pop songs, and when one would play the game would display a link to buy it from iTunes. I couldn’t let my kid play it, it was just too egregious.

Haven’t touched any of those games since. Which is a shame, because I really enjoyed the original.

I remember buying Bioshock on my iPhone way back in the mists of time, before decent controller support existed for iOS. The on screen controls weren’t great, so I didn’t spend much time playing it, always planning to come back at some point.

Then it got removed from the App Store so completely that it disappeared from my purchased list, and that was that.

Yeah, that’s awesome.

Now, let’s see about Red Dead II…

I have an M2 Air which can run the Windows version of Steam via Whisky. Its ability can be patchy, but the fact it runs any games at all is little short of a miracle. I’ve been playing The Talos Principle II that way, and while my wife thinks the glitchy graphics are hilarious, I’m not too fussed because the gameplay is still there.

Of course, it’s not perfect, and while I can get Fallout 4 to run, it looks like shit even on the lowest settings. However, in the context of the gripes in this thread, it means I can play Portal 2 and its various mod packs on my Mac. And they look great.

Speaking as a macOS user, it’s a relatively straightforward process using a specific version of the Kindle app and a bit of knowledge of how to use Calibre. It can be a bit of a fiddle to set up, but once it is it’s wonderful to be able to take advantage of discounts on Kindle while reading on my Kobo.

I can’t speak for how easy it is on Windows/Linux, mind.

I have 16gb on my M2 Air, and 8gb on my 2014 mini. I’m genuinely surprised at how usable that mini still is. Hell, it’s running Sonoma through OCLP, but it’s only when I boot up the Win11 VM I have installed that it really starts to struggle.

No ublock for Safari, which, yeah, is Apple’s fault for being dicks, but it still sucks.

Oh, it’s a stunning game, and I absolutely adored it. But that final boss is an utter prick.

Bramble: The Mountain King

I ragequit half way through the final boss after having died for the thirtieth time. The game is absolutely beautiful, but fuck me some of it is tough.

Ended up watching the last bit on YouTube. No regrets.

iPhone mini gang rise up!

Eh, I dunno.

I was pondering using the new Journal app on my iPhone, but would far prefer to type with a physical keyboard, so haven’t gotten around to it. Not saying that this particular board would change my mind, of course, but ultimately I do vastly prefer the tactile feel of a real board.

Hell, I’m typing this on my iPad using Universal Control from my Mac.

He really did, which made me really appreciate that I came away from that video absolutely certain of why I think that car is dog shit.

Bluetooth, while being perfectly adequate, does need to compress/encode the audio. As a result, wired does sound better, though it only really makes a difference if you’ve got headphones where you might notice it.

Enjoy.

That thread is still magnificent.

Some very dedicated modders have managed to squeeze bluetooth into their Classics. Personally, I think that undoes the point of having one of the best sounding DAPs, but all power to them for adding some versatility.

And flashmodding a classic iPod can give you 500gb of storage, if you want.

I’m mostly joking.

Mostly.

I tried using Invidious, but found that it misses quite a lot of new posts in my subscriptions. So in the end I _ahem flew to Ukraine to take advantage of family Premium for around £3 a month.

Because honestly, I have no real problem paying for Premium, but I massively object to paying £20 A MONTH to watch (mostly) amateur content that YouTube aren’t actually paying anyone to commission. How is Disney+ almost half the damn cost of a YT Premium family plan? Because Google are money-grubbing cunts, that’s how.

sad WebKit noises

Louis Rossman’s recent video on this is good.

And yeah, my Plex server doesn’t fuck me about the way the streaming services do.

The second being Safari, right?

Right?

…right…

Oh, can you use Plex as a DVR then?

Apple has shown that the market could be willing to adapt.

It’s less that they’ll adapt, and more that they don’t really care. And particularly in the case of Apple users: their apps are (mostly) available on their Macs already. The vast majority of people couldn’t tell you what architecture their computer runs on and will just happily use whatever works and doesn’t cost them the earth.

You know, as much as I’m fine with setting sail to find video content that’s hidden behind streaming subscriptions, I’m actually ok with paying £15 a month for Apple Music / Spotify, et al…

I mean, I’d say there’s 99% similarity between the libraries of the big two streamers, so it’s not like you have to sub to both to get all the music you want. I can listen to the same hardcore bands across most of them, and that’s fine. The problem I have is that there’s a bunch of shows on Netflix, another bunch on D+, more on Prime, and so on, and so on. So we’re made to feel that, in order to keep up with cultural discourse, we have to spend out £70+ a month on half a dozen different services.

And nah, fuck that.

All that said, I do download some music, because I want FLACs to convert to 320 aac so I can load on to the iPod I like to use.

You’re forgetting the important NES setup step of having to blow on the cartridge to get the damn thing to read.

Yeah. I booted up my PS4 for the first time in months a few days ago, to play a free game. I had to sit through fifteen minutes of software updates for both the OS, and for God of War that just happened to be in the drive that I’ve completed and didn’t want to play.

Yeah, good luck finding me.