djdarren
@djdarren@piefed.social
- Comment on Frying chicken? Taking a leak? It's a mystery. 🤔 18 hours ago:
And you cannot change my mind.
- Comment on Developers Were Left in the Dark About DLSS 5 2 days ago:
My Sony MDR-7506 are studio quality reference headphones, and they only cost me £80.
- Comment on 2 days ago:
Hmm, I might look into that for getting YT on Apple TV without having to tolerate All Of The Adverts. Currently I manually download using yt-dlp and put them in a Jellyfin folder.
- Comment on Retro yet? 3 days ago:
I modded my 4th gen, and replaced the battery while I was in there. The trouble with mine is that it won’t charge with USB, so I had to spend out on a FireWire charger. Also, the HDD in 4G is IDE, where the 5G+ are SATA, so if you do decide to mod a newer one you’ll need a new adapter.
It is pretty though. And very easy to mod.
- Comment on Asus Co-CEO: MacBook Neo Is a 'Shock' to the PC Industry 1 week ago:
Eh, I gather the Linux based ones were actually pretty cool. But 99% of netbooks ended up being underpowered mini laptops running XP, so were doomed to failure.
- Comment on Asus Co-CEO: MacBook Neo Is a 'Shock' to the PC Industry 1 week ago:
What, like Asus did back in 2007?
- Comment on Asus Co-CEO: MacBook Neo Is a 'Shock' to the PC Industry 1 week ago:
Of all the PC manufacturers, Apple are the ones who are most likely to sweep away legacy standards.
Remember when they ditched DVD drives altogether, and the tech world threw a shit fit. When was the last time you saw a new laptop with a disc drive?
They did the same with the 30 pin connector. USB-A as well.
Of course, they can get away with it because they can also dictate which machines get which OS updates, so can entirely block devices that don’t have hardware they no longer want to support.
- Comment on Asus Co-CEO: MacBook Neo Is a 'Shock' to the PC Industry 1 week ago:
Thing is, from Apple’s perspective they don’t really need users to plug anything in to a MacBook - particularly where this one is concerned.
MacBook Neo exists as an entry-level device to hook new computer users into their services. You don’t need an external hard drive, because for just £5 a month you can access iCloud Storage. You don’t need to connect a music player, because for just £15 a month you can have Apple Music. You don’t need to sync a Kobo, because you can read Apple Books on your iPad or iPhone. And so on.
They made the same argument with the 2015 MacBook. It only had one USB-C as a nod to the fact that it needed to be charged somehow.
Personally I don’t like that view, but I’m not the target for this laptop.
For a teenager whose primary use case is to complete their school work on this, that’s entirely valid. And for the employee who’s issued a low-cost computer so they can work from home.
If the user needs more/better IO, then they can spend more to get more. But why equip an entry-level computer with four Thunderbolt 5 ports that will never be used? And why go to the trouble and expense of retrofitting an A18 SOC to provide those TB ports?
- Comment on YouTube ads are about to get even longer and they’ll be unskippable 1 week ago:
It’s like you don’t care about stonks and shareholder value.
- Comment on YouTube ads are about to get even longer and they’ll be unskippable 1 week ago:
I have a script that takes a YT URL on my clipboard and uses yt-dlp to download it to my Jellyfin folder so I can watch on my Apple TV on The Big Telly.
Fuck adverts.
- Comment on funny number 1 week ago:
- Or 7.
- Comment on funny number 1 week ago:
I used to work for the company that made those cards. One of the best jobs I’ve ever had, because the manager was cool as fuck.
- Comment on Do you stick to the same linux distro across your devices? 1 week ago:
My work PC and gaming PC are Kubuntu, my media server is Debian, and my Home Assistant server is macOS, because it’s an M1 mini. So yeah, kinda. I thought about putting the server on Kubuntu, but in the end figured I’d go for as stable as possible.
- Comment on Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse 1 week ago:
IMO it’s the exact opposite; we talk about this because we want the best protocol to win, this time, while knowing full well that usually it doesn’t.
Honestly, I couldn’t give a shit. Like I couldn’t give a shit about celebrities and journalists signing up to Mastodon.
The Fediverse with which I interact is vibrant, and full of (mostly) good people, all sharing knowledge, jokes, art, etc… I don’t personally care if Taylor Swift signs up, because the people who currently live on here largely play by the rules, and the vibe is good.
I don’t care if Bluesky’s protocol ends up ‘winning’, because it doesn’t affect Mastodon. Or Lemmy. Or Pixelfed. Or Peertube. Or whatever federated services anyone else uses.
- Comment on sausage party is such a fun movie 1 week ago:
I don’t like how sad the sandwich looks.
- Comment on Apple introduces Macbook Neo - cheaper Macbooks starting at $599 2 weeks ago:
I actually have no idea how it all works. It just does.
Asahi is incredible for general use computing on M1/2 machines, and perhaps even in use as a general purpose home server. But it’s still very much a fun exercise in what might be possible rather than a solid option, in my opinion.
- Comment on Apple introduces Macbook Neo - cheaper Macbooks starting at $599 2 weeks ago:
I have an 8GB M1 mini in service as my Home Assistant server. 4GB to UTM to run HAOS, the rest for macOS and Ollama running a small LLM for speech to text. I’m genuinely amazed that it hasn’t fallen over. Tried the same thing in Asahi but without macOS’ memory management and access to GPU acceleration, it just wasn’t feasible.
- Comment on https://www.androidauthority.com/desktop-mode-march-pixel-drop-3646069/ 2 weeks ago:
I last tried out the beta version of it on Graphene a couple of months back and it was rough. In fairness though, I was mostly using it to figure out how to use it to install a full fat Linux distro, which is probably a niche use.
My phone’s just updated, so I’ll give it another spin when I get home tonight and report back.
- Comment on Apple Accidentally Leaks 'MacBook Neo' 2 weeks ago:
The performance with regards to Home Assistant is spot on.
- Comment on Apple Accidentally Leaks 'MacBook Neo' 2 weeks ago:
I have an M1 mini with 8Gb of RAM that I use as my Home Assistant server. I’ve given 4Gb to HAOS running in UTM, and let Ollama use the rest to run a modest LLM for speech to text. It’s flawless.
I’m not suggesting that 8Gb is the gold standard or anything, but for some applications it’s still perfectly usable.
I have an M2 Air with 16Gb, and for what I need it to do, I couldn’t have any less, but the target market for a bargain basement entry level MacBook almost certainly won’t ever notice. It’ll literally just be a portal to access iCloud and whatever browser they use to get on their socials. And if they do find they need more, then Apple will happily sell them a new laptop.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Apple’s approach to RAM pricing has been criminal for years, and as a company they’re really figuring out how to plumb the depths of scumminess, but on this I don’t really see the issue.
With that said, the cost of an extra 8Gb to them is literally pennies, so withholding it is shitty. But it won’t really make that much difference to the average performance of the computer.
- Comment on 'Democracy'? UK blocks access to Iranian media 2 weeks ago:
Yep, works fine for me too, on the south coast of England.
Has anyone checked the author’s wifi connection?
- Comment on I am an amateur propagandist. A hobbyist. Enthusiast, if you will. 2 weeks ago:
I’m choosing to interpret this as the regular people’s kids have armed up and are hunting down Trump and Netanyahu’s kids.
- Comment on Xbox Co-founder Says Microsoft is Quietly Sunsetting the Platform 3 weeks ago:
That’s not Microsoft’s problem.
(I agree with you)
- Comment on Xbox Co-founder Says Microsoft is Quietly Sunsetting the Platform 3 weeks ago:
I saw a thread the other day, something like “What low-level conspiracies do you genuinely believe”; to which someone replied that they believe that OpenAI is being speedrun to bankruptcy in order for Microsoft to buy their data centres for pennies on the dollar.
And yeah, it all kinda seems that could be a credible outcome, at which point MS will have a huge amount of equipment all ready to serve game streaming to people who can no longer afford to buy a home computer to do the same.
Is it going to happen? shrug
Could it? Absolutely.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
Huh, hadn’t thought of that.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
Pretty much.
It reads the clipboard, adds the URL to a yt-dlp script, downloads the video, then switches to my YouTube Jellyfin folder and copies the download across. But instead of opening a terminal in that folder and copy/pasting the script from a .txt file I used to use, it’s just one click. Three if you count clicking the share button in Freetube and then clicking the ‘copy link’ button.
- Comment on South of Midnight won Best Character Animation at the 53rd Annie Awards 3 weeks ago:
I enjoyed it enormously.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
My approach is a python app that’s literally just a button I press after I copy a YT URL from FreeTube. I click the button and it gets yt-dlp to download the video in the highest quality into my Jellyfin folder so I can watch it on my Apple TV.
I did start looking into TubeSync, but I wasn’t all that familiar with Docker at the time, so got quite lost with it. In the end I quite like browsing FreeTube, and only downloading the stuff that catches my interest. Means I don’t spend ages idly scrolling a feed.
- Comment on this post would have singlehandedly won him the 2024 election 3 weeks ago:
Can anyone post a link to the material being referenced here, so I can decide whether to warn my church group about it?
- Comment on Lesbian group seeks legal exemption to exclude trans women from events 3 weeks ago:
TERFs in action, folks.
