Darren

I posted my comment using that very client 😀

The mobile app is basically a clone

Amazing. Make loads of noise about snagging Christian from Apollo to be a part of the relaunch, then make an app that has nowhere near the charm of Apollo.

my Android phone

Hard to do AirPlay from a Pixel.

Literally the only reason my LG TV is hooked up to the wifi is so I can show my wife stuff from my Android phone. For everything else we have an Apple TV.

I can’t see any good reason to allow a fridge access to the internet.

Being English, I’m stubbornly monolingual (aside from some leftover schoolboy French), so when I was invited to a Sikh wedding I was genuinely amazed by all the guests just flowing between English and Punjabi as if they were the same language.

This is just avoiding the issue of having a short attention span.

And how do you improve your attention span? By not having distractions available to you.

There are dozens of us out here patiently awaiting a bunch of reasonably powerful new Linux machines.

They do not. Yet.

I don’t really use Windows these days. Mostly in a VM to make sure something I’m fiddling with is compatible for the poor folks at work who have to use it. So I can’t say I have any real opinions on 11 one way or the other. I couldn’t really point to one thing that’s vastly different or improved.

I guess, from that point of view, 11 feels mostly like it’s MS adjusting the OS to better suit their revenue stream, rather than improving workflows for the consumer. Which it is, I suppose.

We use a Canon at work, behind a print server called UniPrint, or some shit. I figured out how to use it to print from a USB drive long before I finally caved and mailed the guy who maintains it to ask how to get my KDE Neom machine to successfully send a print job. I figured out how to see it, I could check the toner levels, but I could not send a print.

Works now, because he changed a setting.

Bastard printers.

I genuinely couldn’t tell you what the current gen Xbox is named, though to be fair I don’t really pay that much attention these days.

But yeah, Windows can’t really have much of a default theme update when there are a good four different window styles throughout the various settings panels.

Looking at it from a perspective other than “Windows shit, use Linux”, MS’ biggest issue here is that the vast majority have no compelling reason to upgrade. Currently.

To the average punter, W11 offers nothing that W10 doesn’t already have. There’s no new technologies that they care about, no new tentpole software that they’re dying to try. Nothing. It has copilot running rampant through it, but most people don’t know what that is or don’t give a shit.

Give Apple their due, when they announce an OS update, they focus hard on the ways it improves over the current offering. Ways it can interact with your other devices, for example. Or even just a whole new design.

But MS advertise nothing beyond “This is new, come get it!”, then wonder why no one cares.

My partner uses Mastodon, but not Lemmy.

As with so many things, the barrier to entry has been lowered so far that literally anyone can have a go. And that’s good. But it does mean that the vast, vast majority of art is now being experienced by an audience of maybe 20 people.

You can spend hours crafting a beautifully soundscaped podcast that truly gets to the heart of what you need to talk about. And ten people will listen to it.

But I suppose it was ever thus. Someone would spend a year painstakingly working on a painting, getting all the details just so. And then it would sit in their studio because they had nowhere to display it, or no one to buy it.

Speaking as someone who’s been into Nirvana and RatM since the early '90s, there’s more anger and protest in ‘We Live Here’ than in the entirety of Nirvana’s catalogue.

Bob Vylan - We Live Here

Sure, Nirvana were angry, but mostly in a depressed, teenage way, lashing out at an unfair world. They were angry on a personal level, mostly. Bob Vylan are angry on a social level, in the way RatM were. They’re demanding the world look at the inequality they see, rallying us to take it on board and do something about it.

If that isn’t protest, then I don’t know what it is you’re looking for.

Having just finished the first Death Stranding, I agree with you re: Kojima.

Don’t get me wrong, the game is great; I ended up enjoying the delivery aspect more and more as it went on. But man, the story is…tough. The broad strokes of it are interesting, but I feel like the inertia of it got lost in the attempt to make it a multiple-hour open world.

As a whole, the game is undeniably an incredible piece of work. While you’re immersed in it it’s wonderful. But when you stop to think about it for even a few seconds, it flakes away.

And, like I said, while you’re playing, you’re really into it, you get to the end game, you ‘defeat’ the final boss. Then there’s the best part of 90 minutes worth of exposition to explain the parts of the story that weren’t explained DURING THE STORY. Never before have I played a game that had to put so much effort into explaining itself.

But somehow it all works. The experience of playing it is excellent. Or maybe Kojima just has his own reality distortion field.

NMS came out on macOS around the same time I got my M2 Air. Being a huge 65daysofstatic fan, I played it for a bit when it first came out, but I didn’t have my own PC, so it was on my wife’s, meaning I couldn’t play that much.

Anyway, I was stoked to finally be able to play it on my own computer and put hours and hours into it. But the thing I could never really shake is just how lonely it feels. I get that that’s part of the point, but after a while it begins to feel really quite oppressive.

Having never owned an Xbox, I never really played any Halo besides when I had a go with my brothers. But I have to say, the co-op multiplayer on Halo 2 (I think it was) was incredible.

Going into a room, he’d go left, I’d go right, and together we’d clear it out before moving to the next. It was great.

I honestly wouldn’t mind paying for it if it didn’t feel like such a fucking rip-off.

For example, for £19 a month I could sub to Netflix top tier. For that, I and three others could watch their stuff in UHD, all at the same time. And sure, Netflix content might be somewhat average these days, but it’s still reasonably high quality and costs a decent packet to produce.

By contrast, YT Premium for family is £20 a month, with which I can access a bunch of videos that, while enjoyable, do not cost Google anything to make. Yes, hosting costs money, and yes, they (theoretically) pay the video creators. But it doesn’t feel like £20 a month, y’know?

Part of the trouble is that they lump YT Music in to the same subscription. But I don’t want or need that. I have Apple Music with its lossless catalogue, and library that I’ve built up over many years. If YT offered a straight up ad-free plan that I could share with my family that cost a tenner a month, I’d probably go for it. It would mean being able to watch videos on Apple TV without having to fuck about downloading them to my Plex folder first, because they’ve injected SO MANY ADVERTS in now that the YT app is completely unusable.

Until a few months ago I was all-in the Apple ecosystem. iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV. Seeing them launch things like Universal Control was amazing.

Then I jumped out, got a Pixel, put Graphene on it, and started messing with Linux.

… Only to discover that Universal Control is essentially just Input Leap, which can trace its history back to 2001 and the launch of Synergy.

Apple are absolutely a marketing company. Don’t get me wrong, they add some much-needed polish, but they essentially just rejig existing tech and lock it down so it only works on their devices sold in the last few years.