djdarren

Yep, my own government (UK), have rolled out a digital ID app that only works with Play Services intact, so I had to jump through hoops to prove my ID so I could renew my driving licence. It’s bullshit.

Yep, I use it on my Mac. I also use Konsole instead of Terminal. I wish Dolphin was available, but sadly it’s not.

Yeah, she’s in the process of doing that now, but it’s a whole massive arsehole that they baked into the process from the start; either intentionally or not.

And that doesn’t get around the fact that if you use the default camera app, which most people will, there’s no way to save the photos to anywhere other than the camera roll. And you can’t integrate the way photos work with iCloud into something like Immich. As far as I’m aware.

My wife and I were talking about this a few weeks ago. I had iPhones from 2009 until early last year, so had a shit load of photos in iCloud. She got her first iPhone in 2012, and still has one, so also has a shit load of photos in iCloud.

Now that I don’t use an iPhone, I’ve been able to save all my photos to bung over on my Immich server, largely because my Pixel doesn’t give a shit what camera app I use, or where I save the photos.

My wife, however, is in a situation where she kinda has to keep using the stock camera, and the photos from that have to go into iCloud because there’s 80gb of photos and she sure as shit doesn’t have 80gb spare on her 128gb phone to even begin the process of saving them all. So she is, in effect, trapped into paying for iCloud storage every month.

And sure, in theory it’s reasonably easy to shift across to another app - now. But for a long, long time the default was basically the only game in town. Being able to map another one to the shortcut on the lock screen is relatively recent. Is the new camera shutter button on iPhones able to open and control a third party app? I don’t know.

Long story short, they made it super easy to get to a place where iCloud lock-in was the default, and it was only a few quid a month so fine, whatever. But as soon as you try to change, you’ve got to jump through a bunch of hoops.

Added to that is their fucky storage levels. You get 50gb for 99p, 200gb for £2.99, or 2tb for £8.99. We ended up hovering around 500gb of usage between us and my kid, so a 1tb plan would have been perfect. But nope, we had to pay £9 a month because there genuinely wasn’t another way to do it at that time.

My MacBook Air has MagSafe, and I love it. I sometimes charge with USB-C, but very, very rarely. Not least because it only has two USB sockets.

It’s very similar. I found WinApps to be quite flaky, where WinBoat feels much more solid. However, a nice feature of WinApps is the ability to set the Windows apps as the default file type, and you can open files from the right click > Open With, which you can’t do with WinBoat. Not that I’ve found, anyway.

I have ADHD, so, well, everything.

In the process of shifting my entire iCloud photo library over to Immich, I’ve discovered that a huge amount of the videos I’ve shot over the years with various iPhones are ridiculously huge x264 .MOVs. So I’ve been fiddling about with ffmpeg this morning, and have landed upon this script that re-encodes them to around 10% of their original size with no visible loss of quality, and retains EXIF metadata. One video I have is 90 seconds long, and is of bats filmed at twilight over a large pond in the New Forest. The original is 132mb, but because most of the clip is basically black, it’s been able to compress it to 2mb. Which is mad.

Anyway.

Navigate your terminal to a folder that contains a bunch of videos and paste this in, then sit back and let ffmpeg work its magic:

for i in *.MOV; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -map_metadata 0 -vcodec libx265 -crf 30 -tag:v hvc1 -movflags use_metadata_tags "${i%.*}.mp4"; done

For just the odd one or two videos, here’s the basic ffmpeg command:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -map_metadata 0 -vcodec libx265 -crf 30 -tag:v hvc1 -movflags use_metadata_tags ouput.mp4

God, I love ffmpeg.

Pretty sure it’s this command;

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vcodec libx265 -crf 30 -tag:v hvc1 output.mp4

On my M2 Air, conversions are usually pretty quick, depending on the size of the input. After a short while it does throttle because there’s no fan, but it counters along nicely.

As for audio; I use XLD, set to encode HE-AAC at 80kbps. It seems really low, but still sounds great.

As a Brit, 🤷🏽‍♀

I’ve never really understood the mentality of businesses. They’re losing customers, so they bump the price to compensate, therefore losing more customers.

I guess those that hang on end up making up for those they lose, and because all the other services are doing the same, they end up getting people who’ve jumped ship from another one and signed up at a good introductory cost.

But, like, just charge a bit less and have more customers.

I’ve got an ffmpeg script saved on my Mac which re-encodes video to a fraction of its original size without any apparent loss of quality. Shit’s basically magic.

I have one for audio as well, but I think it’s an Apple-only MP4 codec, that requires you to have to manually build it into ffmpeg on any other platform. But the end result is that my 2 hour radio show AIFFs that start out at 4GB end up being high quality MP4 at around 75mb.

Like I said, magic.

When using Sunshine/Moonlight to stream games to our Apple TV, you can guarantee that if it begins to stutter it’s because Windows is downloading something in the background.

Cheap shit from 2014.

Funny enough, I installed Win11 on a friend’s HP convertible laptop today.

A 2GHz i3 and 4GB RAM, and it was still entirely usable. Not powerful by any means, but a fine socials browser, YouTube viewer, and document writer.

I’d have preferred to put Debian on it, but it wasn’t my call, so I did as requested.

AI scrapers only know this outdated information

While I have experienced this (quite a lot), it’s much easier to spend five minutes figuring this out with an AI than it is to spend an hour trying to work that out by searching forums for answers.

I especially wish more man pages had common examples.

A thousand times this. It’s all well and good telling us what each option does, but if we don’t know how to form the command around the various arguments and paths, then it’s all fairly useless.

I know It’ll be a controversial take on here; but while I don’t like the use of AI for most things, I’ve found LLMs to be immensely valuable when it comes to learning how to Linux, and as an extension, how to self host.

I understand the limitations, but it’s so much more straightforward to tell an LLM what I’m trying to achieve then follow those instructions, than it is to try and poke about from site to site trying to piece together the information. Particularly if you don’t know what it is you need to search for in the first place.

Obviously you have to exercise some caution, but it makes so much more sense to me to confirm instructions provided by an LLM than it is to try and figure out where to even start. And let’s be honest, not all forum users are as forgiving to complete noobs.

I wish I still had my top spec 2015 MacBook Pro, because I’d love to see how well Debian runs on it.

Yo Bro, cool your jets.