ohgr

I’ve been mostly been getting all my shit out of various clouds and trying to get more things offline where I can control the tenancy, risk and cost.

The house looks fucking awful. I mean my place basically is an IKEA show room and it looks more like a home.

Not really doing that with my kids. It’s important to nudge them in the right direction but that’s about it. Any absolutist things are not helpful as they build resentment and resistance. Constructive discussions and teaching them to reflect is important.

I mean my youngest got into Roblox for a bit (talking weeks). Yeah fine with that, with one eye open. One day someone stole all her shit and her friend was an asshole on the same day. Sat down and talked about virtual items and grinding games and life generally. She never touched it again!

Hyper optimism in this thread.

Outside tech users it’s a novelty that lasts about a week or disappears in a puff of smoke the moment money is asked for it.

The whole industry is blind to the fact the market doesn’t need it and it it doesn’t really solve any problems. It’s not even a means to an end.

What consumers want is to be left the fuck alone and their stuff to last longer. But this doesn’t make numbers go up.

I’m lazy. I just extract the abstract from the tex source and put a link to the PDF. That is however quite different and not public in my case.

Turns out from a technical documentation consumer perspective it’s easier to save a PDF than feck around with web pages and try and save them.

Bad model, bad method or bad paper?

It is required when you’re the victim of a crime however so it’s a good precaution.

(Had my phone swiped once)

If you have adequate physical security it is less necessary thus my home desktop is not encrypted.

Yeah travel in and out of Europe all the time. No issues ever. Still devices are locked and encrypted though.

Place bet: Musk investigates while shutting down any data protection agencies.

I had a scammer calling me using this a while ago. The accent was perfect but the English grammar was terrible.

This stuff scares me. The amount of schools dependent on this sort of stuff and google’s estate is insane here (UK).

They have no contingency plan either.

No you just steal it and pretend it’s ok because the machine came with windows 11. Tech companies taught me it’s ok to steal and do things without permission.

I give it a week before someone patches it.

I’m using LTSC. That’s fine. I suspect that’ll never require a Microsoft account.

Edit: come on EU. Step up here. Tell them they need to give the users choice.

They’re really not. Instability is bad for growth. You make more money with hands in a thousand pots not one hand in a big one.

The big guns you see and hear about are complete amateurs.

Yeah I suspect people might start falling off yachts soon. I’ve worked for people who have real money not just valuations and borrowing and you don’t fuck around there.

Appears to be a trap for idiot engineers as well. Some who are quite senior.

I tried using Numbers across my Mac and iPad. It has some show stopping sync bugs there which result in it completely destroying documents. Then when you try and recover previous versions you get a lesson in Apple's commitment to things other than the facade on the front of their stuff: not a lot. The document versions thing sometimes doesn't even work and if it does it's so slow it's unusable. Probably backed with some low tier S3 stuff. Also the formula editor is painful at best.

TeXshop on the Mac is however rather nice.

Subscription is fine on Office for me. I just pay for the O365 family edition (without copilot) and everyone gets it for about £6.70 a month. However I don't want the signed in cloud version so I just use the moral justification of cracking it with Ohook and disabling all the cloud shit. I'm paying for it so I don't give a crap.

LibreOffice I want to like but I've tripped over many weird bugs and things which have been floating around in their Bugzilla since the dawn of time.

If I have an academic interest, I'll just use TeXlive and LaTeX Workship inside VScode.

Try the LTSC version. All the infuriating bits are not installed :)

Windows 11 LTSC one is quite good because it's so damn stupid. You can indeed hit start then just type what you want. Only does files though, by name, which is fine.

It is indeed starting to feel like that.

Yeah I stopped using spotlight a few years ago. I didn't really notice that I stopped using it until recently. It just became useless. I reorganised my stuff carefully so I know where I put it. I think that turned out to be more powerful than hoping a search engine over the top would be able to sift through the nuances.

It's fine if you stay away from the consumer releases. Windows 11 LTSC (based on 24H2) feels like windows 7. Most of the stuff you had to futz with powertoys and GPOs back then. That hasn't changed. I quite like it. It has been utterly boring compared to my recent Apple experiences.

I don't think it does. Long term Apple user here (since 2007). I'm typing this on a 5 year old pile of junk with Windows 11 LTSC on it. The (M4) Mac is sitting next to me acting as an SMB server until I can be bothered to get all my stuff out of it. It's just tiring using a Mac these days. It's difficult to explain but everything feels slightly frustrating. The nice things are really nice. The whole experience is quite nice. Until you hit a problem. Then it's a complete pit of pain and misery and there just aren't enough ways out of it.

Had a few issues with iCloud syncing and data loss as well and what with being based in the UK and the general problems with geopolitics and the cloud I figured I'd try and get as much stuff out of iCloud as possible. Well there's not much advantage now. Most of it is in the ecosystem tie in, not the hardware. And on top of that the provisioned services such as Apple Music are just pain for me on a daily basis. My entire music catalogue disappeared in a puff of smoke when I was offline for nearly a week. The one thing I wanted it for!

So back to the PC. I ran out of disk space on the (soldered in SSD) Mac. I can't delete anything and macOS has leaked out about 20gb suddenly. I don't know what this is other than about 5 gig of it is Apple Intelligence despite telling it to fuck off. So it's late Friday afternoon and I need to get something done so I can have a clear weekend. I dig in the junk cupboard and find a couple of hard disks but no way of connecting them to the USB-C only Mac. Amazon solutions aren't available for delivery until Sunday. There upon I discovered the kids' "covid work PC" for when they were home studying. Despite the acceptable 16Gb of RAM it only had a meagre 256Gb disk in it. No worries. Opened it up and there's a hole for an SSD in it. It now has +500Gb SSD. Brilliant. On goes windows 11 LTSC. I'm back up running R in under an hour and have transferred all the data over.

I never went back. It feels better here. This thing is a swiss army knife. And extension of me. Not the other way round like on the Mac. The Mac feels like it feeds off me: both cash and energy. Apple need to fix that.

We’ll see it in the CVEs.

I’m running GrapheneOS without it fine. Everything I need works fine.

That’s why we just email the sheets around like it’s 1999 :)

Bugger all. We had something go straight through.

Based on the staff I see at the average technology company I wouldn’t expect this to get any better any time soon. The state of things is definitely declining.

I work with one of those guys. Morally bankrupt at every level of his existence.