I like the new discord mobile app design tbh, it’s nice. Good improvement. I’m sure some things can be refined, but that’ll come.
AutoHDR on Red Dead Redemption 2 is way better than the built in HDR (on PC at least). 5 years old and it's still an amazing looking game.
Grand Theft Auto VI reveal https://blog.qassim.uk/2023/12/05/gta-vi-trailer-1/
@christianselig yep, I had the etched glass LCD model, deliberately went with the glossy 512 OLED because of that. It’s a shame you have to get the matte display to get the ‘top end’ model.
Beheading a MacBook Pro for Apple's sins https://blog.qassim.uk/2023/11/27/beheading-a-macbook-pro-for-apples-sins/
Been playing 20 Minutes Till Dawn on the Steam Deck. Really good gsme, perfect for portable play. Only thing I’d criticise is the colours for the menu selections. Always takes me 5 seconds to figure what is actually selected currently.s
Clearing out my desk drawers and finding a million now useless (to me) lightning cables and accessories.
Steam Deck OLED impressions https://blog.qassim.uk/2023/11/24/steam-deck-oled-impressions/
In the absence of any other clever uses of the iPhone 15 Pro’s action button (I want to do a Tailscale VPN toggle at some point), I’ve set it to ChatGPT’s ‘Start voice conversation’ shortcut action which works quite well.
Reading that the Samsung OLED G9 has less text fringing than the first gen QD-OLEDs. Do I chance it or wait for further refinement in hardware or software? 🤔 https://pcmonitors.info/articles/qd-oled-and-woled-fringing-issues/
NVIDIA's AI boom https://blog.qassim.uk/2023/11/21/nvidias-ai-boom/
I need to learn how to sleep standing up because I’m currently in a cycle where sleeping or laying down destroys my neck, I wake up barely able to function for hours into the day, then in the evening I feel somewhat okay (still not great), then repeat the cycle.
Las Vegas GP 2023 https://blog.qassim.uk/2023/11/20/las-vegas-gp-2023/
Half-Life 25th anniversary https://blog.qassim.uk/2023/11/18/half-life-25th-anniversary/
This is cool, Apple have some cool F1 features for the vegas track in Maps #f1 https://mastodon.design/@rafa/111425230308324468
Apple, please, just swallow your pride and copy window snapping from Windows for macOS. The third party apps like Rectangle and Magnet work well, but it being native would be a bigger UX improvement to regular users than stage manager.
Microsoft will do everything to Teams except make the core chat UX acceptable.
Everyone sticks to private chats or group chats instead of 'Teams' / channel chats because the UX is so bad for standard channels.
Also finished Spider-Man 2 the other day, really good game. I think I might buy it again once it comes out on PC to grind out the side content.
Been playing a bit of Diablo IV recently and it definitely feels like a much more enjoyable game, actually feels like you're making an impact now.
One of the stupidest things Apple does on the Mac is with Finder, why is merging folders an option *HIDDEN* behind holding the Option key when you drag a folder into the destination? Absurd. Just present it when it's appropriate and let the user pick.
Omegle and the wild west of the web https://blog.qassim.uk/2023/11/09/omegle-and-the-wild-west/
Steam Deck 2023 refresh https://blog.qassim.uk/2023/11/09/steam-deck-2023-refresh/
PC path tracing in Alan Wake 2 https://blog.qassim.uk/2023/11/07/pc-path-tracing-alan-wake-2/
Optimistically buying a domain for a project idea you have is one thing, this time I went even further and set up an AWS org with dev/prod accounts - bootstrapped them with a standard networking setup via terraform and everything. THAT's optimism.
@spencerdailey the base 12” MacBook from 2015 (8.5 years ago!) had 8GB of RAM. Yes, the Apple Silicon machines are lightyears ahead of them in terms of performance, but it does feel strange to see that bar hasn't been raised yet..
If I were buying an MBP today, I'd probably end up being upsold to the M3 Max because of that. The GPU isn't particularly relevant to me on an MBP, so it was good I could get pretty much the same CPU performance on the M2 Pro as the M2 Max.
With the reviews out, suspicions about the M3 Pro are somewhat correct. M3 Pro is faster than the M2 Pro, but by a relatively small amount. The M3 Max, however looks excellent. Shame to get more CPU perf you need to pay for the chip with the high end GPU. https://md.qassim.uk/@qassim/111326960323312641
I don't really need a new GPU, my 3080 is mostly good enough for me at the moment, but DLSS 3 (making path tracing feasible in games like Cyberpunk & Alan Wake 2) really makes me want a 4090. But no, I'll wait for the 5000 series - which based on rumours isn't until 2025 😭
Are headrests actually good? https://blog.qassim.uk/2023/11/03/are-headrests-actually-good/
@zachleat ignore type of dish, place them anywhere in the dishwasher
@marcoarment Yep, given the Max now has appreciably more CPU grunt, it’d be hard for me not to pick that too. I have a PC for my heavy GPU stuff, but I want the best CPU I can get in a Mac - which is now the Max.
@paul @illogical_me Yep, they killed a P core.
@paul The P + E core configs are interesting.
12 P + 4 E on the top end M3 Max
10 P + 4 E on the base M3 Max
6 + 6 on the top M3 Pro
5 + 6 on the base M3 Pro
Both fewer P cores than the high end M2 Pro (8 + 4). Maybe that's why they didn't compare to the M2 Pro on the slide? 🤔
Apple selling base M3 MacBook Pros with 8GB of RAM is criminal.
https://md.qassim.uk/@qassim/111326960323312641
M3 MacBook Pros https://blog.qassim.uk/2023/10/31/m3-pro-max-macbook-pro/
@lukechannings thanks! I’m just trying to get into the habit of writing *anything*, not overthinking it - trying to smash out a post in 10 mins or so and sending it. Working better than it has done in the past at least.
@atpfm I get the same issue as @siracusa on my Roam. I also have other Sonos stuff (Arc + 2x One) that has been practically bulletproof for me.
The Roam being its own little thing seems to have introduced issues like the audio stutter & sometimes for me the audio just doesn’t play, although it appears to look like it’s playing (the track progresses on my phone).
This is all through airplay though, reliable through the Sonos app, but not keen on using that when I don’t need to.
@lukechannings and then starting, getting about 2% of the way in (after buying a domain for it - obviously), then giving up.
NowTV PLEASE add the ability to pin/favourite channels so I don't have to hunt and click a thousand buttons just to get to F1 every time.
It's close to 2 months since Starfield's release and it still doesn't have DLSS. Something people modding in within *hours* of release. The DLSS mod I was using broke and I can't be bothered figuring it out with so many other games to play currently. So I'm waiting for update.
Qualcomm's answer to Apple Silicon https://blog.qassim.uk/2023/10/24/qualcomms-answer/
It's very annoying that Logitech don't do a USB-C Logi Bolt dongle.
F1 - US GP 2023 https://blog.qassim.uk/2023/10/23/f1-us-gp-2023/
UK open banking APIs for personal use https://blog.qassim.uk/2023/10/22/uk-open-banking-apis-for-personal-use/
I haven’t watched Counter-Strike tournaments in a while - but it feels like the commentary meta is now to scream at every play through the entire game.
@Edent nice, I’ve been looking for this for a while - just had a play around with the API & linking my accounts - bit of a back-and-forth as you say but overall it works well!
Counter-Strike 2, three weeks in https://blog.qassim.uk/2023/10/20/counter-strike-2-three-weeks-in/
@christianselig I've been on since the last beta, no issues whatsoever. But of course, as with all macOS releases, YMMV.
Dropping the M chip seems unnecessary for cost given they can put them in iPad Airs.
https://mastodon.social/@macrumors/111244345790478132
I really like Ivory but the pace of development compared to competitors is fairly slow. There's still a bunch of features that others have, primarily the ability to load content from other servers easily, that are still missing that hinder the experience quite a bit unfortunately.
GPT APIs, .NET core and a rude Mancunian Slack bot https://blog.qassim.uk/2023/10/16/gpt-apis-net-core-rude-slack-bot/
Threads has somewhat okay F1 content, but none of it is particularly organic - mostly F1 teams and journalists posting stuff.
The only thing that keeps me on Twitter is the lack of F1 community on mastodon. I’d sacrifice everything else twitter ‘offers’.
Ever increasing security noise in macOS https://blog.qassim.uk/2023/10/12/macoss-ever-increasing-security-noise/
When Apple announced they were acquired Dark Sky years ago, thought it was a shame, but at least Apple’s own weather data would be better.
The ‘no data’ bug has plagued the weather widgets intermittently ever since. It’s so annoying.
Loss leading AI services https://blog.qassim.uk/2023/10/10/loss-leading-ai-services/
FTX fake insurance fund figures https://blog.qassim.uk/2023/10/10/ftx-fake-insurance-numbers/
@RecDiffs same with 'grafting', it just means 'working hard' here too, but it can be used in a variety of contexts including the one suggested - to go and pursue a person for a relationship. But can be applied to anything where you might work hard for _something_.
It's interesting to hear they feel different to you, even when you explained how you would use/understand them vs how the people in the show used them, they both sound the same to me - just one is a more context specific version.
@RecDiffs re: your interpretation of 'crack on' and ‘grafting' - I think this is an interesting difference between how English people speak and Americans - we tend to use/assume context a bit more I think?
e.g. 'crack on' meaning specifically “I'm going to go and pursue this relationship" being different to "I'm going to carry on in this direction" are basically the same to us. That's how it would have been used by English people too.
Realised I was paying £9/m for 2TB iCloud storage and £23 for Apple One family separately. £32/m.
Which is the same as Apple One Premier which includes 2TB iCloud storage AND, Apple News+, Fitness+ in addition to the standard Music, Arcade, TV 🤦♂️
Not against twitter rules btw
You wait years for some decent video games and 400 of them show up at once https://q-url.co/too-many-video-games-2023
But I always pull back on writing blog posts more often because I struggle with brevity. I want to get comfortable with writing tiny posts on my blog that might just be a reaction to something in the news, or something I learned that day.
My blog / social media accounts are pretty much entirely for my own self-journaling purposes. I enjoy going back and reading what I wrote/posted years prior, as I find it interesting to remember what I was thinking/doing at the time.
I am absolutely TERRIBLE at Counter-Strike 2. The two-three years off CSGO has destroyed any competency I had at this game. I was comfortably above average… now I’d be lucky to be ‘average’ 😭
@siracusa I've not seen it once, funnily enough - I don't know if that's because I was on the betas on my devices 🤷
@netzdings @caseyliss they’ve got a nice setting for Americans to fix their temperature units too 😏
2023 is a relentless years for game releases I'm actually interested in playing. I'm still so far behind in playing what I want to play, and more keep coming.
@elmgren @snazzyq I think you get a more than just a button and a usb-c port in the box, but I may be mistaken.
I shouldn’t be surprised, but I just plugged my 15 Pro Max into my thunderbolt dock and:
- it powered and mirrored to both monitors
- it used the wired Ethernet instead of WiFi (got gigabit)
- output sound through the speakers connected to it
- keyboard and mouse didn’t work??
Got the 15 Pro Max this morning, physically a nice improvement, it’s definitely the incremental update people expect. Would like the Action button repositioned on future devices.
Natural titanium is cool, 🤞it remains for future phones.
@caseyliss the worst thing I’ve had the last 2 years (14 & 15 Pro Max) has been my phone overheating in the ‘downloading your apps’ phase after the main restore has finished.
So all the apps just stop installing almost immediately and everything hangs. Even when the device feels relatively cool it takes a while to get going again. Only way I’ve found to force it to get going again was multiple reboots. Annoying.
@stroughtonsmith yeah, I downloaded as many as I had patience for and set it on shuffle. I really enjoy them.
Managed to get a BlueSky invite, I'm @qassim.uk on there. I like the custom domain name verification system. Obviously lots of fragmented networks out there now. Threads, Mastodon, Twitter, BlueSky, Nostr, etc.
I use twitter the most, but I actually read the most via Mastodon. Far higher quality conversation and posts than anywhere else on my feed. Still hoping for the threads.net mastodon integration though…
@lukechannings yeah, it’s much of a muchness for me. One day I’ll hold my nerve and end the upgrade programme, but I dunno when.
@lukechannings I’m on the iPhone ~sucker~ upgrade programme, which needs to be done in person.
Reserved the new iPhone 15 Pro Max, went for natural titanium, managed to get the first slot of the day at 08:00 -> 08:15. Probably a mistake to get such an early slot, but whatever.
Also the Airpods auto switching back and forth between macOS sonoma & iOS 17 is basically instant for me at the moment. Time will tell if it remains reliable and fast, but really good first impressions
The video screen savers -> desktop backgrounds in macOS sonoma are cool.
Apple have added hardware accelerated ray tracing to their GPU in the A17 Pro. Pretty cool, means it should appear on the Macs soon too.
This Apple 'skit' where they get grilled by a personification of mother nature on the stuff they do on sustainability did everything except address how unrepairable their devices are.
@atpfm for the iPhone 15 being usb 2.0, could that be to do with the fact it keeps the old SoC? It may not have the bandwidth or general I/O capability to upgrade just yet.
I love Apple's commitment to the ‘display all PCs as terrible ancient machines’ bit on their own devices.
But on the subject of Starfield, the local planet map is horrendous. It's absolutely pointless, just a few icons on a completely detail-free background. It's not useful for nav at all.
I've never really been a big fan of Bethesda's games primarily because of the combat. But Starfield's combat actually feels pretty good, I'm enjoying it.
The watch OS 10 & iOS 17 live cycling metrics displayed on your phone are quite good, definitely a nice improvement to the cycling activity on the watch.
Dunno if I’m imagining things but AirPlay seems a lot more responsive on iOS 17. Connects quicker, commands respond much faster.
AirPods connection switching seems better too, but a bit early to say conclusively on that.
Finally gonna brave iOS 17 (beta 8) on my phone. I feel like once the Apple event is announced, they're probably close enough.
@lukechannings I’ve since told it it’s from Manchester, so it should speak appropriately 😏
I integrated gpt into my slack bot and feed it manchester metrolink API responses to get it to interpret them and give me an answer. It has an instruction to be a nob in all of its responses though, so it gives some interesting replies.
I know it's not the trendiest language or framework out there, but I find it an all around decent proposition. But then I've never been a language zealot, they're tools for job and I've usually been able to enjoy programming in many languages.
I know it's not the trendiest language or framework out there, but I find it an all around decent proposition. But then I've never been a language zealot, they're tools for job and I've usually been able to enjoy programming in many languages.
so last time I really did anything with .NET, core was only *just* becoming a thing in pre-release beta form. I had a play with it at the time, but it was early.
These days, it's quite nice - the tooling is pretty much spot on, Rider is a great cross platform IDE for it, I have been writing my .NET slack bot on my Windows desktop and Mac laptop, seamlessly swapping between the two. Running it on my linux home server. Can't fault it much, it’s a fairly nice experience.
I first learned how to program properly via writing Java IRC bots, and in 2015/2016 I started doing the same with slack bots - using them to pick up new languages or brush up on ones I haven’t used in a while. They're enjoyable to make, text-based interaction helps avoid getting stuck into complex UI/UX details.
My most recent is a .NET core 7 based slack bot. It has been about 7-8 years since I last wrote any C# or used any .NET stuff, so I'm ultra rusty and want to brush up for work.
@malwaretech yeah I don’t own a car because I don’t need one day to day. I’m an enterprise car club member that allows me to just book a car via an app and pick it up from its regular spot around the city, unlock & go via my phone.
Much cheaper than owning a car and can book a variety of vehicles (from vans to small cars).
Apple, why would I want my Airpods to connect to my laptop WHEN IT'S CLOSED and several metres away AND INSTEAD OF MY PHONE THAT IS IN MY HANDS AND UNLOCKED.
I haven't been paying attention at all to Baldur's Gate 3 - but seeing it get such great reviews and massive player numbers on Steam is tempting me.
I have historically enjoyed these games but it's been a while & I have too many games to play currently..
Windows 11 has tabbed file explorer, but you can't drag the tab off the window to have that tab be it's own window. It's basic tabbing UX so it's very annoying you can't do that.
Nice, the BBC have setup their own mastodon instance at https://social.bbc (although it seems to be down currently lol).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2023-07-mastodon-distributed-decentralised-fediverse-activitypub
This is mostly just for my Plex library, so I don't back it up - it's almost entirely made up of content I ripped off my own blu-ray/dvd collection. So I want redundancy, but I'm not paying to back it up as I can recreate it (with.. a lot of time).
My NAS is running low on storage, but since I've bought it - many, many years ago - I can easily get a single HDD for not that much money that has more _raw_ capacity (before RAID) than my NAS.
I just need to.. put it in my old Haswell server and maybe buy two for RAID 1 or something. 2x 12TB? 2x18TB?
Max and GP's radios were quite fun #f1
Surprised by Ferrari's pace here, expected Lewis and Mercedes to give Leclerc more trouble than they did. #f1
Checo starting 2nd, Max starting 6th.
Max finished 1st, *22 seconds* ahead of Checo in 2nd. He opened up that gap in just 27 laps.
In the same car. Max is just leagues ahead, it’s crazy. #f1
@stroughtonsmith I’m broadly in agreement - but I’ve been wrong about things like this before - assuming they’d bother me a lot more than they actually do. So I’d be willing to give a foldable iPhone a shot even if it had a crease (at this point I’m not that interested in switching back to Android)
I do have an IFTT applet that cross posts from my mastodon instance to my twitter account, but it's not perfect and doing stuff like threads (like.. post threads) doesn't work well.
If/once threads federates and I can follow threads accounts - there are enough active F1 threads accounts that this could change. So 🤞
My twitter habit has been harder to break. I enjoy reading my mastodon feed a lot more generally, as it's a straight feed and all the techy people I follow post good stuff.
But my main usage of twitter, F1, just has no presence on mastodon whatsoever.
I thought I'd cave, but I haven't - much of what made browsing reddit an enjoyable experience was the 3rd party apps like Apollo.
My reddit usage is almost disappeared since the 3rd party apps shut down and I surprisingly don't miss it.
I'm not boycotting reddit, I'll occasionally click and browse on my desktop, but 90% of my usage has gone.
@lukechannings they also do the annoying thing of having no granular storage options. I hit my 200GB limit, now I’m having to pay for 2TB. Might end up just cancelling my 2TB Dropbox and seeing how iCloud Drive works for my use case..
Remember when the UK, in peak Brexit hysteria, decided it would back out of Galileo and launch our own GPS satellite system?
Then it inevitably got scrapped because it was a stupid idea, but not before the UK gov wasted money on acquiring a share in OneWeb.
A few photos from a recent trip to Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovnia and Montenegro.
One thing I’ve noticed the past few months about the 2nd gen AirPods Pro, is that yeah the noise cancellation is noticeably better - but it comes at the cost of worst wind noise. I find I have to swap to transparency mode more often when outside.
… so I bought an esim online, unlimited data for 7 days. It emailed a setup QR code to me, iOS went through a wizard to set it up and what to use each sim for - with a ‘personal’ and travel’ profile.
It also gives me 5G, which roaming on the same network via Three didn’t. Impressed how well it works.
The esim support in the iPhone is surprisingly good. Having all sorts of trouble getting more data on Three whilst here in Croatia (usually pay £5 per day for unlimited after 12GB - but it’s not working).
I think this is good. I’m looking forward to this on #threads.
Now that Apollo has left my Home Screen, and I doubt I’ll be using Reddit much at all on mobile at least (which was 80% of my usage of Reddit), I suspect I’ll just lean more heavily on my RSS feeds. Which is probably a good thing, given the lack of comments.
RIP Apollo 🫡 @christianselig
It also means I can take my time and relax about playing Diablo IV, F1 23 and Street Fighter 6 too. Haven't given much time to SF6 yet, but I'm really enjoying Diablo & F1 - it has been a very long time since this many games have released in such a short period of time that I've enjoyed and wanted to play.
I didn't really expect them to go as far as they did. Tears of the Kingdom feels like it makes Breath of the wild a bit redundant now, but Botw obvs deserves massive credit.
I'm excited to relax and take my time with all the side content left in Tears of the Kingdom.
Back when Breath of the Wild came out, and became one of my favourite ever games, all I could think about is the potential for the sequel. How much they could do with the format and world now that they already had the foundations built.
After 80-90 hours, and a little break for the past couple of weeks, I finally finished the story of Tears of the Kingdom.
It was really good, I still have a huge amount left to do in the game, and still want to go back to it. For me, this game delivered way beyond my expectations in _most_ (not all) ways.
Playing F1 23 and I keep instinctively lifting before the final corner on the new Barcelona track layout. Too used to that annoying chicane. Good change though.
The video game controller being the way that Titan sub was controlled isn’t particularly worrying. Militaries have used them for drones, sub periscope replacements, etc. They’re well suited to the job 🤷
… until I disconnect and reconnect it. But it was doing it so frequently that it becomes unplayable. Either that or force feedback disables. Not sure if it’s a bug in the game or an issue with my wheel.
F1 23 feels much nicer than 22. I bounced off that game after a good amount of hours because the cars just felt so frustrating to drive. 23 feels much nicer with all the assists off.
But I’ve been getting a weird issue with my wheel, it basically begins to pull right or left.
@lukechannings Yeah for the most part I use digitalocean for personal stuff, except for Route53, Cloudfront and a couple of basic Lambdas.
@lukechannings I'm still on fasthosts.co.uk - I just manage them via Route53 on AWS for a few $ a month.
But cloudflare is an option if I ever feel like I should move 'em...
There was a time when I thought about transferring my domains over to Google domains, now with the news that they've sold it to Squarespace - I'm glad I didn't.
Nothing against Squarespace, just a classic Google move.
Cleaning my minuscule flat takes an entire day because I do 5 mins of work, then reward myself with a 30 minute break - during which I’ll post incredibly boring posts like this.
I really don’t understand the logic of web pages having sticky videos start playing at the top of your page whilst you’re trying to read an article. It’s obnoxious.
Beyond the API changes/charges, it’s just horrendous behaviour from the people at Reddit to treat individuals like this (see the details in the post). https://mastodon.social/@christianselig/110509739563895220
Diablo IV being a real pain at the moment, it's a good game - but you queue for 2-4 minutes to get in, but then when you reach the end of the queue you'll get an error, forcing the client to quit and you to join the queue again.
The WatchOS updates look good, I’m probably in for a new one this year depending on what hardware is released. #wwdc23.
Kojima in the #wwdc23 keynote - he’s bringing Death Stranding to the Mac.
If it gets added to Steam - then I’ll give it a try to see how it performs.
That standby feature in iOS 17 might be quite useful for me, my phone already sits on a magsafe charger on my desk - if I can put my calendar agenda on it, that’d be cool. #wwdc23
@stroughtonsmith Did they say you can’t use GPUs in the PCIe slots? I might have missed that..
Here’s Creg. #wwdc
It’s a shame it’s just one M2 Ultra and not anything more, but maybe in the future.
Haha, new Mac Pro - I’m glad they’re doing proper PCI-E expansion. Will they support third party GPUs?
The app store is 15 years old this year? I'm not that old am I? #wwdc
@stroughtonsmith I know the tech might not be quite there yet for Apple (creases, reliability, etc), but I’d really love a foldable iPhone - (to fold out into a small iPad like form factor).
I’m envious of everyone who feels productive on their phone screens, but even on the Pro Max, I still just feel so constrained by the size of the screen.
I like the experimentation going on in the Android world in this form factor, I’m glad they’re doing it. I think there’s potential in it.
“Google & Amazon don’t tell us how to be more efficient. It’s up to us as users of these services to optimize our usage to meet our budget.”
Is just flat out wrong. I speak from experience of Amazon dedicating time from multiple engineers to review and help improve our usage of their services. Reddit can do the same for their biggest consumers easily.
I know there are federated Reddit alternatives out there already, but it does feel like the Reddit model fits being federated better than a twitter-like.
Absolutely absurd. Reddit want to kill API access, particularly 3rd party clients, like twitter, despite what they say to the contrary. You don’t do this without the intention of shutting off all popular apps. https://mastodon.social/@christianselig/110464420566906146
I really like both @ivory and @MonaApp - it’s cool to see such well crafted applications that are not only great iPhone apps, but are excellent Mac apps too.
I assume this wasn’t the intended solution #TearsOfTheKingdom #Zelda
Tears of the Kingdom 😍😍
@jimmylittle @snazzyq What? The live holes have shutters in them, you can’t stick anything in them without opening the shutters first with the (longer) earth pin. A toddler isn’t figuring that out.
I’ve been using Mona on iOS and Mac for a few weeks now and been very happy with it. Instantly bought the £15 ‘Mona Pro Max’ iAP (one off purchase) too.
I like that Mona doesn’t just feel like a twitter app converted to mastodon, it’s well designed and high quality software with a great Mac app too. https://mastodon.macstories.net/@viticci/110293276617830199
I can't find many great mastodon apps for Windows. macOS really punches above its weight (even if it's very much in decline) for native apps.
@stroughtonsmith Hopefully, unlike their attitude to the Mac App Store, Apple will try and make the App Store competitive with the alternatives. That’d be a nice outcome.
There are some really good mastodon apps, Mona, IceCubes, Ivory - all offering slightly different things but also some interesting ideas and all are quality apps.
Currently a big fan of Mona as the Mac app is well optimised for the Mac, whereas Ivory for Mac isn’t available yet and IceCubes is the phone app blown up (still great to have it though!).
@gh0sti @christianselig People have been saying that for years, it still isn’t true. It’s a pretty big difference using a iPhone * Max and an iPad Mini.
@christianselig Or enforce the sponsored posts through the API, something I wish Twitter did to be able to justify 3rd party clients existing. I would obviously prefer status quo though.
@christianselig Ugh. Unlike twitter where, whilst I preferred third party clients before they fell behind due to API restrictions, I was okay with the official app, the same isn’t true for me and Reddit.
I use Reddit a lot due to the nice experience of Apollo (and other third party clients before it). Worst comes to it, I’d be happy to pay for a Reddit membership of some kind to keep the ability to use full functionality in 3rd party clients.
The Apple TV Tetris film was actually really enjoyable. Obviously super sensationalised (a bit daft towards the end), but that’s fine. Would recommend.
Dredge is a great game, I’m travelling currently and it’s a perfect game for Steam Deck 👌
Diablo IV beta was pretty good, I’m fairly optimistic about the game. I just hope there’s a party matchmaking system in the full game…
Diablo IV beta works quite well on Steam Deck ❤️
One of the most annoying things about Windows remains the fact that virutal desktops span across your monitors. Meaning you can't change your virtual desktop on a per monitor basis, like you can on macOS.
It basically renders the whole virtual desktop feature useless to me.
Just watched Everything Everywhere All At Once in the cinema. Was absolutely insane, but also very good.
I didn't watch much of Drive to Survive last season and I don't even think I'll end up watching any of it this season. It surprisingly just annoys me way too much with its sensationalism and outright fabricated moments.
The 2021 season is what broke it for me.
2021 was as exciting and full of drama as you could hope for in F1, it didn't need sensationalising but they did it anyway.
It's a shame because it has so many positive things, it's just wrapped up in this unnecessary crap.
The Alfa Romeo F1 car this year looks really good. Last year’s livery was nice, but I’m a big fan of this one and the overall shape.
Where I was with TVs a few years ago seems like where I'm at now with PC monitors.
I waited years on my old plasma for OLEDs to reach a certain point in price & performance before upgrading.
I'm clinging onto my old PC monitors in the hope a good OLED ultrawide comes along.
The QD-OLEDs are frustratingly close if it weren't for the subpixel / text fringing issue. Maybe I'll just have to try one to see if it bothers me..
I’m going to miss the first race of the F1 season because I'll be out of the country on a holiday 😧
Depending on what I'm doing I might be able to catch the start via NowTV on a VPN, but I'm not planning on watching the full race. #f1
For the spec I bought, I went back and forth between just bumping up to the M2 Max model as that had the RAM & SSD pre-configured how I wanted.
But I realised I’d be paying extra for worse battery life and thermals - for extra GPU power that I’ll never use (despite playing a few casual games here and there on my laptop). If I have a GPU heavy workload, I’ll use my desktop PC for that.
Trading off some battery life for that extra M2 Max performance would be worth it if you use it though.
It’s in another universe to any other Mac I’ve ever used.
I liked some (controversial) aspects of the previous design of MBPs, like the 4x thunderbolt ports (4 high speed ports that can do practically anything is great).
But overall, they were a complete disaster in so many ways and it’s just nice to see these laptops designed with a lot more practically with performance and functionality as a priority.
Battery life has been incredible and thermals have been excellent too. The fans so rarely even start, much of the heavy CPU work I do is bursty rather than sustained, so it’s effectively silent most of the time (a huge shift from prev MBPs).
I managed to get the fans to spin whilst playing a game (an MMO) for a whle, but even then - they were still so quiet I had to hold my ear next to the vents for them to be audible.
Design wise it’s great, keyboard, trackpad, ports, screen - all excellent.
I’ve been very happy with the size, it’s exactly what I hoped it would be - I was a bit nervous about getting the smaller device for the first time - but it’s great.
If it was my only machine and I primarily just used it at desk, I’d probably get the 16” and put up with the extra size and weight for the bigger screen, battery and speakers (and slightly better thermals in certain circumstances).
Performance wise, it has been mega. It runs circles around my top-spec work issued 16” i9 MBP.
It has been a few weeks since I got my first Apple silicon Mac, and it has actually been better than I expected - and I had high expectations.
I bought the 14” M2 Pro (12 core CPU/19 core GPU), 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD.
For the first time I went with the smaller device because portability is more important for me now and given you don’t need to sacrifice performance in any meaningful way like you used to to get the smaller laptop, that’s perfect.
I really want to make mastodon my ‘micro blog’ thing, and it would have been so much easier if Twitter didn’t look like they’re going to nuke the API - so I could automatically cross post to there.
But yeah, I’ll see.
Alfa Romeo's is my favourite of the new F1 2023 liveries so far. #f1 #f123
@lukechannings yeah I initially enabled a few relays so my instance would pull in more posts from other instances from people I didn’t follow, but then I realised that also included caching the media that those posts have…
Realised that was a bad idea when I saw some porn coming in.. So I just disabled the relays and it works well with just the people I follow.
@lukechannings it’s a bit of a faff, and I want to get rid of the ‘md.’ subdomain in mine, but I’d have to spin up an entirely new instance and do the account migration for that to work properly.
I used the digitalocean 1-click app, but then configured it to cache media on s3 fronted by cloudfront.
Bit of a faff, and I’m sure at some point I’ll give up and go to a shared instance, but just wanted to give it a go.
Do I toot here to 0 followers as sort of a diary to myself for the future?
I think I will.
Maybe make user's data (posts, following, followers, etc) available via a predictable client side feed URL that other clients can hook into to fill in that gap?
There are implications to that but the disconnect and the hassle involved in finding people is the worst thing about this model, and... it's a social network. That's the point.
The worst thing about Mastodon is the limited things your individual server can know about users on other servers. It grinds the UX to a halt.
I want to find people to follow by looking at the following list of other users I know. But obviously I'm not on their server (usually mastadon.social) and can't be because it's full anyway.
I'd love for a way that even if it can't be solved server side, that there's a way to solve it client side.
@ivory this alone has massively improved my experience of mastodon ❤️ the tapbots polish and UX.
My mastodon instance is behaving better than it was last night when I first brought it online. The media caching wasn’t working so well from federated users.
Hosting my own mastodon instance because why wouldn't you?
Hello, World!