Ah yeah i didn’t really think about this.
Also the Neo trackpad is only worse than the force touch in the way that a miata is worse than a Z3.
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since the Neo is bringing back 8GB discourse
now that M1 Airs are 5-6 years old, have those with a base amount of memory thrashed their SSDs to death en masse yet from swapping
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mine is still good
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my wife ran a 2013 8gb haswell air (one of my favorite computers they ever made) for close to 10 years and I did wind up having to replace the SSD on that. iirc they were still socketed back then but they were also like a first gen NVMe that no one else really sold so I could only get a replacement from OWC who pretty much only make apple aftermarket stuff
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I also replaced sooo many batteries from 2013 Haswell Airs because I swear like every woman I knew owned one and they all went bad at some point but they were also super easy to work with — it was like $50 and 8 screws and they were done, took 20 minutes for all people bellyache about Apple computers being non repairable
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Damn. Yeah you could upgrade the memory, HD, and battery in about 15 minutes on the core 2 duo macbooks.
It’s weird how easy it is to service the Apple products that are user serviceable.
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extreme standardization counts for a lot (as we’re seeing with the Neo price for the quality of components). Apple absolutely knows they can fine tune their goodwill on that basis
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is there a way to keep macos from opening every single application on your computer at once whenever you restart it?
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don’t tick the “restore open windows on restart” when you power down
right but what if your computer crashes or you think the feature is ill-conceived and never want it to work under any circumstances
i think there’s maybe something you can do by fucking with the permissions of a particular system directory but this only comes up a few times a year and i’m always doing something when my computer crashes so i never get around to it
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ah, that’s easy: Apple thinks you’re wrong & you can’t disable it. you can boot to safe mode and then restart “as a workaround”
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i’ll close my eyes and think of california as i wait 5 minutes and close the improperly initialized copies of bespoke and firefox
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Look at that little logic board!
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really pleased i worked out how to turn the leds off on this 4070, they were ruining my cavern ambience
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The Neo is really tempting (I’ve been out of the MacBook loop since the 2013 Air), but for what I use a laptop for (poking around online, maybe playing something real lightweight) I’m probably better off getting a 13" Thinkpad refurb and flashin’ Linux to it for about half the price.
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I wanted to watch an illegal stream of the WBC on my smart TV that I have owned for a couple years after being totally behind on smart TVs because I’m a projector guy. at a few times in the last couple years I had done this by just using Airplay from the stream on my laptop, but that busies my laptop and its audio output in particular, so I wanted to see if I could do this with just the TV on its own.
I accomplished this in about 15 minutes. this was an absolutely insane experience that exposed me to so many wild Android user patterns that resemble nothing so much as like, Windows XP apps maintained by people who had no idea how computers worked 25 years ago, and it’s pretty fascinating that this kind of “just let me steal stuff I don’t know what I’m doing” UX still exists in the Android space. here’s what I did:
- open browser app that comes with TV and try to navigate to streaming site I like. fortunately, streaming site was not unusably full of ads because I have a pihole running on my home network (interaction I took for granted #1), but having to navigate to a URL with a TV remote sucked big time, and then when I got there — it couldn’t run a regular H264 embed iframe in the browser!
- do some googling — oh, OK, the built-in browser apps are known not to do this because if you’re accessing a kind of content that doesn’t have an official streaming app you can use instead, it’s mostly useful for piracy. fair point. but I can install another browser?
- sure, yes, people recommend Brave for this purpose. I’ve never used Brave on desktop, but I’m aware of it, and I guess it’s one of the least scammy Android browsers that publishes a full APK for generic Android that you can just sideload directly on the TV without dependencies. fine.
- I go to the Github CI releases page for Brave and download the APK on my laptop and spend a little while trying to figure out how to get a web endpoint on the TV I can fire it off to. I find insane stuff like GitHub - Yablio/sendfilestotv: SFTTV is a simple application to connect your Smart Tv android, your android mobile device and your personal computer · GitHub that looks, again, like it has no idea how computers work, like it would be scammy if it wasn’t so hapless. none of this seems to work without also having an Android phone (?) to send the files from. insane stuff. I decide to just download the APK on the TV instead. cue browsing Github with the TV remote. awful.
- I download the APK. I am led to understand I need to separately install a file browser app to be able to install it from. this turns out to be a wild goose chase — after installing a file browser, I realize the builtin web browser is in fact capable of browsing around its own downloads and opening them. it pops up some insane system menu that lets me toggle which apps are allowed to install other apps. I definitely should not give the browser this permission. I give the browser this permission.
- architecture not valid — have to try 3 other ARM builds of Brave before I realize that my smart TV apparently doesn’t have 64 bit app support (lol).
- I get Brave installed! I open the browser and laboriously re-input the URL to my illegal stream. but the fucking Android phone version of Brave I installed on my TV doesn’t have any kind of mouse cursor emulation unlike the builtin browser, so I can’t actually navigate any web pages or click any links. I google some more — you need to pair a mouse to your TV via bluetooth to be able to use Android apps like this, because a remote is a special kind of input device that most non-TV Android apps are not built with support for. OK!!!
- I grab the old Steam Controller from my nightstand because I am not currently using it with any other devices and I remember from 2 years ago when I paired it to the TV on a lark that it actually came up as a generic mouse input device rather than a controller. Phew, good thing I remembered that. Now we’re close!
- I cannot reopen the Brave app I installed because sideloaded APKs don’t get added to the regular app menu — I can only get back into it from the app settings menu where it is listed under “all apps” alongside a bunch of weird system dependencies that aren’t whitelisted for the home screen.
- I reopen brave. I go to my streaming site now thankfully stored in the browser history. I am dual fisting the TV remote and the Steam controller to be able to even interact with this web page. I press play. the video works. I can watch illegal baseball on my TV now without needing to Airplay it. jesus christ!
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bonus — when I just tried to press the home button to close the app, the audio from the baseball stream kept playing in the background, so I turned the TV off then on again, and it resumed when it woke back up lol. I understand how Android’s multitasking model works and I get that apps need to be told to have regular “TV” suspend behavior but this is so silly
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Cannot imagine a better way to sell a living room PC
yeah I mean I know lots of other ways to work around this and many of them are in other parts of my house even, I just wanted to figure out what the on-device solution here was, and man it is goofy