Oh fork! This was the Bad Place all along!

The Apple TV remote is rechargeable, though not backlit.

They were trying to be cunty, and in that they were a success.

MS does this with ALL their forums, and it’s cunty.

Connected to this: Bluetooth headphones do not need, and never needed, a flashing LED while they’re in use. I would regulate this harshly.

See, I have ADHD so that’s kinda how I roll too. My mind goes off on tangents as I’m talking.

But crucially, I’m not trying to be the president of the USA.

I’d ride the CHUNGUS 3000.

“Advertising doesn’t work on me!” I mutter smugly, before loading up the Apple keynote to see what my next phone will do.

and those that do post don’t really interact with others

I’ve found quite the opposite on Mastodon. I get WAY more interaction on there than I ever did on Twitter.

I do a radio show on Monday nights. Despite having more followers on Twitter I never really managed to attract many listeners. Dropped it for a few years and started up again a few months back, publicising solely through Mastodon. Engagement with it is three or four times what it was before.

It’s essentially a request show, and there have been a couple of weeks where I’ve not had to pick any songs to fill the time, all of it has been filled by listener requests.

That said, that’s only my experience, it may be different for others.

How very antisemiti…oh, hang on…

All of which is to say, once I finally get around to picking up a half way reasonable Bluetooth speaker for the kitchen I’m putting a fucking hammer through that fucking show. Useless lump of crap.

We have an older Echo Show in the kitchen. I hate it. It’s genuinely one of the single most ill-conceived, user-unfriendly products I’ve ever experienced. It’s straight up dog shit.

My wife originally picked it up because Amazon were flogging them for something like £30 as a loss-leader. Figured it would make a useful bedside clock and smart speaker in one. It’s a shitty clock, and absolutely fucking useless on the bedside because it keeps flashing shit up in the dark. You can’t load any photos on to it, so you’re stuck looking at whatever artwork/“tips”/ads it wants to show you.

I don’t understand how Amazon created a device that looks like a little picture frame, that would be an ideal bedside clock, and apparently at no point did they consider that people might want to use it like that.

We since got a Google thing that’s essentially the same device (free with an energy tariff), and y’know, Google did a good job with that thing. Just sits in the bedroom being a clock and smart speaker, dimming nicely when the lights are out, never advertising shit at us.

I use it as a Bluetooth speaker, which also sucks because it’ll randomly refuse to disconnect from my phone even though I did it through my phone’s settings. It’ll be disconnected, then I’ll be sat in the lounge and I’ll hear it reconnect, like some kind of cunt.

And they’ve programmed it to talk ALL THE FUCKING TIME. “NOW CONNECTED TO YOUR PHONE”. Yes, I fucking know it is, I just told you to do that.

It is legitimately the worst bit of tech I’ve ever used, and I’ve used a Virgin Media cable TV box.

Yes, Apple have become a steaming tower of shitheads, but fuck me, their hardware is (generally) incredibly well built.

I have a 2011 13” MacBook Pro that I bumped up to 16gb RAM, and replaced the DVD drive with a second hard drive. I had it running Sonoma through OCLP until a few weeks ago when I threw Linux Mint on it. Damn thing won’t die. Same for the 2011 and 2014 Macs mini that I also use regularly. I also have a 15” M2 Air, which is legitimately the best computer I’ve ever owned. I don’t imagine I’ll get the same life out of that, not with macOS at least. Asahi Linux seems to be very, very promising though.