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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 20th, 2023

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  • 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.





  • This was really thrown into sharp focus for me a couple of years back, when I read an article about how people with ocular implants are being left to go blind again because the company who made their implant has been bought by another company who doesn’t want to continue support.

    I just can’t think about how callous that is, and if a company doesn’t give a shit about that, why would they give a shit about a car?


  • Because a huge part of their business model over the past twenty years has been the upsell.

    I bought my first MacBook in 2007. It had 2gb of RAM as standard. I asked about upgrading it, the guy told me to pick some up online as it would be waaaay cheaper, and he was right. Did the same for the MacBook Pro that replaced it a few years later, but in the meantime they moved to the soldered model so had to swallow the cost of the 16gb ‘upgrade’ in my M2 Air.

    To be fair, the cost over time of my Macs has been incredible. My 2011 MBP is still trucking along, these days running Linux Mint. With the cost to upgrade the RAM and replace the HDD with an SSD, all in it cost me around £1200. Less than £100 a year for a laptop that still works perfectly fine.








  • I know it’s really low hanging fruit, but a couple of weeks back, on a whim, I decided to play Candy Crush for the first time in probably ten years. For the first time since I was diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago, in fact.

    And boy oh boy, is that shit eye-opening when you’re playing with a greater understanding of what makes an ADHD brain tick.

    The speed at which you can tick through the screens to get to playing, the satisfying way the haptics tap when you make a match, the constancy of advertising power ups. The game is a masterpiece in addictive design, working just on the right side of being compulsive to play.

    Fortunately for me, being aware of this stuff means I’m not tempted to spend any money on it. As soon as I’m out of lives I shut it down. But I’m still susceptible to its charms all the same, and it’s kinda scary how easy it is.







  • Speaking personally, I don’t think they’re dumbed down. They’re pretty straightforward to use, sure, but they do what I need them to.

    In terms of the hardware; I have a 2011 MacBook Pro at home that’s still just about as solid as the day I bought it. The battery’s dead, but that’s to be expected for its age. I’m typing this on a 2014 Mac mini that’s running the latest macOS perfectly through OCLP. My main computer is a 15" M2 MacBook Air that is a genuinely impressive machine. If anything, Apple have kinda shot themselves in the foot, making devices that last far longer than their software support allows.