I used Waydroid to get Apple Music running on Linux. It worked, but it wasn’t a great experience, not least because it needed to be an older version of the app. Winapps was slightly better, but given that AM is only available as a UWP through the Windows Store, it was a pain in the arse to get running, then buggy when it was.
So these days I just play music through my phone.
Yeah, I ended up dropping 4Gb in that one. For some reason it could only see 3Gb, but it made it immensely more useful. It got me through a radio production degree and only got replaced because I happened to find myself in a position to be able to afford a 13" Pro a few years later. In fact, it’s still in a box somewhere.
I’ll never forget buying my first MacBook in '07 and asking the guy how much it would cost to bump the RAM from 1Gb to 2Gb. He told me in no uncertain terms that I’d be better off looking online for a cheaper price.
Well, in the intervening years they certainly have closed that loophole.
AND YET, Pictures of Matchstick Men is a psych masterpiece.
Coldplay springs to mind. The Coldplay who released Moon Music last year is an entirely different band to the one who released Parachutes in 2000. I know of few other bands who’ve gone through such an enormous transformation. And while the newer stuff may not resonate with me the way the early stuff did, it’s fair to say that it’s worked for them.
As a teenage metalhead of the 90s, little has distressed me more than literally everything Metallica have released since St Anger.
I really, really dug Load and ReLoad. They were different to what had come before, but they still had a hard rock edge to them that I loved. Then Jason quit, and The Corporation Of James And Lars hired the formely mighty Rob Trujillo and set about their plan to record the same indistinguishable wall of noise over and over again until people stopped bothering to even pirate their music.
It was watching The Bear that made me finally appreciate that fine dining isn’t about filling yer belleh, and more about the art of food; how the senses meld together.
I’m too poor to eat at places that offer that kind of experience, but at least I now understand the point of it and appreciate why it can be so expensive.
When cucumbers are so cheap, and re-usable.
We had an apprentice at work a few years ago who had never seen those movies. The first was released the year he was born.
I shrivelled into a corpse as he told me that.
You can already run Graphene entirely without Play Services. You have to install them yourself after you set up. It’s just that if you do install them, they’re sandboxed.
I’m not an expert by any means, I moved directly to Graphene after 15 years of iPhones without really touching Android in between, so I mostly scrabboed about, found a path that worked and stuck to it.
But the way I use it is with Aurora to install apps from the Play Store. You can use it anonymously, or you can log in to your own Google account.
In terms of other Google services, you can install then, whereby Graphene will run them in a sandbox. You have control over how much data they can have. For me it strikes a happy balance between knowing that I have some semblance of control, but also having the convenience of things like Maps. And Google’s camera app is much much better than any of the others I’ve tried. Which is annoying.
I think I use Syncthing more than any other tool. I have a bunch of different computers, and all of them are running a Syncthing server, all hooked in to the same folders, all sharing the same documents. I have it running on my GrapheneOS phone too, so my photos folder gets shared as well.
It can be kinda fiddly to set up the sharing, making sure that you point the shared folders at the right place on your system, but once you’ve got it dialed in it’s invaluable.
For example; it’s where I keep my Calibre library, so no matter which of my computers I’m on, I can open Calibre, drop a book in, and know that it’ll be ready to load onto my Kobo. I do a weekly radio show, so I keep all of the documentation around that in a folder that I work from locally, whether I’m on my MacBook or Linux desktop.
The only downside to it is that (as far as I can tell) you can’t store everything on one device to download to others as you need (like iCloud Drive or Dropbox), so if your Syncthing folder takes up 30Gb on your 2Tb server, it’ll also take up 30Gb on your 128Gb phone. So it does mean having to be a little judicious with what you drop in there.
Basically, I love Syncthing. It means that I have access to everything I need access to, without having to shell out money each month to rent space from a cloud provider. And because I have all of my devices sharing all the folders with all the others, even if one drops offline, the others still get updated damn near immediately.
I used to be all-in on Input Leap, despite some weird, buggy behaviour I kept experiencing. Someone mentioned DeskFlow to me, which is another fork of Synergy, and which has been far more solid for me.
You don’t have to run any Google stuff at all, if you don’t want to.
He also tried to execute him, but yeah, generally cool.
Vin-di-CATION!
I bought a Pixel 9 with the sole intention of putting Graphene on it. I wasn’t massively down with giving Google money, but my provider offered it to me for £30, then £30 a month on contract. Can’t argue with that.
If you have a Pixel, then GrapheneOS is the sensible choice. Not least because it currently only works with Pixels anyway.
It’s mad that I have to search for how to turn my iPad off every bloody time.
I picked up a cheap cast iron frying pan a couple of years ago, having finally gotten sick of paying £50 every couple of years for a decent non-stick pan.
That cast iron pan still looks basically new. I don’t do anything particularly exciting with it, I just use it, then I wash it with whatever scouring sponge I have. Best £12 I’ve spent on something for my kitchen.