That woman is magnificent.

It’s Disney. Fucking Disney.

I posted something along the same lines last week concerning Star Wars, but the long and the short is that I’m sick and fucking tired of having to do homework in order to enjoy shit.

The last Marvel thing I watched was that shit with Katherine Hahn. Something After All. Fucked if I can remember what it was called. She’s great, and I enjoyed her in Wandavision, and Wandavision was alright n’all. But halfway through… Agatha! That’s the one. Halfway through that, it became painfully clear that what we were actually tolerating was a prequel for whatever the sequel to Wandavision is going to be. They were never going to wrap up the story adequately, because then they wouldn’t be able to convince people to watch the next shit. And the next shit. And so on.

And that’s fine where it’s just one TV show with a new season every year. But this is EVERY FUCKING THING THEY MAKE. “If you don’t watch these 12 movies, then you won’t really get what’s happening”. FUCK. THAT.

Life’s too short to have to keep up with an expanding web of interconnected stories. The absolute NECK of those cunts, the arrogance of assuming that we’re happy to give up so much of our lives to their mediocre bullshit.

And to make matters worse, they’re all telling basically the same story. And that’s fine in a medium like comics, where you’re reading shit week after week, but it got boring real fuckin’ quick in movie and TV format. Lots of boomy bangs, robots/immortals smashing each other into crumbling concrete, end credits, teaser for the next bullshit.

Nah. Fuck 'em.

Cider is ok, but doesn’t allow for lossless audio.

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.

Historically, Doctor Who is a history lesson. It was sci-fi for kids that also aimed to teach them something about the world. It was whole raison d’être for the BBC at that time: to educate, entertain, and inform. So from that perspective, the Doctor Who that’s just pure sci-fi is the aberration.

I did respect what Chibnall was trying to do with those episodes, but it’s just a shame that his writing was so shit.

if you were waiting at a T stop you could easily strike up a conversation

Horrifying.

If you tried that in the part of England I’m from you’ll end up getting sectioned for your own good.

I shifted from Neon to Kubuntu on my work machine. Figured that Neon was a good shout because it’s the official KDE distro, only to later discover that KDE now consider it to be end of life, and are working on a replacement.

Kubuntu is basically the same (from my perspective), but has continuing support.

Yeah, which is part of what’s stopping me. I can’t really be bothered to spend the time putting everything back as it should be if I bugger it up. Which I will.

So for now it works and it works very well. And I guess I’ll leave it that way.

I have Mint on the 2014 Mac mini I use as a media and Home Assistant server. It was my first dabble with Linux, and I now wish it used Plasma instead of Cinnamon. My other Linux machines are running Kubuntu with Plasma, and they’re great, so logging into Cinnamon always feels like a step backwards somehow.

I could try changing the DE on it, but I’m not massively proficient, and don’t want to have to set everything back up again if I fuck it up.

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.

The 2011 MacBook I still have that still works a treat (with Linux) was also an incredibly lucky purchase too, I guess.

My 2011 13" Pro is still trucking along. Granted, it’s running Linux these days, but it’s still a damn useful machine.

Even though my PC use is now 75% Linux, I do still have an M2 MacBook Air. That thing is three years old and still as powerful as the day I bought it. Though to be fair, it’s not running macOS 26, because fuck that.

Their hardware is legitimately incredible. But as a company they’re dog shit. Hence my 75% Linux use. If Asahi was as useful on my MacBook as Kubuntu on my desktop, I wouldn’t be using my Air with macOS at all.

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.

Free on the NHS in the UK. In fact, diabetes is one of the conditions that qualifies people for free prescriptions across the board.

I recently started another play through of RDR2, while figuring out the settings on my old Linux gaming PC. I’d forgotten how long it is between save points during that oh-so-long first segment up in the mountains. Christ. Having to play for half an hour just to get to a point where I could save up.

I loved the first season and really enjoyed the second. Then fired up the third only to discover that a chunk of related action had taken place in a whole other show, and that was the point at which I gave up on caring about anything Disney have their hands on. I won’t be made to do homework just so I can enjoy a fucking TV show.

The only exception was Andor, because Rogue One was top notch and I wanted to see how they got to it.

Do they really though?

The company I work for has 150 employees. Granted, most of those are across various departments in the worlshop, so don’t use computers as part of their core work, but we have around 50 PCs around the site.

We don’t have a dedicated IT person. We should, but we don’t (currently), because our boss is the kind of old skool employer who doesn’t really understand why we need that many computers when they didn’t have them back in the '70S. I would suggest that there are far more mid sized businesses like that where the boomer owner holds a similar view than you might think. Or I’m wrong and just looking at it through my particular lens. But having worked for a bunch of mid sized engineering firms over the years, little about my current employer strikes me as particularly different from the others.

I built a little Python app that’s just a big Download button on top of yt-dlp. Copy the link, hit the button, it downloads the video to my Jellyfin folder so I can watch YouTube videos on Apple TV without having to tolerate ads every three minutes.

I would suggest that the vast, vast majority of companies that use Windows do so for two reasons

1: Because the software is (mostly) interchangeable with what their customers use. Office docs can be opened in any Office application without any formatting errors. Generally speaking. Open an .odt in Word and it could (will probably) end up buggering up the formatting.

2: Because most business owners don’t want to go to the expense of hiring a dedicated IT guy to manage a bunch of computers that their staff don’t know how to operate.