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.

Landlords are vermin, AI is peddled by vermin, and spambots are vermin.

I’m sure he’ll consider their demand thoroughly, and with compassion.

Oh, and to add something that’s just occurred to me…

If you had a problem and couldn’t find a solution while the support was on Reddit, you could easily start a new thread that might bring you the help you needed. Now, with Discord, you have to hope that someone who knows how to help just happens to be browsing the feed at that moment, otherwise your post is getting lost in the ether, because who the fuck is searching for problems in order to offer assistance?

I dunno, but whenever I’ve seen this brought up on /r/Apple the comments are usually stuffed with Android users, or former Android users talking about how much they love T9 dialling.

I won’t lie, as a man of a certain age I’d love to try texting with T9 again, but it’s not hugely important to me.

Not if you’re an Android user, to whom this feature is apparently vital.

I use Opencore Legacy Patcher to run unsupported macOS on my older Macs. They used to have an excellent Reddit group that was easily searchable and rammed full of really good advice on how to fix common issues.

A couple of years ago they shuttered the group and moved everything over to Discord, and it’s been hell ever since trying to figure out how to fix something if it goes wrong.

You search for your issue, find someone talking about it, then have to pick through the dozens of replies either side to try and figure out if there’s anything useful. There are dedicated support threads now, but hardly anyone uses them, so they’re not helpful.

I really, really hate Discord as a support medium, and can’t for the life of me work out why the OCLP mods chose it over Reddit.

From up here you can see the alcoves in the Koningin Astridpark. You use this word, alcoves?

And what housing there is was bought up by investment firms during 2020/21 when people were losing their jobs, or having hours cut, and now more people than ever are paying well over the odds to rent a home because they can’t get a mortgage that would likely cost 2/3 what they’re paying in rent.

But no right leaning/conservative government is going to do a fucking thing about that because too many of them are either landlords, or have funds in those investment firms. So their tame papers run stories about an immigrant family being given a seven bedroom house in a fancy part of town.

2008, the global financial crash, the subsequent shift of trillions of all the currencies towards the already-rich, then Covid hammering the final nail in the coffin of proving that governments care about the people only inasmuch as they provide value.

We’ve had sixteen years of people getting poorer and poorer, shit getting more expensive, and the news outlets they read pointing towards immigrants/gays/leftists as the problem.

The right take those messages and amplify them. They tell people that only they can speak truth to power, when the reality is far more nuanced than that. But people don’t want nuance, they just want to be able to pay their bills. The people aren’t stupid though, they know that the windbags can’t really change anything, but the status quo hasn’t done shit to help them, so fuck it, we’ll vote for the other guy.

“They’re all the same anyway”

What I’d love is a MacBook Pro with a detachable screen that becomes an iPad. There’s no reason they couldn’t do it with the Airs as well.

But I feel like it’s a ridiculously obvious solution that Apple have tried out in testing and decided against for whatever reason.

Who among us has never committed a tiny bit of light treason though…

As a guy in his 40s who’s been to more than his fair share of punk and metal gigs, was a welder until a couple of years ago, and as a youth thought that ear plugs were annoying: sorry, I didn’t hear the question.

It feels to me like the Tories (and their wealthy mates) have now got to the point where they don’t feel they can rinse the taxpayer for much more without everyone seeing them for the craven vampires they are, so they’re happily stepping back for one or two terms.

In that time Labour will struggle like fuck to get the country back to where it was 14 years ago when the Tories walked back into Number 10, the papers will blame Labour for everything being shit, and the door will be open for the Tories to come back in and carry on the pillaging with coffers that are worth the effort.

Here’s hoping they’ve finally sorted out Files.app, and stopped it crashing when you

checks notes

try to use it at all.

I’m still salty that Covid robbed us of Dadi Freyr winning in 2020.

Exactly. Get drunk, sit back, and let the madness wash over you.

My Mini at work has 8gb that I can’t upgrade, and honestly, the only time it’s ever a real issue is when I’m running a Win11 VM that eats up half the RAM.

However, with the cost of RAM now, speccing 8gb on any £1000+ computers is downright criminal.

And, I think, the keyboard. So if you have a current iPad Pro and want the better quality keyboard and trackpad, you have to upgrade your otherwise still more than capable iPad.

It’s fucking diabolical.

The benefit is that Apple are making the chips and want to use the chips in as many products as they can. It doesn’t matter that the software is nowhere near the hardware, the chips are bought and paid for, so they’ll use them.