It’s far better at looking at a page of log information and picking out the one bit that explains why the thing I need to work isn’t working

Yes. I can post a terminal output into it and it’ll tell me exactly what’s not working and why. And that’s incredibly valuable.

Ironically, I used Gemini to help me build a little app that takes a copied YouTube link and uses yt-dlp to download it to my Jellyfin server in a format that’ll play nicely on my Apple TV. I can’t imagine how I’d approach achieving that if I had to start from scratch.

Do you have a 55" OLED laptop screen to watch movies and play games on?

I mean, all power to you, but I really like having a nice sized TV.

I’m a reasonably new Linux at a place of trying to learn how to improve/optimise my system, and honestly, Google’s Gemini has become my user manual.

If I can’t figure something out then I could trawl through a bunch of forums where the issue doesn’t really match mine, or the fix has changed since OP had the same problem, or I could just go straight to an LLM. I understand that they have a tendency to make shit up on the fly (this is a great example), but when it comes to troubleshooting setup issues they’re really helpful. And yes, I kmow that’s because they’ve already ingested the support forums. But it is genuinely so much quicker to sort things out, while learning as you go.

If every smart TV you buy is the same, then you have no viable choices, and as such they’re doing the bare minimum of what’s expected for the bare minimum of cost.

This Noodle video on how old games were developed with CRT in mind was absolutely mind-blowing to me.

The entire lyric to The Weakerthans - This is a Fire Door, Never Leave Open

Headlights race towards the corner of the dining room
And half illuminate a face before they disappear \ You breathe in forty years of failing to describe a feeling \ I breathe out smoke against a window
Trace the letters in your name

Our letters sound the same
Full of all our changing
That isn’t change at all
All straight lines circle sometime

You said, “Somewhere, there’s a box full of replacement parts
To all the tenderness we’ve broken or let rust away.”
Somewhere, sympathy is more than just a way of leaving
Somewhere, someone says, “I’m sorry.”
Someone’s making plans to stay

So tell me it’s okay
Tell me anything
Or show me there’s a pull
Unassailable

That will lead you there from the dark alone
To benevolence that you’ve never known
Or you knew when you were four and can’t remember

Where a small knife tears out those sloppy seams
And the silence knows what your silence means
And your metaphors, as mixed as you can make them
Are linked like days, together

I still hear trains at night when the wind is right
I remember everything
Lick and thread this string

That will never mend you or tailor more
Than a memory of a kitchen floor
Or the fire door that we kept propping open

And I love this place: the enormous sky
And the faces, hands that I’m haunted by
So why can’t I forgive these buildings
These frameworks labeled home?

Headlights race towards the corner of the dining room
And half illuminate a face before they disappear

Oh.

My bank is Lloyds, and their app not working on Graphene is a huge part of why I tried to apply for a Curve account.

Bugger.

I have a couple of Linux machines, but I also use a MacBook. It’s been a year now, and every time I use the Mac it kinda pisses me off that I have to hit Cmd+Space to bring up a search. It feels like a massive step backwards.

I tried to join Curve. For whatever reason they couldn’t verify my ID from the photo I sent, and that was that. No opportunity to redo, and they never replied to my support request email.

To give a serious answer to this; I love using an iPod because it’s not a multipurpose device. I can put music on and not get distracted by notifications, or tempted to open any socials apps. It’s a far more zen experience.

Not the current gen. Well, it can act as a trackpad, but that’s not the primary input method. The previous gen, however, did have a trackpad. Again, it could be clicked, but it was generally shittier. The current remote is actually pretty nice.

We bought a 60" LG LCD first. It was too big for our living room, so when the backlight went faulty and we were offered a refund we chopped it in for the 55" OLED, which is basically perfect for our room.

Turns out 5" really can make a difference.

Yeah, it’s not great.

Luckily, we do 99% of our viewing through an Apple TV, and we have a soundbar, so the ATV remote covers basically everything we need.

My 55" 4K OLED LG is the single greatest TV panel I’ve ever looked at. I can’t determine any individual pixels, the blacks are black. I have no issues with it in the slightest. And I see absolutely no reason why any TV of that size should need 4x more pixel density (or whatever it is).

The clickwheel ribbon cable on my iPod mini broke a couple of weeks ago, so at the weekend a friend of me very kindly donated his own mini to me, so I’m back on my iPod bullshit.

iPod gang rise up.

Oh, and if you’re using Linux, or don’t want the hassle of installing iTunes, TunesReloaded seems to be a genuinely great tool.

I really should get around to refurbing the 5th and 7th gen Classics I have too. They’re more versatile than the mini. But the mini is by far and away the easiest to flashmod.

I’ve had a halogen oven that was a halogen oven, a halogen oven that was called an air fryer, and now have an actual air fryer, and the actual air fryer is the most remarkable piece of cooking technology I’ve bought since I got my first microwave. The halogen ovens I had before are nothing by comparison.

For example, I had a small pie with my dinner last night. The cooking instructions said 170° for 25-30 minutes. I did it for 7 minutes and it was cooked.

Roast potatoes: 15 minutes at 180° for perfectly crisp spuds. I could never have got that from my previous “air fryer”.

Home Assistant

I’ve had HAOS running in a VM on an old Mac mini for the past year or so, to figure out how it works and eventually shift away from Alexa. Last week I finally got serious, shifted my install over to an M1 Mac mini I have,installed Ollama alongside it, then went around the house cataloguing all the smart devices I have and making sure they were all working in HA. I’m now at everything but 5 Govee Matter bulbs, which I’ll figure out when I’ve got time.

I’ve replicated all of our Alexa automations in HA and begun activating them to make sure everything is working, and so far I’ve been really happy with the results.

All of this from someone who only picked up Linux a year ago and is learning as I go along.

Docker

Similarly, over the past year I’ve gone from being kinda nervous of Docker (on Linux) because I can’t really see what it’s doing, to being reasonably confident at installing various bits of software that can chunter away in the background being incredibly useful to me.

I ended up building an app that’s literally just a button that takes a link in my clipboard and passes it to yt-dlp, which then downloads the video in the best format for Apple TV to my Jellyfin server. That’s the only way I have of watching YouTube on Apple TV without having to tolerate half a dozen ads per fifteen minute video.

“A man of the cloth”, or “touching socks”

One is more disastrous than the other.

My current Macbook (M2 Air from 2022) can sync with my 4th gen iPod over FireWire if I have the right adapters.