ouch!

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.

Ah, that’ll be why it feels rock solid then…

To be honest, they offer different use cases, so no, probably not.

Syncthing can be used collaboratively, inasmuch as I could share a folder with my wife, for example, but I think the primary use of it is to enable syncronisation of a folder between several personally accessed computers. If you do share with others, you’ll have to share a separate folder, so will end up with a bunch of different folders all being shared with different computers.

Not to mention that Nextcloud offers other functionality that isn’t necessarily possible with Syncthing. That said, I guess you could save your calendar to a folder in Syncthing and have it sync between devices. So I suppose it could replicate some of the functions.

Syncthing

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.

Also, Apple don’t seem to have an appetite for supporting gaming on macOS, beyond a few big name titles announced once a year to reig ite interest.

I tried to go with Bazzite on my wife’s old PC. Fuck knows what happened, but I could not get it to recognise that I’d downloaded the image with the Nvidia drivers built in.

Ended up giving up and rolling Kubuntu. I know Kubuntu and like it. And it works beautifully. Back in the world of RDR2 now, and loving it.

Its become abundantly clear to me over the past few years that Linux is in place where, to get significant share it needs to have a major figurehead. Imagine if all ThinkPads suddenly were only available with Lenovo’s own fork. That kind of thing.

Unfortunateoy, that’s kinda the opposite of Linux ethos, and not necessarily likely to make Lenovo much money.

So the best we can really hope for at this point is a company with the brand awareness of Valve pushing SteamOS into the mainstream. People who play games know and generally trust Valve, so people (like my wife) who are on the fence, or who just need their computer to work without needing too much faffing, could likely trust SteamOS in a way they wouldn’t necessarily trust Bazzite or CachyOS.

Dutch basically raised Arthur, but in a way that made Arthur believe that the world would always be against him. They were outlaws, and outlaws they would always be. They were treated poorly wherever they went, so they have no trouble doing bad things, which made people treat them poorly. So yeah, Arthur blindly followed an asshole.

But when the game starts we meet them at an infection point in society. Outlaws are less tolerated than they’ve ever been, their way of life is disappearing, and Arthur is forced to examine whether he really is a bad man, or whether circumstances have made him that way. And whether there’s a difference anyway.

When rewatching you’re essentially waiting for Brendanawicz to Brandenaquitz so the show can start getting good.

Shows that fit this bill for me:

Schitt’s Creek Breaking Bad

Schitt’s Creek in particular, from S02 onwards they really locked in to what we ended up loving about the Roses, which was there in S01 but not so clear. As a result, S02 on is damn near perfect.

He published his memoirs a couple of weeks back. It’s a good read.