Darren

I have a Vivoactive 4 that I picked up used from Facebook a couple of months back. It’s a few years old now, and the regular LCD screen looks pretty janky once you’ve got used to OLED. But it cost me £50, works perfectly well with GrapheneOS, and the battery still lasts a week.

It’s left me pondering upgrading it to a new one with an OLED screen.

I think Refused are one of those bands who don’t need to be big. They do their thing, then they disband for a while, work on other projects, then come back together.

Shape of Punk To Come is a straight up masterpiece. Blew my tiny mind in '98, when my world had come to revolve around whatever Epitaph and Fat Wreck were putting out.

I don’t.

flaunts

My wife and I are finally in a place where we’re financially comfortable enough to book tickets to things. So we’re seeing Alanis Morissette in Cardiff in July, then we’re off to the Royal Albert Hall in September for a performance of Holst’s Planets.

These aren’t big things by any means, but her mobility isn’t great and our income hasn’t been amazing, so it’s nice to have something on the calendar that isn’t a reminder of a bill that needs paying.

Has Anna added it to her archive “store” yet?

“Nightmares are dreams too”

I have ADHD, so a massive bonus of a smart watch for me is not having to look at my phone every time I get a notification. If I do, there’s a strong likelihood that I’ll just keep on looking at it. Having notifications go to my watch means I only get my phone out for important ones.

Also, an alarm clock that taps my wrist without waking up my wife at 5:30am is worth its weight in gold.

I moved from 16 years of iPhones to a Pixel 9 purely so I could put Graphene on it. It’s been a couple of months so far and I’m loving it.

Split Fiction came out a few days ago and is excellent. My wife and I are a good way into it already and are enjoying it every bit as much as we enjoyed It Takes Two.

Yep. Welder in a previous life, and can’t go to travelling fun fairs without casting an eye over the rides.

Yes Jeff!

Or Alex Vance.

You mean JD Jones?

If only Fred Trump had pulled out in 1945.

Hootie, however, has very little to say on the matter.

My Volkswagen flashes a message when I put the key in the ignition; “Depress clutch to start”

So I tell it that the majority of Yanks don’t know how to use it and it starts every time.

Honestly, the base level M1 mini is still one hell of a computer. I’m typing this on one right now, complete with only 8gb RAM, and it hasn’t yet felt in any way underpowered.

Encoded some flac files to m4a with XLD this morning. 16 files totalling 450mb; it took 10 seconds to complete. With my work flows I can’t imagine needing much more power than that.

it felt more like what you’d expect from a labor-of-love indie game

I thought that too. It was like a long cutscene and I loved it.

If only the goal of the tech firms was to make the world better while making enough money to achieve this, rather than their goal being to make as much shareholder value as possible while ekeing out improvements on a schedule that fits their need to maximise profits.