djdarren

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 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.

This makes me think about my ex-wife, who made very little attempt at giving a shit about what our son was into, because that was just stupid boy stuff, then couldn’t understand why they weren’t all that close.

I didn’t really care all that much about half the stuff he was into, but I at least made an effort to meet him on his level, and wouldn’t you know, our relationship is great.

AND YET, Pictures of Matchstick Men is a psych masterpiece.

Coldplay springs to mind. The Coldplay who released Moon Music last year is an entirely different band to the one who released Parachutes in 2000. I know of few other bands who’ve gone through such an enormous transformation. And while the newer stuff may not resonate with me the way the early stuff did, it’s fair to say that it’s worked for them.

As a teenage metalhead of the 90s, little has distressed me more than literally everything Metallica have released since St Anger.

I really, really dug Load and ReLoad. They were different to what had come before, but they still had a hard rock edge to them that I loved. Then Jason quit, and The Corporation Of James And Lars hired the formely mighty Rob Trujillo and set about their plan to record the same indistinguishable wall of noise over and over again until people stopped bothering to even pirate their music.

When they took our wooden boat out of the water it turned out that she’d hogged by around 500mm. Which is quite a lot for a boat. In fairness, she was 150 years old by that point.

Now there’s a vast system of hydraulic rams supporting her in the dry dock, to the point that they reckon she’s better supported now than when she was afloat.

Ah, I’m mostly joking. Victory is a really cool museum, almost as cool as the wreck of the Mary Rose that’s displayed in a building next to her.

She’s too beautiful. So beautiful in fact, that I am now banned from Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.

I would say that the US is a very weird place, but then I remembered that this

is the flagship of the British Navy First British Sea Lord. She hasn’t floated for literally 100 years.

So mostly I guess it’s just that militaries are weird.

It was watching The Bear that made me finally appreciate that fine dining isn’t about filling yer belleh, and more about the art of food; how the senses meld together.

I’m too poor to eat at places that offer that kind of experience, but at least I now understand the point of it and appreciate why it can be so expensive.

I use Voyager to access Lemmy, which is heavily based on Apollo for Reddit. And one of the very best things they kept in Voyager is the “New Account Highlightenator”, which adds a baby emoji next to a username, with how many days the account has been active. This disappears after a month (I think it is), but it’s really, really handy for quickly highlighting whether it’s worth paying attention to the shitty opinions being spouted.

Chances are, if it’s a bot or a troll, they’ll be using a new account. If I see shitty opinion + baby emoji, I’ll block and move on.

Other than that, I personally don’t really give a shit how long someone’s been on here. This is my third account on a third server since I first discovered Lemmy a couple of years ago, and I’ve only had this one for a couple of months.

ouch!

Also, ACAB.

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.

🎶 If it’s going up your arsehole flare the base If it’s going up your arsehole flare the base If it’s going up your arse, there’s a point it mustn’t pass If it’s going up your arsehole flare the base 🎶

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.