Thanks for posting. The rest of the blog is also short and sweet, I’m struggling a bit with self worth and self criticism so I found it very touching and relatable.
It’s kind of interesting how I’ve come to expect blog posts to be much longer since microblogging pretty much exists exclusively on social media.
IANAL. But I believe it's not that easy. First it would have to be a foregone conclusion that you had contraband on your phone before merely locking it could be construed as obstruction. Then they'd have to demonstrate that you locked the phone at a time when you had reason to believe that you might be coerced to unlock it because it was a foregone conclusion that you had contraband. Are those likely circumstances? Probably not, though it will happen to someone, sometime, but when it does it will be because they did something stupid or because the cops overstepped their authority (in the latter case the process is the punishment, and it wouldn't be the cops getting punished).
iPhone periodically disables biometrics until you enter your passcode. They aren’t going to be able to prove that the reason the phone is asking now isn’t that.
I’m using Infuse as well, and it’s pretty amazing.
The main thing that Infuse does differently from all the others is that it always does Direct Play (in Plex parlance) so you don’t need anything powerful or power hungry to be hosting the video.
Most devices that will play video these days are powerful enough to do the decoding themselves and have the bandwidth available.
I use Jellyfin and it defaults to direct play unless you need transcoding (e.g: the client device doesn't support the chosen format, Firefox with h265 for example, due to licensing) and it will just remux if the container is the only issue. The desktop client just uses mpv so it supports basically everything directly.
> Most devices that will play video these days are powerful enough to do the decoding themselves and have the bandwidth available.
IME this varies a lot between devices. Google TV dongles for example, even the 4K versions, are built with extremely weak SoCs (as in early 2010s phone weak) and lean hard on hardware acceleration. If you want to play back a format that isn’t hardware accelerated on one of these, you’ll have to rely on media server transcoding.
In my memory of Plex on my Apple TV device it was off by default and hidden in an advanced menu or something. Not impossible by any means, just annoying.
How exactly would you check if a webpage in the Wayback Machine precisely matches a thing that used to be? You would also have to trust whoever checks them.
I have definitely seen that behaviour on my M1 MacBook Air, though not recently.
At the time I tried to do a screen recording but it didn’t show up. I figure it’s some weird hardware acceleration thing with the cursor that gets borked after a bad wake up.
Bluetooth sound, and third-party sound cards have been working for almost the entire time, IIRC. Recently the internal 3.5mm jack was enabled, built-in speakers are still a work-in-progress.
The ARM builds are precisely what Parallels is using here. The only piece left in doubt is Microsoft will bother to make drivers/use a boot compatibility layer and Apple has already said they aren't going to do it via bootcamp this time.
Not being able to snap/tile windows to a screen border or corner without third-party software is just baffling, and the official tiling method only supports two windows side by side in some weird fullscreen mode. Back when Windows introduced this feature I made the jump from a 256MB RAM computer to a brand new laptop with 2 whole CPU cores. It's time Apple caught up to every other desktop OS in this regard.
> is windows better?
In terms of UI yes, provided you don't need a functioning search feature. Windows 10 also finally added support for virtual desktops and scrolling in unfocused windows. Though unfortunately Windows 10 was such an unpleasant experience for me overall that I don't see myself using it in the foreseeable future.
Magnet works fine, if Apple replicated the functionality people would be complaining that they killed off a successful third party app. Can't please everybody.
Mac also has free alternatives like Rectangle. It lets me snap windows to screen edges in various sizes with keyboard and mouse, and that's all I need.
> to improve your already good experience.
The whole reason I stopped using Windows 10 is because it was not a good experience, to put it very mildly. But I likely was an untypically bad case, judging from Windows still being on the market.
Rectangle is great. The fact that some apps (mostly Electron based it seems) are terrible at remembering where they were last opened does appear to be a MacOS trait.
i think disproportionately more people would enjoy the feature being made native. There's no reason the third party app has to go away, fans could keep using it.
Look at PowerToys window manager vs any of the apps on Mac. Night and day difference. This is like table stakes for a modern OS in terms of UX, and even the paid offerings on the Mac side are quite a shadow of PowerToys (which is made by Microsoft itself, and free)
Windows Subsystem for Linux for native linux CLI. I've appreciated Mac being Unix-like, but the small differences end up being quite annoying. Much nicer to use an environment that's close to 1:1 with your servers
Personally I use a Mac for the hardware, and that's about it.
Mac is a Unix. Darwin is a BSD. It has its own PID1, launchctl, instead of systemd.
It's not* a Linux-like (Kernel ABI is different) but if you work with Macports, you can make your userspace a clone of Linux. There's very little that I can't get for Macports that is on Linux (not GUI stuff).
You can get plenty of the equivalent "native linux CLI". Macports for native, lima or minikube to run linux containers. Virtualbox et al for running linux VMs.
I would say at this point in time MacOS is a superior OS for laptops but inferior to both Windows and big Linux distros for desktop. Windowing is awful, multi monitor support is inferior, the OS doesn't even have native support for mouse 4 + 5 buttons, and there's no subpixel text antialiasing which makes fonts look awful on 3rd party monitors. Beyond that, the lack of Nvidea support and OpenGL support makes it a poor platform for desktop 3D modelling and games.
This is a personal anecdote, but I also feel like the quality and robustness of Mac OS has declined compared to the direction of Windows or Linux over the last few OS upgrades.
That's a good question, and I cannot really give you a coherent answer tbh. I just find Windows to feel more modern. I suppose a few examples are:
Snap/Windows Management in macOS is a pain.
Using Brew as a package manager isn't exactly a wonderful experience.
The taskbar feels pretty ugly and dated - that little dot, and then having both the top and bottom bar in play just feels outdated.
Even having to use Parallels is a bit of a pain - build a hypervisor into the OS.
I'm the furthest thing from a designer, and I understand that Apple went with a different UI paradigm. It's just starting to feel a bit left behind. It's still my daily driver though.
Well if you find this design outdated, how can you be so easy in reverse with windows 10 where advanced settings often result in un-burying NT era hideous and messy interfaces?
I agree MacOS feels dated, some examples: The Windows window manager is far better than the MacOS equivalent, the UI is higher quality, more consistent and more discoverable, and PowerShell is better than zsh.
I guess it depends on what one is looking for, because to me Windows feels the most dated of any desktop environment mainly due to its poor implementation of virtual desktops.
Even the version of Spaces from OS X 10.5 Leopard (circa 2007) is better, and various *nix DEs had better virtual desktops since the mid-late 90s onward. That makes Windows harder to use for me than lack of snapping on macOS does, particularly with how Windows makes me feel like I need to maximize most windows which drives a greater need for good virtual desktops.
What I miss most in macOS is the raw graphics performance of Windows, even for day-to-day computing. Probably a combo of available graphics cards, drivers, and how the OS treats graphics performance. Finder is def getting a bit creaky, but I've never hit limitations using it.
It’s kind of interesting how I’ve come to expect blog posts to be much longer since microblogging pretty much exists exclusively on social media.