djdarren

Everyone is tracking everything anyway, but having been a user of Apple products since 2007, they’ve got what they can on me.

From a European perspective, at this stage I think I’d prefer the Chinese tech over the American.

I use an Apple TV with mine. You can control the TV and soundbar from its one small remote.

Yeah, my LG OLED is a genuinely wonderful thing, with which 99% of its use is via an Apple TV. The other 1% is me casting my phone to it, because it’s a Pixel and Apple are pricks who won’t let AirPlay work outside of their ecosystem.

Yeah. I have a 2011 Macbook Pro with a dual core i7 running Arch and Plasma, and while it’s obviously nowhere near as quick as my M2 Macbook Air, it’s still a perfectly respectable machine. Last week I also put Arch on a ThinkPad T410 with a dual core i5. I wouldn’t want it as my main computer, but it chugs along ok.

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.

You don’t have to run any Google stuff at all, if you don’t want to.

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.

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.

Auto-hiding on the seam between my two monitors for me.

Get a Kobo. Read the book, click the buttons that take you to another book.