We bought a 60" LG LCD first. It was too big for our living room, so when the backlight went faulty and we were offered a refund we chopped it in for the 55" OLED, which is basically perfect for our room.

Turns out 5" really can make a difference.

Yeah, it’s not great.

Luckily, we do 99% of our viewing through an Apple TV, and we have a soundbar, so the ATV remote covers basically everything we need.

My 55" 4K OLED LG is the single greatest TV panel I’ve ever looked at. I can’t determine any individual pixels, the blacks are black. I have no issues with it in the slightest. And I see absolutely no reason why any TV of that size should need 4x more pixel density (or whatever it is).

The clickwheel ribbon cable on my iPod mini broke a couple of weeks ago, so at the weekend a friend of me very kindly donated his own mini to me, so I’m back on my iPod bullshit.

iPod gang rise up.

Oh, and if you’re using Linux, or don’t want the hassle of installing iTunes, TunesReloaded seems to be a genuinely great tool.

I really should get around to refurbing the 5th and 7th gen Classics I have too. They’re more versatile than the mini. But the mini is by far and away the easiest to flashmod.

I’ve had a halogen oven that was a halogen oven, a halogen oven that was called an air fryer, and now have an actual air fryer, and the actual air fryer is the most remarkable piece of cooking technology I’ve bought since I got my first microwave. The halogen ovens I had before are nothing by comparison.

For example, I had a small pie with my dinner last night. The cooking instructions said 170° for 25-30 minutes. I did it for 7 minutes and it was cooked.

Roast potatoes: 15 minutes at 180° for perfectly crisp spuds. I could never have got that from my previous “air fryer”.

Home Assistant

I’ve had HAOS running in a VM on an old Mac mini for the past year or so, to figure out how it works and eventually shift away from Alexa. Last week I finally got serious, shifted my install over to an M1 Mac mini I have,installed Ollama alongside it, then went around the house cataloguing all the smart devices I have and making sure they were all working in HA. I’m now at everything but 5 Govee Matter bulbs, which I’ll figure out when I’ve got time.

I’ve replicated all of our Alexa automations in HA and begun activating them to make sure everything is working, and so far I’ve been really happy with the results.

All of this from someone who only picked up Linux a year ago and is learning as I go along.

Docker

Similarly, over the past year I’ve gone from being kinda nervous of Docker (on Linux) because I can’t really see what it’s doing, to being reasonably confident at installing various bits of software that can chunter away in the background being incredibly useful to me.

Meanwhile, I just have a big button on my Home Assistant home screen on my phone that turns off all my lights. It’s great.

Another: You can bind shortcuts to mouse buttons like Ctrl-Alt-Right (click) And Ctrl-Alt-Left to say, switch desktops right/left.

OK, how the hell do you do this? Because I have Ctrl+left click and Ctrl+right click set on my Mac to switch left/right between spaces/desktops, and cannot for the life of me work our how to replicate that in Linux.

For example, the ability to disable global shortcuts on specific windows. So if I’ve got a remote desktop open to my work I can send Super-. (Win-.) and that’ll open the Windows emoji picker in the remote desktop instead of the KDE one (locally). And it will remember this setting for that application!

I did not know this! I’ll look into this and no longer will it piss me off when I tap Super in a VM to open the menu, and have to dismiss my local menu first.

I feel like picking the right DE makes much bigger impact.

I made the same point to someone on Reddit who asked earlier today what a good distro is from swapping from macOS.

I’ve only been using Linux for a year or so, so I’m still very much learning how things work, but from my (limited) perspective, whether you use Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch etc… is essentially meaningless to a new user. But how you interact with it isn’t.

Personally, I tried Mint first because that’s the default answer, and while Cinnamon is fine, I find it too restrictive. Which makes GNOME a no-gno for me. I’ve tried GNOME, and I hate it. I’ve landed on Plasma, and I like Plasma.

And crucially, I can use Plasma on my Kubuntu machines, my old MacBook that’s now running Arch(btw), and my M1 Mac mini that’s running Asahi, and the experience is pretty much the same for what I do. The only difference is the command I use to update my software in Konsole.

My bedside wireless charger has a piercing bright blue light on the front. That was covered by a small bit of black electrical tape on the first night.

Which sadist designs this shit?

I have a Zigbee controller coming at some point this week, so I can set up a bunch of Zigbee sensors and products that a friend of mine no longer needs. Proper looking forward to seeing what I can do with it all in Home Assistant.

There are people who walk among us, people who can vote, and procreate, who will willingly sit in a room with just The Big Light on. It chills my blood to think about.

I ended up building an app that’s literally just a button that takes a link in my clipboard and passes it to yt-dlp, which then downloads the video in the best format for Apple TV to my Jellyfin server. That’s the only way I have of watching YouTube on Apple TV without having to tolerate half a dozen ads per fifteen minute video.

“A man of the cloth”, or “touching socks”

One is more disastrous than the other.

My current Macbook (M2 Air from 2022) can sync with my 4th gen iPod over FireWire if I have the right adapters.

I believe he does it with the full consent of his boss.

Jellyfin still don’t have Apple TV Apps

I can heartily recommend Infuse for accessing both Plex and Jellyfin on Apple TV.

I’ve ditched all streaming services in favour of a friend’s 40tb Plex server, running from the server room of the university where he works. It’s rock solid and has everything I want to watch.

Anything he can’t find, or that I personally want my own access to goes in my own Jellyfin server.

It’s great. Better than spending £50 a month on a couple of services.

Not even John Fetterman is really sure of John Fetterman’s political views these days.