Cassidy 🗽 @cassidyjames@mastodon.social

What would your ideal elementary OS laptop look like?

I think I might work on some poster designs for the elementary store. I have some thoughts, but if you were to put something from elementary on YOUR wall, what would it be?

I’m going to try to do some livestreaming while working on/talking about elementary OS things. What would you find specifically interesting or worthwhile?

Want to support your favorite YouTuber, author, artist, or open source project? Check if they have a way to SUBSCRIBE to support them. Even $1/month can be a huge help when it is reliable, predictable income. Patreon, GitHub Sponsors, etc. are great for this.

By the way, I'm posting over at Pixelfed now as well. I'm strongly considering deleting or at least locking down my Instagram account; I'm sick of Facebook as a company, sick of the increasingly terrible ads, and sick of the proliferation of crappy graphics with overlaid text versus the original intent of just *photos* of what people were up to/taking photos of.

You can follow me via the magic of the fediverse right here: @cassidyjames

Alright, we are starting #MandoWatchAlong for #TheMandalorian Chapter 14 (S2E6)! Catch us and ask for a timestamp if you're joining late. https://cassidyjames.com/starwars/#the-mandalorian-mandowatchalong

Cans for reference

Under a half hour until we start #MandoWatchAlong! Which Left Hand Brewing Co. nitro beer should I choose?

Galactic Cowboy Imperial Stout, or Chai Milk Stout?

Two hours until #TheMandalorian Chapter 14 (S2E6)! Join our Discord for the weekly #MandoWatchAlong https://cassidyjames.com/starwars/

Okay, I have started to put together my Clone Wars episode guide, finally! This includes what I deem important for the larger Star Wars canon, especially Rebels, The Mandalorian, and the saga films.

https://cassidyjames.com/starwars/#the-clone-wars-episode-guide

And just categorically throwing out “mobile” chipsets because you think that means crappy means you are ignoring the massive strides in mobile computing.

My point is, designing a computer by committee is going to get you a crappy product, or at least limit your thinking. Sure, expandable memory and swappable drives would be nice, but in NO WAY is it a requirement for a successful, powerful consumer computer. See: Apple M1.

“Definitely, we need to be looking at something with real I/O, not some crappy mobile chipset with soldered-on 2GB of RAM.”

Apple M1 is based on Apple’s mobile chipsets and has soldered-on RAM, albeit starting at 8 GB. Not to mention soldered-on storage.

“I have a 24-core Opteron right. To replace that I would need a 64-core Cortex A73 or something, which doesn’t exist.”

Apple M1 has eight cores—four performance cores and four efficiency cores.

“the ARM PC would need an expandable x86-style board with DDR4 memory DIMM slot, and NVMe or SATA slots for plugging in SSDs or other drives.”

Apple M1 has no memory slots, and no internally-expandable storage.

Reading this kind of hurts. Three and a half years ago, open source folks interested in powerful ARM consumer hardware got together and had these brilliant insights…https://www.pcworld.com/article/3184230/the-anatomy-of-a-powerful-desktop-with-an-arm-chip.html

And I still need to reroute those cables because I ended up swinging the display around to the other side. 🙈

Alternate take with some everyday objects for scale. 🔍

What’s a computer?? Using the Raspberry Pi as my desktop for a bit. Tiny, fanless, and inexpensive. 👍

It’s just so half-assed and makes it frustrating to use, because it feels like some exec at Google said that Meet needed to be inside of Gmail. Without understanding or caring about any of the implications.

Multitasking: I’m in a meeting and want to check some mail? I swipe home, tap the Gmail icon and… wait why am I back in my meeting? Where is my email?

Digital Wellbeing: same thing as Battery Usage! If I block/turn off Google Meet app or want to track its usage for my own digital wellbeing, that is now impossible without also blocking/turning off/tracking the Gmail app. It breaks Android platform features.

Battery usage: my phone now tells me that I used Gmail for a couple of hours today and that it REALLY sucked down my battery when I never explicitly/intentionally even opened it.

Oh yeah, I had a couple meetings in Google Meet. 😒

Permissions: no, I'm not giving Gmail access to my camera and mic. But a video chat app kinda needs that. And even when I have given Meet access, sometimes meetings try to open in Gmail and so I can’t figure out why my camera/mic don’t work. Especially since the UI is identical.

Google Meet being integrated into the Gmail app on Android is frustrating for so many reasons.