@hoare_spitall

Made my day: "results that only my dog can hear".

@CiaraNi

@hoare_spitall I have a second-hand stereo receiver that's 20+ years old, and a decent pair of Technics floor speakers manufactured in the 80s.

I did upgrade my stereo a couple of years back with an inexpensive Bluetooth 5.x receiver plugged into the tape deck input. Sounds great and lets me marry newer tech with old.

@hoare_spitall
Yes, but my audiologist is nearby, I like them, and the appointments are zero-cost to me.

The first update since I got them actually fixed a bug I encountered, and supposedly extends battery life when using certain modes.

Yeah, I'm weird. I generally don't watch video clips if by that you mean short videos. I'm not a fan of short videos.

I'm especially annoyed with video makers that use their phones in portrait orientation. Silly people, phones can be easily rotated! 😉

@analogfusion Agreed.

This reminds me of how long it took me to realise that photos I post don't automatically get compressed. Now I try always to remember to reduce the size before posting. (It also took me far too long to understand the environmental problems with digital hoarding.)

@analogfusion an old compact camera with lower MP but good optics can still beat a modern high MP smartphone IMO. As much as they pack tech into phones so far they can never beat good optics just with megapixels.

And old DSLR photography can still leave phone photography in the dust I reckon, on a decent monitor my old 10MP Canon EOS 40D photos look far better than supposed "50MP" photos from my Samsung phone today (which I rarely use in 50MP mode anyway, it's entirely a waste of space.) But I don't carry a proper camera any more, the phone is almost always "good enough"... every now and then I happen to look back at my photos from back then and kinda wish I still made that effort to do it properly... but that camera and a few lenses, which I still have, is a lot to lug around.

@yvan @analogfusion 'I don't carry a proper camera any more, the phone is almost always "good enough"'

This is it. 'The camera you have on you anyway' is the handiest camera.

n/n I also pointed out that most of the videos that they sent me would convey the excitement of the moment perfectly at VGA resolutions.

"Oh but I like to take my pictures at maximum resolution" was the answer that returned and with that the subject was closed.

I did not get the chance to point out that photo and video resolution settings on phones are independent of each of each other.

So you can reduce video resolution without changing still photo resolution.

@the_wub

"photo and video resolution settings on phones are independent of each of each other" - this is the kind of thing that many of us genuinely don't know. Like the climate impact of digital hoarding - it took far too long for me to realise it was a problem, let alone a problem that I could and should do something about in my own home.

@xenogon The thirsty servers of the 'cloud' that store our hoarded data use energy. This is from the same book ('99th Day'):

“We’re destroying our environment to take 1.9 trillion photos every year. That’s more photos taken in one single year in the 2020s than were taken in the entire 20th century. That’s more than 200 photos taken for every child, woman and man alive. Every year. Twelve trillion photos and growing, stored in the Cloud, the vast majority of which will never be viewed again”

@xenogon
But the cloud servers are always on, aren’t they?

If I rent a bit of cloud space, it’s not going to be on a separate drive just reserved for me, or is it?

@nellie_m yes the cloud servers are always on and so yes it uses more power to store stuff in the cloud than locally where you can unplug an unused drive or turn your whole computer off. so if the message is that we shouldn't be storing stuff in the cloud then I absolutely agree 100% for a whole raft of reasons, not just energy

however the quote made it seem that it is peoples behavior taking and hoarding photos that is the problem, but that is really only 1% of the problem with photos, and photos are a small part of what cloud computing is used for and not the energy intensive part

so it's making people worry about the wrong things.

@xenogon @nellie_m Modern SSDs do not make the best long term storage solution if left unpowered for longer periods of time.

xda-developers.com/your-unpowe…

@the_wub @nellie_m neither does leaving your files at the mercy of some corporate in the cloud, so the point is somewhat moot for the discussion at hand.

however if storing files oneself long term then powering up and checking from time to time is advisable, and perhaps transferring to new media every decade or so depending on the importance of the files.

really though who leaves a drive unpowered for years at a stretch? it's a niche sort of use. and as the article points out you can use old fashioned HDDs if you need to do that.

@nellie_m @the_wub
IMO you are doing computers pretty well.

you could maybe consider ditching cloud storage altogether, and ideally we'd (all) be using linux rather than mac, though I still use macs myself for some things so I can't fault you for that.

however i don't plan to upgrade my macs past sonoma, due to the ai integration in later versions of MacOS so they are going to become offline workstations once sonoma is no longer supported.

@xenogon @the_wub
oh, I’m a bit reluctant to say but I’m on an old iMac that can’t be updated beyond High Sierra but it can still run the last Adobe CS you could purchase, CS6. That’s what I still work with. And it works 🤷‍♀️

Once that machine is no longer allowed to play on the internet I’ll have to switch to Affinity, I guess.

The cloud, to be honest, it’s only what my iPhone uses, I turned it off for most apps but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to have it keep contacts and notes, small stuff like that, as an extra backup. I do backup the whole phone locally on the iMac which in turn is on a time machine so in theory it’s fairly safe but of course I could do it more often, and I still don’t have a backup on another planet 🫣

@nellie_m nothing wrong with your old imac as a workstation. and old software is often better actually.

However you should be aware that High Sierra hasn't received security updates for years, so may be somewhat vulnerable on the internet. How bad that actually is I am not expert enough to say.

@nellie_m having an offline workstation (ie your imac) with your old familiar software and a uptodate linux machine for the internet would not be a stupid solution.

affinity is pretty good for design, haven't used it much for photos.

@xenogon

I’ve already installed it even (the 2.0 when it came out) but haven’t got around to having more than a brief look at it yet. <hangs head in shame>

Switching to Linux would be even more of a challenge. I hear that Mint is easy to use if you got on well with Windows, but that’s not me. What flavour of it would you recommend for a Mac person?

@nellie_m

I use Mint, standard Cinnamon edition. It is easy to use and I'm a Mac person since 1988. Been using linux, mostly Mint since 2016.

I could complain about it extensively, like I could with any OS, but it is not difficult to get started on.

It will be fine if you just want a regular computer doing email and browsing and easy enough to run any of the big linux applications, ie Krita, Darktable, Libreoffice, Inkscape, OpenSCAD, whatever.

There are many people here infinitely more expert on linux than I am, but you may find their advice can be a bit arcane at times so happy to help as a fellow mac user if I can.

@xenogon

That’s very kind of you, thank you!

I do find the command line stuff scary, I have to say. I won’t have any questions right away because I’ll first have to find some cheap machine to run it on (and meet my regular deadline and finish a book project) but if I do find both that and some courage, is it okay if I drop you a DM?