bluegreyred

your sophisticated technique assumes social skills!

As somebody on a 2015 15" MBP looking to make the switch, how do you deal with things like Word/Excel documents or updating the firmware of IOT things (not mine but those of relatives) that only offer proprietary Windows and Mac updaters/installers? Do you just spin up a KVM and pass through USB, or use a separate computer?

These edge cases (and the uneasy feeling that there are many others that I won't discover until I make the switch) are the main reasons holding me back at the moment. The lack of interoperability because Linux is not an established consumer OS (yet).

>I do leave the batteries in. Is it dangerous? I read some time ago that it is not dangerous, but the capacity of the battery drops significantly, I don't care about capacity, and safe shutdowns are important to me.

It's not necessarily dangerous but lithium batteries have a chance to fail and in very rare cases even explode, making them a potential fire hazard. I'm not an expert, maybe someone else can expand on this. If I were to run an old laptop of unknown provenance with a LiIon battery 24/7 completely unattended I'd at least want to make sure that it is on a non-flammable surface without any flammable items nearby.

>In the past I used an HP DL380 Gen. 7 (which I still own, and wouldn't mind selling as I don't use it), but I had to find a solution for the noise. And power consumption was at around 18EUR for my EUR/kWh.

Yes, I am surprised how many people leave power consumption out of the equation. These days you can rent a decent VPS for the power cost of an old refurb server alone.

nice to see somebody using a thinkpad as a homeserver.

I remember comparing low power homeservers, consumer NAS and a refurb Thinkpad and the latter won when considering the price/performance and idle power consumption (<5W). You also get a built screen & keyboard for debugging and a efficient DC-UPS if you're brave enough to leave the batteries in. That's of course assuming you don't need multiple terabytes of storage or run programs that load the CPU 24/7, which I don't. These days a rPi 4 would probably suffice for my needs but I still think the refurb thinkpad is a smart idea.

Last time I checked the only iOS client was defunct and not even on the App Store. The issue discussing a native iOS app on github is tagged with not-our-bug.

https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/102

If there's a new client out I'd love to know about it.

I enjoyed Panic's polished applications since way back when but the way they simply drop paid for apps with an existing userbase due to "lack of revenue" (Status Board [1], Transmit on iOS [2], Unison [3] and Audion [4]) really left a sour taste in my mouth.

Transmit for iOS was a particularly big loss for me, so much so that I personally am going out of my way to avoid their products.

[1] https://panic.com/blog/the-future-of-status-board/

[2] https://panic.com/blog/the-future-of-transmit-ios/

[3] https://panic.com/blog/the-future-of-unison/

[4] https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/

Older Haswell rMBPs can be undervolted with but it requires disabling SIP which is not recommended.

Read the warnings and disclaimers and inspect the source code:

https://github.com/sicreative/VoltageShift

newer MBPs (2016+) appear to be locked down.

This is correct. Lower power consumption as a result of better TIM and thus lower core temperatures:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poole–Frenkel_effect

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/effect-of-temperature-o...

The effect is so pronounced that a watercooled computer running under full load will typically use less power than an identical aircooled computer, because the lowered silicon current leakage more than makes up for the power consumption of the pump and additional fans.

flawed hardware anyway...

Yes, iOS.

The new iPad Air is essentially the new A12 SoC inside the now discontinued 2017 10.5" iPad Pro.

They also cut some features like the bright high refresh rate screen, the high resolution camera and the four speakers. As such there's no support for the new Pencil, USB-C and FaceID (for better or for worse).

Indeed, that's what makes the raspberry pi so hard to beat, even though I'm just a hobbyist using it as a tinker toy.

If something major breaks software-wise you can be pretty sure that the rPi community is large enough to produce a fix within hours.

OTOH if you'd like a new kernel for that fancy $65 big.LITTLE 4GB dualchannel ECC Gigabit PCIe SBC then you're at the mercy of your vendor who considers 4.4 LTS ought to be good enough and already reassigned the entire dev team to work on a future hardware release. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I tried this with OpenVPN a while back and it was a spectacular failure because keeping the tunnel open also kept the cellular connection active and that sent battery consumption through the roof. I'm talking about 8-10 hours "standby" time on a modern iPhone. Is that not a problem with your setup?

I looked into on-demand but is required a mdm profile and that seemed more trouble than it's worth.

Agreed, Docker on Mac performance is abysmal. Writing from a container to a shared volume yields sub-10MB/s write speeds and full load on at least two cores via hyperkit. I get that translating I/O between file systems is expensive but even Windows does this better. It's the number one reason why I'm looking into switching away from macOS right now.

I think you might be describing analysis paralysis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis).

While I can't advise you how to deal with it I find that acknowledging the tendency makes it easier to override, particularly for relatively trivial and inconsequential decisions like your example.

Years ago I used to aim for 100% "information coverage" to base a decision on. These days I'm slowly starting to realize that the diminishing returns past a certain percentage of "information coverage" are rarely worth the time, though this depends on the gravity of the decision. In the case of the make/brand of my phone case I'd visit a site like thewirecutter.com and order their top pick.

There's this "toner heads" interview with Jobs, you've probably seen it but it fascinates me every time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1rXqD6M614

In my experience you are unlikely to have problems when you are logged into your Google account with an "old" cookie. If you block cookies, ads & third party js/trackers, use firefox containerisation and other privacy addons, they will punish you by letting you identify traffic lights for a few minutes.

The logical explanation is that they use various tracking methods to evaluate your "human score" and blocking them makes you suspicious, thus the repeated and increasingly hard tests.

It says „PFOA and PFTE FREE“ in the description

understandable, though you forgot to mention the soldered SSD. I bought another 2015 15" when it was EOL'd three months ago, put Applecare on it and passed my old 2013 down to my parents.

If this one would get run over by a truck I'd probably buy a Thinkpad.

Would it be feasible to order the model with the smallest buil tin storage and put the home (/User/*) directories on a fast external TB3 SSD?

Sure, but the authors of larger magazines typically do not get to keep (or even use) the product for their own private purposes, so they're not nearly as invested and have far less reason to be biased.

I've heard many companies "forget" to ask for their seeded samples back, particularly those sent to so-called influencers.

Don't judge, maybe the next version of the mac mini will be waterproof!

True, I used to go out of my way to find unbiased and honest reviews from "real" people that weren't "seeded" by manufacturers.

The problem is that many others did the same, so these honest reviewers gained followers, that gave them exposure and eventually they get approached by the PR departments which would like to "lend" them top end review samples for an undisclosed amount of time. Well before the press NDA, of course. Lately I find myself buying paper magazines again.

That being said the new Mac Mini does seem like a great product.

Reminds me of this: https://youtu.be/uSVqoW1rz6w?t=850

"We know all of your interests. Not just your interests you are willing to declare publicly on Facebook – we know your dark secrets, we know everything… (laughs)"

Because you can upsell a larger iCloud subscription to your customers using the new built in automatic cloud archival function. Then use compression server-side. $$$

I didn't see any mentions of check-summing. Please tell me this brand new filesystem won't be susceptible to bitrot?

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

I prefer XBMCtorrent over Popcorn-app anyway. It even supports search from within the XBMC menu, multiple trackers, can be controlled via remote on a HTPC etc.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=174736

I’d gladly pay for Netflix but it is not available in my country and this is the closest thing I have found so far.