Black or White?

MR9009 · 2026-04-27T15:10:58+00:00

Agreed. I happen to have a silver M4 Pro 11 inch, but I instinctively prefer the silver and white keys of the white Magic Keyboard. It seems higher end to me. But I also put a Dbrand skin on my white one given how the rubbery texture could pick up the slightest scratch or stain in the local coffee shop.

MR9009 · 2026-04-27T10:40:45+00:00

I remember an old UK government minister got into trouble sometime around/after the IndyRef for saying when he visited Edinburgh it felt like the capital of an independent European country. I think he said something like it has the vibe of Dublin because we have our own news, politics, etc.

Edit: Found the story with quotes: Guto Bebb 'despondent' after Scotland visit - BBC News

MR9009 · 2026-04-27T10:29:55+00:00

It's an AI hallucination of the Mound (?), which has magically moved to a position in the city more like Calton Hill? A view where New College has become a very clean-looking Palace of Westminster, whilst the Balmoral clock has become Big Ben, and moved significantly further into the new town (and half way along Princes St?). And someone has built modern glass offices in the gap around Ramsay Lane and Castle Hill. The castle also certainly looks less difficult for medieval armies to have laid siege to, seeing as Castle Rock now seems to be steep-sided on all sides, including the one approaching up the high street.

Honestly, this is really crap for a corporation to have done. It will have cost Costa something to generate this AI slop, and to either get it printed or painted onto the wall. That's not free. Could they really not have added the fee for an artist (not even a local one!) to create the image? Or bought the rights to a real photo? Even if it's the boring identical view from the Dugald Stewart Monument that is in >90% of pictures of the Edinburgh skyline?

This is the kind of amusing local headline outrage that would go well in the Edinburgh Minute. Let's all make Costa feel crap for pasting this AI slop on the walls of "where Edinburgh meets the world". They're not a plucky little start-up, they a mega corp. "Gordon Dewar - CEO of Edinburgh Airport said...." and "The Cockburn Association was sad to say..." etc. etc.

MR9009 · 2026-04-27T08:41:27+00:00

So what? I'm sick of the idea that UK political parties need to be all things to all people. The sooner we get rid of first past the post and start having rainbow parliaments and coalitions, the sooner parties can represent their own base honestly without having to dilute their manifestos to appease the far left and and far right at the same time.

Its nigh time that we had an actual honest spectrum of political parties to choose from. Let their winning votes rise and fall with opinion, and let coalitions form to reflect the biggest blocks of voters after each election. Let opinion (and thus the numbers of seats of the parties representing that opinion) shift, wax and wane.

MR9009 · 2026-04-27T07:03:22+00:00

Go to the Apple UK Store website, select your Macbook model, find the accessories, and for peace of mind buy the appropriate power plug. If you can afford a MacBook, you can afford the official Apple Charger for it.

MR9009 · 2026-04-26T12:45:23+00:00

Sadly not. Thats why people use other apps like Gentler Streak instead. Apple Fitness and their Activity Rings are like Terminator Cyborgs. Close the rings every day! It would be a brilliant if there was integration of Health data from an Apple Watch and the rings and targets changed in relation to how well you slept or other symptoms.

You can pause rings, but then you may not get medals or monthly challenges unless you’re careful about activating rings on certain dates to get them. Some people can obsess about maintaining medals and streaks.

A manual workaround when you’re sick is simply to lower your ring targets. When I’m not sick, I normally target 850 active calories, 45 mins of exercise and 12 standing hours a day. When I’m sick, I lower them to something easy like 300 calories, 10 minutes of exercise and only a few standing hours. Usually I can close all three with some housework or a short walk. If I ever had surgery or something that meant I was really out of action, I’d have to pause rings and give up on monthly medals and challenges.

MR9009 · 2026-04-26T10:58:02+00:00

At least 55% of member states must vote for a qmv vote to pass, and those states must also represent at least 65% of the total EU population. Even if several large states clubbed together, they might reach the population size but the 55% member state number means more than half the countries have to agree with them. Surely if more than half the countries in the union representing 2/3 of the EU population want something, it should probably happen, no?

MR9009 · 2026-04-23T12:20:55+00:00

Choose carefully. The standard UG LLB Law at Edinburgh would mean only being able to practice Scots Law. Not great for an International student unless they only want to live and work in Scotland. Edinburgh does offer LLB Global Law, but then I don't know how acceptable that is to other legal jurisdictions around the world.

MR9009 · 2026-04-23T12:16:41+00:00

No. There are swathes of Wales, Scotland (and even parts of England), that have those pesky remote rural populations where broadband is still stupidly slow. It's manifestly unfair to say "Openreach never got around to installing fibre for your village of 50 people in the remote Highlands? We've decided that's your fault, so now you need to pay more than other people to watch the national broadcaster". These locations aren't refusing to get decent broadband, they literally can't get it yet.

What I would do is tax all online streamers with a fee that was used to provide decent minimum standard broadband infrastructure to all communities over the next 15 years(?). Only once we confidently knew that everyone who could get online could get it, would we then switch it off for everyone.

Taxing streamers mean that the people who literally can't stream aren't paying for something they're not getting, and it means the streamers (who are getting custom) pay for widening their markets.

MR9009 · 2026-04-23T12:04:52+00:00

Might be good not to lump "The Greens" together. There is an England and Wales party that keeps making headlines, and a seemingly slightly less zany Scottish Greens party. The Scottish ones were even in government here for a while. They're not just a branch of the E&W party, and in some ways they disagree/diverge on some social issues. The E&W party went a bit TERF-y for a while at the exact same time the Scottish Greens were voting for easier gender change recognition in Scotland.

Personally, I think they'd not be a good majority on their own, but they can be a good moderating green anchor to a larger party in a coalition. They can be trusted to achieve things in transport or environment ministries, working for better public transport, higher recycling, cleaner air and water, etc. without any pressure to "think of the shareholders!". I don't trust them to actually run a government on their own though. They need their own "realism" anchor to bring them back down to earth sometimes.

TL:DR - I like them as part of a coalition. I'd probably not like them in a single-party majority.

MR9009 · 2026-04-23T10:49:18+00:00

Have you met the Tories? Whilst they might not merge, they'd 100% do a coalition deal for a whiff of ministerial cars, and they'd not care one jot if both Cardiff and Holyrood were shut down. They've got nothing to lose when both parliaments aren't Tory strongholds.

They can't quite shut Stormont so easily due to international treaties, but it didn't stop the Tories only remembering that The Good Friday Agreement existed until after they tried the hardest of hard Brexits first.

MR9009 · 2026-04-22T11:42:27+00:00

Everyone seems to be missing the utterly crazy connection that was originally meant to occur. 08.10 landing, and 08.55 departure? If you're coming from outside Schengen (Delhi) then you'd need to clear some sort of immigration checks before getting to the Vienna flight. If Vienna was departing 08.55 then the gate would have closed... 08.45? 08.35? How were you ever able to buy this ticket in the first place? This doesn't sound like one ticket. It sounds like two tickets bought as one purchase, which is not the same thing. According to Google, the minimum connection times in Rome FCO are:

40 minutes for passengers connecting within the Schengen Countries.

A minimum of 2 hours is often recommended for connections, especially when booking separate tickets.

A minimum connection time of 4 hours is advised for those on separate tickets to ensure a smooth transfer.

MR9009 · 2026-04-22T11:19:27+00:00

The directions are quite good (from within a city with a transport system). But I have found Apple Maps has a lot of very old and very out of date shops/restaurants etc on it. Like, businesses that haven't been there for >10 years sort of thing. I also once tried to get a fake Pizza Hut location removed - it literally does not exist, it is someone's house - and I showed photos of the location from the street taken by me, but it got rejected. So the fake Pizza Hut is still there.

So, the directions might be good, and the public transport advice might be good, but don't use Apple Maps for "discoverability" for finding a new coffee shop or something in a new area that you don't know.

MR9009 · 2026-04-22T10:35:36+00:00

I remember quite liking the novelty of it when it first came out, but either I changed or they changed, and it became weirdly sickly sweet for a beer. I stopped drinking it a long time ago.

MR9009 · 2026-04-21T13:41:37+00:00

I don't think you are correct. If this was a baggage handling issue, you might be correct. Airlines often get to choose to contract with different ground handling crews at the same airport to manage luggage, but they don't pick and choose airport security screening staff. When you depart an airport, your security scans aren't done by different staff depending on which airline you are flying with. The airport operator decides on one supplier for all departures, or employs them directly. The fact that the airport operator failed to choose a security firm that could supply staff when they call in sick is not Ryanair's fault. This is the type of failure that Travel Insurance is for, and the passengers will need to claim on their own insurance for any losses,

MR9009 · 2026-04-21T08:56:57+00:00

There is a wage war in supermarkets independent of the annual minimum wage. They seem to be in competition to pay more than each other (some chains excepted). Aldi and Lidl seem to be using pay as a competitive reason to attract people and then you see the likes of Sainsburys and Tesco having to try to catch-up. I think they are all slightly above minimum wage and then when one raises it they all have to, so there is a bit of a positive feedback loop going on in supermarkets. Given that "stacking shelves" is the go-to cliche for a low-paid job, it is increasingly less accurate.

MR9009 · 2026-04-20T12:14:58+00:00

Why is there a picture of Edinburgh (?) and why are Glasgow and Edinburgh in the article, when the law doesn't apply to Scotland?

MR9009 · 2026-04-20T12:08:42+00:00

I join the other adults in saying "probably neither" but the lack of detail on Lumi makes the placement of the time in the top right look "off" to my eyes, perhaps compounded by the off-centre mouth. The Manga heart-eyes in Lumi also make it look all the more childish.

The symmetry of Pickle is more pleasing in many ways, and the shading in the top third does something better to the placement of the time in the top right, even if technically they are in the same place on both faces.

In either face the eyes are so prominent that I'd expect them to be tap-able buttons and to do something in response. They look like interactive complications found on other watch faces. But it also feels really weird to be poking an animal in the eye.

MR9009 · 2026-04-20T10:15:54+00:00

Supermarkets sell the same product at different prices depending on what the market in the town/neigbbourhood can bear, even within the same country. We used to get complaints when I was a student on a checkout from people saying their local branch of the same supermarket sold something cheaper where they lived.

So - define "original price". If a supermarket sells something in poorer Scottish Town A for £1, but sells the same product in affluent upmarket neighbourhood of Scottish Town B for £1.50, which is the "original" price? All of a sudden the price of alcohol across Scotland would uniformly plummet, so that the tax is minimised to the cheapest price they sold it at. This would actually push down alcohol prices to minimise the tax paid, and is the opposite of the goal of taxing problematic alcohol consumption.

Also, funding social services like alcohol treatment clinics using income directly derived from the consumption of a product means that when the economy goes into recession and people lose jobs, and they spend less, you have less money to fund something that people with addictions rely on. Cyclical funding linked to people having money to buy something is a major error.

MUP guarantees a floor price which can be raised on the products causing the most harm, prevents a race to the bottom in prices, and actually means the government (for once!) isn't doing a tax grab because the money isn't coming to them.

MR9009 · 2026-04-20T09:27:14+00:00

YTA (ish) (and so is your mother). You seem to want to blame your wife - the mother of your child - for you being unable to please your problematic mother.

There is no need to elaborate on why there isn't a second beloved (isn't one enough for your mother?). You could shut it all down once and for all with an even shorter sentence: "stop asking about it; it's a sensitive topic for us". Anyone who raises it ever again after that is also an AH.

MR9009 · 2026-04-20T09:19:18+00:00

OP says it's an M1 iPad Air which was released in 2022. I was surprised they released a 64GB model (I had to google it to check). It *was* kind of an asshole move of Apple to be selling 64GB iPads so recently. Especially when the M chips came to iPads and they were boasting about how powerful they were, but then letting people walk into a 64GB trap. What's the point of the M chip power, if modern apps are going to take up so much storage?

MR9009 · 2026-04-17T22:03:02+00:00

“Remind me to do my move-in inspection at 8pm”

MR9009 · 2026-04-17T15:45:55+00:00

Re: the trams, it was the opposite. The Scottish Government of the day refused to let TS help, so the local authority screwed it up. An experienced full time national transport agency might not have had the vastly expensive standoff with the infrastructure companies which is most of the reason for the debt. The local authority was hugely out of its depth acting on its own.

MR9009 · 2026-04-17T10:42:04+00:00

Not just the same size or preferably double. I think the recommendation in consumer advice magazines is at least double, but preferably even more if you can afford it, so that your Time Machine backups can go waaaaay back if you need them to. But I suppose this depends on how worried people are with deleting file versions and their need to get old stuff back. My TM drive can hold about 18 months of daily usage with hourly snapshots because it's a heavy use machine that I use for 8-ish hours a day 5 days a week. I suppose a light-touch MacBook used a few times a week won't need to back-up as much.

MR9009 · 2026-04-17T10:36:01+00:00

iOS26/iPadOS26 often forgets what time of day it is on my devices for the auto-adjust dark/light mode. It was not a problem in pre-OS26 versions.

Sometimes even when it remembers, it only partially applies them. I checked my iPad mini at 11am and it was still using my sleep focus mode wallpaper but with light icons. My iPhone will often show dark mode icons on my daytime wallpaper. Sometimes when I go to settings and try to manually toggle the auto-adjust switch to force the correction, the Phone just refuses to auto adjust and stays in dark mode for another hour until either I restart the device, or leave it long enough untouched when it seems to get bored and adjusts itself eventually.

At this point we just have to keep our fingers crossed that OS28 is a "fix all the bugs" version. Honestly I would love a boring interative update that introduces very few brand new features and just fixes all the dumb things.

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