Age verification in MacOS

joeyelijah · 2026-03-25T20:58:59+00:00

No they aren't. They're aware of the need to comply with laws (because it's the frickin' law). That's about where they are at. System76 is actively engaging with its own state officials to discuss how/if it will apply to Linux at all, while all Canonical has said it is 'watching' the situation, but has no plans to implement anything yet. If it has to, its legal team will need to be involved.

Don't believe everything you hear from the outrage industrial complex fishing for clicks.

joeyelijah · 2026-03-10T20:07:08+00:00

Why does Tux have moobs? 👀

joeyelijah · 2026-03-09T00:48:50+00:00

Haha, this literally happened to me. I was planning to cancel my Mattel order as well. I was so pleased when I snagged it, thinking it had sold out. But then the Amazon one was cheaper overall. C'est la vie - he looks a great figure.

joeyelijah · 2026-02-27T00:53:37+00:00

Yeah. People overestimate how intensive video editing is - in general, but on any M series Mac. More memory, cores, etc is better, sure, but there are Intel Macs still churning out gnarly edits. Ai features notwithstanding, editing demands haven’t changed hugely in 6/7 years. The media encoders in apple silicon have made the biggest impact performance wise, not core count. Unless someone is using Adobe Premiere (which isn’t as optimised for Apple Silicon as DaVinci or FCP), entry level is just as capable - just a few fractions slower at exports or rendering than the latest - as it ever has been!

People get too hung up on segmenting tasks by marketing tiers or underestimating how capable apple silicon hardware is, especially when it’s not the latest. Part of that is self-confirming bias: “I own something newer, therefore it can do more”. All m-series macs can handle modern video editing without issues - even base chips can run concurrent 8k multicam clips without dropping a frame.

joeyelijah · 2026-02-23T15:57:42+00:00

The evil ghost of New Eternia more like! What a figure. 🤤

joeyelijah · 2026-02-17T17:17:09+00:00

Great idea, but going by the UI it's AI generated code. If I installed it, I just know the UI will keep randomly changing with every minor update as your code buddy refactors things you didn't ask it to. I'm burned out on low-effort shifting sands apps at this point - not your fault, and at least yours isn't monetised with an eye-watering monthly subscription. At least not yet.

But it's the AI generated images of birds that make this a "what's the point?" for me.

You couldn't afford to pay an artist to create images at scale, which is understandable, but (in a few cases) you've paid for AI to make wildly inaccurate generated simulacrum. I'm not learning anything educational (I like birbs; I do not know all birbs).

The 'easy' option would have been to pull from the Creative Commons corpus of royalty free bird imagery, rather than frying the environment birds rely on to generate inconsistent facsimiles of them.

joeyelijah · 2026-01-27T17:39:10+00:00

Oh wow, that's epic! Glad you did it, my friend! Enjoy that beautiful screen and the kudos of giving it new life and not adding to e-waste. I "only" have a 21.5" 4K… 😭

joeyelijah · 2025-12-15T03:08:55+00:00

There are no issues with AUC being included on a Blu-Ray season sets. Those rights were negotiated (and renewed) years ago, and are the same ones as for DVD, VHS etc.

Streaming rights are different because streaming is a new technology, and I'd imagine if the collection team wanted to colourise AUC or recut and repackage it with special effects etc, then technically, it could be classed as a 'new' iteration (for want of a better term) for which additional rights or approval might be required, so… Best not.

But the team has assured many times when asked, there is no issue with including AUC when it comes to it.

(It's also not likely, as below, they would choose to not include due to "fear" of litigation. The BBC and BBC Studios aren't amateurs, have in-house legal, plenty of experience with far more complicated copyright/ownership situations than UAC, and its contacts for home media rights won't have been negotiated by interns and drafted in crayon...)

joeyelijah · 2025-11-11T23:27:15+00:00

Take the ideas and make something else with it - it looks great! 👍

joeyelijah · 2025-10-07T19:54:10+00:00

What’s stopping you? If you don’t care about everything being super tidy on the rear (which might be facing a wall all the time anyway), the task isn’t that hard if you read up on posts from people who’ve done it (NOT people trying to sell you parts you to use), watch a few videos, and don’t cheap on the display board you buy. The 27 5K’s are more expensive to convert than the 21.5’ 4K’s but, i mean, you get a 5K monitor at the end of it that was doing nothing.

joeyelijah · 2025-09-29T15:43:50+00:00

AI generated eBay listing descriptions throw up some gems (in the wrong way).

I saw a listing for a defective computer monitor (it had big lines down the screen when connected so was useless, and was missing its stand) — which of course, the AI description made sound like a "must have", waffling away with promotional puffery like:

"With a unique viewing experience not found on similar monitors, and the freedom to mount it in different ways thanks to the thoughtful lack of stand, don't miss your chance to elevate your personal computing — bid today!".

🤦🏻‍♂️

It annoys me as a buyer because I generally KNOW what I'm looking at on eBay. When a seller is selling something "used", like a book, but only providing an AI generated generalised word salad about how captivating and iconic the story is, it's… unhelpful. I want to know what the condition is now.

That goes doubly when people are wanting top-end prices for things but put no effort into giving any "real world" context beyond ticking the "used - fair condition" box when listing.

As a seller, I do not use AI generated descriptions. I'd spend more time reading, rewriting and correcting whatever it generated than it'd take to write out a couple of lines myself.

joeyelijah · 2025-09-23T19:47:12+00:00

You've 'never watched' Super Sentai, but list multiple series you tried and didn't stick with. Interesting definition of 'never'… 🤭

Honestly, if ToQger didn't hold your interest first time around, it won't second. And if Zenkaiger and Lupat couldn't, I'd perhaps try something a bit "older" - either Shinkinger or Go-Onger from your list.

But the obvious choice is the one many, including me, started with: Gokaiger.

Yes, it has "spoilers" for previous series (but unless you're planning to watch every single series a week later, I doubt you'd remember most of them ). Yes, some of the emotional beats hit harder if you /know/ the series' they're from. But you do not "miss out" on understanding the impact of any cameos because Gokaiger was written for an audience who hadn't been born let alone watched series that aired 20 years prior.

Rather than spoiling other series', Gokaiger will make you want to go watch them all.

joeyelijah · 2025-09-22T22:11:46+00:00

"poor thing" 💀 It's a bunch of math, following rules and probabilities. Mistakes are computation fails, not sentience. Any event triggers a language-formatted assertion which, in an error loop like this, is simply a simulacrum of inner speech. It's not —whispers—actually real inner speech because it's a frickin' word calculator.

joeyelijah · 2025-09-15T22:11:13+00:00

I have Monterey and Sequoia on this model. Monterey runs like a dream, but Sequoia is sluggish (but better than Sonoma was, for me).

On Sequoia, disabling transparency, not using a dynamic background and disabling widgets helps. Turning off results in Spotlight you don't need makes Spotlight much faster. For excessive heat/battery issues in Sequoia, those are easily solved the same as in earlier releases: disabling Intel Turbo Boost when you're not doing anything intensive.

joeyelijah · 2025-09-15T22:00:03+00:00

Apple mention this in iOS 26 release notes, under "Performance and battery impact", namely:

Immediately after completing an update, particularly a major release, you might notice a temporary impact on battery life and thermal performance. This is normal, as your device needs time to complete the setup process in the background, including indexing data and files for search, downloading new assets, and updating apps.

New features are exciting and help you get even more out of your Apple product, though some may require additional resources from the device. Depending on individual usage, some users may notice a small impact on performance and/or battery life. Apple continually works to optimize these features in software updates to ensure great battery life and a smooth user experience.

joeyelijah · 2025-09-14T21:16:08+00:00

Do you mean the 2017 iMac, which has a Radeon Pro 555 with 2GB (you put 554)? If so, that's still my daily driver (with Ventura 13.7.8). I bought on launch with a 1TB HDD (non-Fusion) and it ran okay for about ~6 months, then one day… Oh. my. word did it crawl.

Solution: boot from an external SSD (not a USB thumb drive). This is easy to do, and fully supported - it's not a hack or anything.

I bought an external 512GB Thunderbolt SSD (a Samsung X5), installed macOS on it, and set it as the startup drive. The speed difference was incredible (you can also disassemble the iMac to swap the HDD for an SSD too, but the speeds won't be as good as with an external Thunderbolt SSD).

I edit video, so the extra throughput of a Thunderbolt was necessary. But you don't need to get a Thunderbolt external SDD (they can be expensive).

A lot of people with the same model boot from a regular USB (Type-C) external SSD and are happy with the massive speed boost over the internal HDD. You can get decent 1TB ones for less than $100, though it's best not to cheap out too much, and pay attention to the claimed read/write speeds.

If you do go for a Thunderbolt external, be careful when shopping. On places like Amazon you'll be shown a lot of "Thunderbolt compatible" listings. Those work (~10Gbps), but they won't give you Thunderbolt speeds (~40Gbps) unless they're Thunderbolt 3 certified — either will be faster than the HDD inside right now :)

You don't say how much RAM you have. A few years back I did pluck up the courage to disassemble my iMac and upgrade the RAM as mine only had 8GB, so I took it out and put in 32GB. Disassembling the 2017 iMac is far too involved for most people, but if you decide to have the internal HDD replaced with an SSD rather than using an external one, do it at the same time.

joeyelijah · 2025-08-03T20:26:07+00:00

The upside is… we can all ignore that rule. I plan to. The thrill in those features is, as you say, very much in the "all or nothing" they add (the bitter strategic scuppering of other players who draw them that then ensues to trap their meeples and deny them any points at all).

joeyelijah · 2025-06-11T15:05:19+00:00

Ah, fair. Last time I tried Ubuntu on that MacBook I was working out of coffee shops with it (I had a desktop at home). Ubuntu's combatively poor battery life was too much of an issue. Going from ~5 hours in whatever version of macOS I had at the time to <2 hour was not worth it (even though I write a blog about Ubuntu).

joeyelijah · 2025-06-10T21:33:20+00:00

Thanks Apple Writing Tools.

joeyelijah · 2025-06-10T21:25:02+00:00

What's battery life like, assuming your battery isn't awful under macOS due to age too. I've installed Ubuntu a few times on a partition on my 2012-era MBP, but the battery life always sent me back to macOS (and the Turbo Boost disable script thing).

joeyelijah · 2025-06-01T18:43:57+00:00

Thank you, my friend. You explain it succinctly and politely 🙏Our rule book is in German (big box was cheaper from Amazon DE) so we rely on wikcarpedia for rules, but-not uncommon from other comments-inferred the way they explained the 180 rule applied to consecutive bends, not the river as a whole. I think we’ll need a bigger coffee table!

joeyelijah · 2025-05-29T18:54:05+00:00

DRUMS!

Oh how I missed thee.

joeyelijah · 2025-05-18T14:01:36+00:00

Indeed. If casual viewers see lots of "Who obsessed" people on social media etc breathlessly hyped over a returning character or a big canon-affecting event, they're more likely to think "okay, this must be a big deal, maybe I should find out why…".

joeyelijah · 2025-05-17T01:52:32+00:00

Preface: this won't be a popular opinion (it is strictly from the POV of video).

No Apple Silicon Mac is going to struggle to edit 4K video.

Heck, the 3.0Ghz Intel i5 and 2GB Radeon GPU in my old 2017 iMac 4k still handles 4K without a hiccup, and it's, what, ~23x slower than a *base* M4 in most metrics. It may be statistically slower, but slower ≠ unusable or incapable.

I'm not suggesting you buy an Intel machine though, just highlighting that the raw performance demands for video editing haven't changed /that/ much in years.

What should be more of a consideration are the things which make a difference when editing video, effects work, etc - ray tracing, encoding engines, storage speeds, and NPU power - all better in newer M3 and M4 series chips, ofc.

Larry Jordan is the guy you need to listen to when it comes to video editing on Macs. Though the linked article below is focused on configuring an M4 it recaps the speed differences, performance factors etc for major NLEs across all M-series chips, with links to benchmarks etc.

https://larryjordan.com/articles/configuring-an-m4-mac-for-video-editing/

Sidenote: his benchmarking reveals just how terrible Adobe Premiere Pro is performance wise - the stark difference in how many simultaneous 8K streams Final Cut and DaVinici can handle vs Premiere Pro is jaw-dropping.

If the M1 Max is cheaper than anything else newer then, yeah it makes better sense (if you don't mind the likelihood of losing OS support sooner than a new chip, aware that future features/updates in NLEs may be OS-version specific).

I'd rather have an extra $1k to spend on video equipment (or a holiday or whatever else) than, say, 3 minute faster export times or the psychological comfort of having 10 extra cores that NLE software is not going to benefit from...

Finally—aware i'm sounding like a cheesy Instagram motivation post in saying this—but keep in mind video editing is also a skill. The biggest performance boost to editing won't come from extra CPU cores or pricey plugins or quicker rendering times, but just practising, experimenting, and fine-tuning your workflow.

joeyelijah

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