I have an M1 MacBook Air. I use UTM to run a Debian 11 virtual machine.

After the initial setup, updating and upgrading, installing Firefox and a few small programs, (I almost called them apps, d'oh), the Debian.utm file size was about 6GB. Now, less than a month later, it's almost 9GB.

The VM size increases after each use. I haven't downloaded or installed anything close to 3GB worth. I have downloaded files, then put them into the trash and emptied the trash, could the trash not be emptying properly?

I have run ncdu, but nothing stands out. When I drill down into /usr and into each large folder, no sub folder is larger than a few 100MB. I can't see any big files lurking.

I've googled using many search terms, but I can't get past results that are about how to increase the size of a VM that is running out of room.

Thanks very much for reading this, any ideas?

I happen to be in possession of a 2013 MacBook Pro that runs macOS 11 Big Sur and it's decent for that.

Let's say I wanted to run the latest apps and macOS on it, things that don't work on Big Sur. I know there are unofficial ways to get those on the MacBook, OpenCore Legacy Patcher is what most articles recommend that I've seen.

Has anyone here tried that, and were there any big problems with that setup? Were there any broken apps or features after upgrading? Did everything become slower?

I have an external drive (3.5" hdd, SATA) in an enclosure (usb 3) (purchased separately), connected to a thunderbolt dock (OWC) connected alternately to an iMac and a macbook pro. The HDD goes to sleep, and causes problems. Freezes, weird internet access problems, kernel panics.

I have done some research, and can't seem to figure out:

how to know whether it is the drive, enclosure, or computer causing the sleep, although, fiddling with various settings on the mac seemed to have no effect, although it may have increased my battery usage :(

how to adjust settings on the drive, or in the enclosure.

How to determine what the sleep behavior of prospective drives will be.

As a workaround, I tried to write a zsh script to touch the drive ever few seconds. This kinda worked, but was a struggle to figure out appropriate permissions issues and how to make it run automatically.

I welcome all guidance, pointers to resources, clarifications, incantations, well-wishes.

I use Slack, WhatsApp, Discord and Facebook's Messenger. On my computers, rather than installing dedicated apps, I've always just used these services' browser versions. It allows me to block ads with my browser's ad blocker and modify the UIs with other extensions that I use.

But in terms of privacy — and more specifically, in terms of what the service has access to outside of their own walled gardens — is there a difference between using these services through a browser or their dedicated apps? I use both Windows and Mac computers, if that makes a difference. My browser of choice is Firefox and I run the services in their own containers.

On my phone, I just use the provided apps and get notifications that way. I am well aware that most of these protocols are not great for privacy to begin with, but I'm not currently looking for other messaging systems.

Hey Tildes,

I am wondering if anyone has any recommendations for a way to transcribe voice memos on iOS/macOS.

I want to take up a weekly/daily/whatever journal, however, I felt it may be good for me to use the voice memos feature on my iPhone as I go on longer daily walks and I always have my phone on me. However, going back to look at old voice memos can be rather time consuming rather than just reading/skimming through a text version.

The app can be paid or free. I am hoping to be able to export into multiple file types as well that I could open on any device I really want.

Hi everyone!

I've been using Vox for about a year now to listen to music and while there are some good qualities to it, I'm honestly fed up with the lack of volume normalisation and having to constantly adjust my volume manually (There's heaps years old of threads on their forums requesting or complaining about this). So here I am looking for a replacement and was wondering if anyone has a setup that I could copy. Here are the requirements that I have:

• I can stream my own music library of high quality music (FLAC format).
• It provides volume normalisation.
• I can set my whole library to shuffle.
• Native macOS client.

I've been doing some looking around and so far the most likely solution will be for me to set up a Gonic server at home and use Strawberry Music Player on my laptop. A close second contender was Youtube music but they don't provide a native client and I currently use a combination of keyboard shortcuts and applescripts to manage playback (I found media keys insufficient but that's a topic for another post).

I am currently paying a subscription fee for Vox so I don't mind if I have to pay for the new player, I'd prefer a service like that for ease of use rather than rolling out my own.

Update
For posterity I'm posting what I ended up doing. I tried Roon and while it looked and felt amazing, the ability for streaming out of home is very limited, it's intended to stream within a local network. It appears you can only do remote streaming to a mobile device and requires a custom port to be forwarded, I wanted to put this behind a reverse proxy but was not able to do that (Seems it's not supported).
I did not try Plexamp, after all the work I did to get Gonic set up properly it felt like I was doing too much work myself to pay for a solution. Ideally I wanted something that would "just work" even if it wasn't free but no solution did that. If I had access to a free trial I would have probably tested it as well.
I already had Gonic working within my home network going into this but setup of it is still trivial. The bulk of the work came in setting a dynamic DNS set up, and a reverse proxy (NPM) inside my network to provide HTTPS support with Letsencrypt certificates for Gonic (It's only HTTP). I spend too much time trying to have a secure setup (Crowdsec + Cloudflare) but after ditching that, I'm still happy with it and looking at logs it does not appear there's any significant risk to my network (I'm also using a geoip block to outright block requests from some countries).
As far as clients go, I settled with Strawberry. Tried the following:

• Sonixd: It had limited hotkey functionality and doesn't seem to be actively developed anymore.
• Submariner: Did not work.
• Clementine: Current version crashes on launch, rc version complaints about wrong credentials when connecting to the server.

My mother is 65+ years old and loves everything Apple, but whenever I need to touch her computer I find myself questioning that choice.

The degree to which Apple abstract things from the user enables the most absurd behaviors. macOS gives little indication about which programs are open, and the red x on the top left corner just closes windows, not apps. Because the session persistence is so robust, the consequence is that my mother's Macbook Air keeps 12+ programs and their states open at all times literally for months. Every time she comes over from another continent, I close a bunch of stuff and get her an instant performance boost. Plus, she's never really sure if a program is open or not.

The concept of (work)Spaces, as well as the launchpad, spotlight, or even how Finder really works is beyond her. Because of her over-reliance on the dock, she never enabled autohiding, so her screen real state is always crowded.

Folders are entirely immaterial for her. Everything goes to "Downloads" with no organization whatsoever, and she's always looking for stuff "manually" by reading the filenames.

Her machine is running Mojave, and right now I can only see that finder displays two "Libraries": Documents and Downloads. Linux and Windows have Videos, Downloads, Music, etc. Those are easy to make sense of. What's the supposed Mac alternative? Buy stuff on iTunes. Well, if something is not on Amazon Video or Netflix my mother is a pirate like me (hehe), so she never made sense of it and I truly despise using iTunes for doing anything at all. She also downloads a bunch of media related to her job.

I'm not saying macOS is bad, I'm just asking: is it really the best choice for non-technical older people?

Hi Tilderinos!

As the title says, I have used Android almost my entire life. Many parts of the internet (especially reddit) really look down on Apple for many reasons (may of them valid). Starting about 3 weeks ago, I started to wonder if the grass really was greener on the other side. I would like to share my experience.

My first smart device was an iPod tough 4th generation. Back then, iOS was really bad. Notifications took over the screen. If you didn't want to deal with a notification right then, you had to dismiss it permanently. Multitasking did not exist (until a few updates later) Android was miles better then. Switching was the obvious choice. Flash forward to now, through many different android devices. I had a Samsung Galaxy S10e, Galaxy Watch LTE, and Galaxy Buds. I had the best ecosystem of devices that Android has to offer (Tizen vs WearOS is arguable, but I have not used WearOS).

I wanted to get back into mountain biking, and I wanted to bring only my buds and watch. This should be an obvious use case for an LTE watch and bluetooth earbuds. Unfortunately, transferring music to the watch is a difficult prospect. You must have the files downloaded onto your phone, but I use Spotify or Google Play Music. Spotify does have a Tizen app, but it is pretty terrible. Also, I wanted to have audiobooks and podcasts downloaded to listen to. I could not find any apps for audiobooks or podcasts for my Galaxy Watch. All my google-fu got me to the answer: Just transfer the files and play them in the watch music app. This was a pretty bad solution for a few reasons. First, listening times did not sync with the phone. Second, I don't think that the watch music app would save the timestamp when you closed it. Finally, the Galaxy Watch has 4gb storage, and only leaves around 2gb usable. Game of Thrones book 5 weighs in at about 1.3gb. If I wanted my book and even a single episode from most of my podcasts, that would not be enough storage.

Because of this experience, I started looking into the Apple Watch. My grandfather gave me his old iPhone 6s+ and I got an Apple Watch series 3 LTE for a great deal on craigslist. I thought the phone would be a downgrade from an s10e. In a few ways it is, such as the screen, battery life, and camera. But for everything else about this phone, it is just as good as my s10e, which is 4 years newer. I still have my s10e, and I keep it charged. There are very few times where I want to use my s10e over my 6s+. This was not what I was expecting when I switched. I expected to use the 6s+ to see if I could handle a new iPhone, just so I could use an Apple Watch. Since then, I borrowed my dad's old MacBook Pro mid 2012 non-retina, to see if I liked OS X. I am currently typing this in that MacBook. I also bought the AirPods Pro.

Almost every single interaction between these devices is quick, intuitive, and seamless. OS X is way better than windows. Parallels makes running windows software a dream. When I bought parallels, I was able to pay with my watch through Apple Pay. I have not heard of any software doing anything like that with google/samsung pay and windows. Overcast is able to automatically sync podcasts and playback times to the watch, and easily switch which device is playing. Audible is a bit more clunky (and I am still looking for an alternative for books), but it is possible to get books on the watch, and the playback time syncs without issue. The AirPods Pro seamlessly switch between the phone and watch. They are already paired with the MBP through iCloud, although they do not seamlessly switch. I think this is because the bluetooth chip in the computer is too old. CarPlay is miles better than android auto. Siri is just as good for most thing as google assistant, and is more consistent.

This is a pretty long post already, but the bottom line is every single apple device I am trying out is better than the corresponding android/windows device that is 2-4 years newer. After many years of shunning apple, I am back on the apple bandwagon. I am currently planning on replacing all of my devices with something from apple (except my gaming desktop, unfortunately). I would like to hear about your experiences with switching to or from either ecosystem.

(Mods: I wasn't sure if this should be in ~talk or ~tech. Please move it if necessary)

I figured one thread for all of Apple's new product announcements would be enough.

The new MacBook Air with the same redesigned keyboard as the 16-inch model and newer processors. I'm glad to see that they're bringing the keyboard to the rest of the lineup so quickly (I'm writing this on a 2017 MacBook Pro and this keyboard is not pleasant even after two and a half years of adjustment).

The new iPad Pro is where things get interesting. Same design as the previous iPad Pros, but now with an ultra wide camera and a LIDAR sensor.

The iPad Pro also has a new keyboard and trackpad accessory that looks interesting. It has an adjustable hinge that can hold the iPad at any angle, which is one of my biggest complaints with the current keyboard case. I'm interested to see how well it works in a lap when hands on videos start coming out.

I'm excited that Apple is bringing official pointing support to iOS (beyond the basic accessibility feature in iOS 13). This could be a game changer. I'm also excited that it's coming to iOS 13.4 (and all iPads that can run it) and they aren't waiting until iOS 14 to roll out the feature. I've wanted Apple to start rolling out features on an ongoing basis (like Google is doing with the Pixel Feature Drops) rather than as one big drop every fall.

I'm thinking about getting a new printer. My needs are basically to print out textual documents 2-3 times per month from macOS. I don't need to print photos. I will not buy an inkjet because of the outrageous price of the ink. I would like to have fax support (my spouse sees a lot of doctors and they still use fax machines a lot, and we're not comfortable sending personal medical info via a fax service on the web), and it would be nice if we could also scan documents. So I'm thinking a multi-function device.

We currently have a Brother 7840W MFC with print, fax, copy, and scan. It's over 10 years old (maybe 15?) and I dislike it. It's been slowly losing functionality over the past 5+ years. The WiFi went out, but I was able to connect it via wired ethernet to a computer and share it from there. The drivers insist that there's a paper jam, but there isn't and it prints just fine (but sounds like some of the internal mechanical components are going to die any day now.) The UI of the printer is awful. I recall having to use the phone pad to enter my WiFi password, and it was like texting on a Motorola StarTAC. (Like if you want the letter "C" press the number "2" three times, etc.) The drivers and related software don't work like normal macOS software. (Disclosure: I also once wrote a scanner driver for Brother and it was horrible, but they shipped it, so I'm not real comfortable putting their software on my computer. But that was 25 years ago, so maybe they're better now?)

I've heard horrible things about the drivers and software of most other major printer makers - HP, Epson, Lexmark, etc. I'm guessing what I'm looking for doesn't exist, but I just want a multi-function device in as small a package as is reasonable, and with a UI on the device and software that doesn't suck and that won't die on me in < 5 years. Does such a thing exist?