I've been a long time Fi user on the Pixel line of phones, so I've always gotten the gold standard of service from Fi. My wife is an adamant iPhone user. We want to port her over to my plan, but I was hoping to get some recent feedback from anyone using a modern iPhone (just bought her a 16) -- All the things I find on Google are months to years old. If this is you, how well do the iPhone features (Visual voicemail, iMessage, RCS, FaceTime, 5G, etc) work for you on Fi?

Hi Tildes !

I was passively looking for an refresh of my current laptop (Thinkpad X1 carbon Gen 5; it's still working fine except some mysterious thermal profile¹), and a friend of mine working in retail told me he could sell me a Macbook Pro (the mid-range 14in one with the M3 Pro chip² at a heavy discount (more than half the price; it's a display model but he tells me it wasn't mistreated). It's a too good of a deal to pass on, so I accepted.

¹ it's constantly at 70C; I already changed the thermal paste and the battery.
² does that mean it's Macbook Pro Pro ?
³ and I guess the Thinkpad's going to be recycled as a home server. I half hope that running Linux on it will solve the thermal problem

My use case would be (in no particular order):

• photo/video processing: I know what I need and I already have a CaptureOne license. Davinci Resolve is enough (and plenty) for me
• programming (web dev, arduino; VScode's probably gonna be the second thing I'm going to install)(I'm kinda interested running a LLM locally, but have no experience with that)
• light CAD for 3d printing,
• gaming? My old gaming tower runs Elden Ring fine but struggle a bit with Baldur's Gate 3 (it's really the loading time, and loading textures), and it seems this MBP can run it fine.
• regular day-to-day browsing / office and adulting work

I would qualify myself as a power-user.

Background: I'm not entirely new to the Apple ecosystem. Back in uni I had the first unibody MBP sporting Leopard and then Snow Leopard. I then went with a X220t and then a my current X1.

Some questions:

• I see that BetterTouchTools is still a thing (back then I mapped three fingers swipe up to new tab, three finger swipe down to close tab, and twist to change tabs). I half remember one that was just a staging area living on a sidebar when moving file from one part of the finder to another (the name eludes me). Is there any other handy utilities I should be aware of ? That's also your prompt to plug in your favorite apps :)
• How's the dongle life (and what's the recommended one) ? While most of my stuff can be USB-C, I still have important stuff that requires USB-A (my photo printers, several portables hard-drive)
• Any interesting (gasp!) Android integration ? I'm not currently using any with my Windows machine (having Whatsapp/Telegram/Discord is sufficient), but I'm curious anyway.

Hi,

Thanks for looking at this. There is a specific comment in a reddit conversation that I want to share in a few different places. It's important to me.

I tried this a few years ago when I wanted to participate in r/bestof and I could not make sense of the instructions that they provided.

I am not a technologically skilled person but I have learned a few tricks using markdown while participating here on tildes.

Can someone please give advice and possibly help me troubleshoot ? I will be returning to my computer and hopefully trying out suggestions about four hours from the time stamp on this post.

I'm stuck in a bit of a rut for work and trying to help out a department. We're going through a massive cash flow problem that we will see the other side of. There is zero budget for this, but I have spare kit.

The problem is that Legal have pulled all paper archives for all of the projects for the past 20 years of operating and need them digitally stored. Right now, we have a company runner scanning in a document to email, who then saves it off to a folder structure and renames it. The structure is on SharePoint, but the scan is image, not even OCR'd.

I have discovered Paperless NGX and wonder if this would be a better option for fast ingest. I can host on prem easy enough, either on a bare metal or VM. It looks like it can SSOd via many different options.

Any input would be great before I just go ahead and do this. I'm after pros and cons, alternatives, etc.

Thanks.

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?