Apple in the shit. google has an erection

Showing my age, I confess to being a Mac user since 1984 having previously used a BBC Micro 2 and Dragon 32 - I have only used a Windows PC if I absolutely had to. I remember seeing one on Tomorrow's World (a UK BBC Science programme for anybody unfamiliar) and a few weeks later, I was sitting in front of one in a college Library to which I had no legitimate access not being a student but practically every day, I had to be kicked out when the library closed. I was mainly playing around with MacPaint (later SuperPaint) and MacDraw and then Aldus Pagemaker.

I didn't actually own one until I bought a second hand Mac Plus a few years later which had a jaw-dropping Rodine 40MB hard drive upgraded from 20MB that had a footprint the same size as the Mac. Still, it saved all the floppy swapping - if you had been fortunate to have a second floppy drive, any time saving was offset by confusion. I spent the next decade or so as an imposter in the graphic design world - no training just blagging my way until I started my own short lived business.

I loved the Mac back then - there was plenty of fun to be had under the hood and my favourite toy was ResEdit but when OS X was introduced, I was not impressed. Maybe my G3 wasn't powerful enough to run it at its best but even so, it had taken away so many of the things I had loved and I wrote a letter to three of the main Mac magazines all of which published it but the editor of one quoted from the letter in their editorial. As empowered as that made me feel, I might as well have been King Cnut. There was no stopping Apple's intentions and pretty much everything that is wrong with Apple today began, in my humble opinion, in 2001. It was almost as if AOL had become an operating system. I grew to accept it and eventually acknowledged its many advantages (I doubt that many remember the Font/DA mover which OS X made obsolete) but they all came at a price - the slowly constructed prison which was the antithesis of the mission statement laid out in the iconic 1984 advert - not unlike Google's 'Don't Be Evil' maxim. Apple is as evil and greedy a corporation as it is Orwellian. I have no loyalty other than that which is imposed by the monopoly that I allowed them to funnel me into.

As alluded to at the outset, I am now of an age when my enthusiasm to keep up with technology is fading away gracefully. I wouldn't bother with a Mac which cannot be upgraded so all but one of the (stops to count) seven Macs in the house are 2012 or earlier and I have a boxed spare 2012 Mac Mini just in case of an unexpected catastrophe. I have managed to keep my other Apple devices fairly distant in the cutting edge's rear view mirror and the only new devices I have bought have been Android TV boxes, an Android phone and a Synology NAS.

Suffice to say, I detest what the rotten Apple has become. Tim Cook gives me the creeps and whilst it didn't seem like it last century, it has become increasingly cult-like. That said, I think that Steve Jobs was a remarkable leader and I believe that in order to realise visions, it is necessary to have many attributes of a dictator. The Apple story was Shakespearean at times, the sacking of Jobs, the disaster under Gil Amelio (licensed Mac clones) and the triumphal return of the king. There is much room for nostalgia and most of my artistic endeavours over the past 40 years (it just occurred to me that I don't recall any official acknowledgement of the 40 years since the Mac was launched in January but I don't really follow such things), in some way, involved a Mac.

However, I am enjoying the show at the moment and that is greatly enhanced by the YouTube channel, SamTime which I highly recommend:

https://www.youtube.com/@SAMTIME

I'm pretty sure that the need for IT techs declined inline with the shift that I mentioned. The desktop (more like under the desk) I had was a G4 which had a side panel which dropped down revealing everything - it was meant to be tinkered with and there were all kinds of non-Apple approved PCI boards for which people were writing patches but that was already about 2003. I wish I remembered the URLs or site names but there were plenty of sites which had discussions about fixing and hacking - I think that Louis Rossman came on the scene just as Apple started to really solder everything in.

Anyway, I guess that I was an early fanboy but not because I took a side - simply because I enjoyed using Macs, I never really set foot outside the Mac environment and it just happened, I suppose, that most of my friends were Mac users - either through work or business or music and video making.

Regarding the early computers, I was a radio mechanic in the military when the home computing thing started to take off. Most of my colleagues had a BBC Micro A (I got the terminology wrong when I said I had a BBC Micro '2') when they first came out but I was a fairly junior rank so could only afford a Dragon 32 which was half the price. I soon learned that it was crap not having any peers to turn to and the Dragon 32 was not very friendly. I think that only one person had a ZX Spectrum and to be honest, the keyboard did my head in. I had the idea of cataloging my vinyl but it was apparent that it would be less time consuming to write everything in a notebook because of the almost constant tape read/write errors. So, when the BBC Micro B came out, I went stupid with my overdraft and/or credit card and got one.

By the way, I still have a tick from using the BBC Micro; if you were typing code and held the shift key when hitting the backspace, it would delete the whole line and even now, when I'm typing and I have a finger on the shift key, I automatically let it go if I backspace.

I was being deliberately vague about my military service - not sure why but it was a 10 year chapter of my life which has very mixed memories; some okay, some really bad. But as this forum is not likely to be read by anybody I know, I was actually in the RN Fleet Air Arm. I was a radio mechanic on Wessex IIIs and Vs but the period during which I mentioned BBC Micros etc. I was in Ground Radio which was maintaining ATC radio and radar. Blandford was just up the road but I'm afraid I don't remember much about it. There was no internet when I last lived down there (I'm in Nazi occupied Scotland now), but can't help wondering if it has its own forum!

Louis is a good dude. I think his videos could be less than half as long but that's a common problem with a lot of YouTubers - but he's on the ball about everything. I'm just glad, as I said, that I'm of an age that it doesn't matter to me that my computer is 12 years old. If I want to do any video editing (which I rarely do anymore), I have to use a 14 year old MBP 17 because I hate FCP X - I've tried it and done several courses but it just sucks when you have been used to doing things a completely different way for almost 20 years. And I could never get my head around where my media was supposed to be stored - with the older versions, I organised files where I wanted them and I can't stand not having that control.

I was being a touch hyperbolic about the SNP and the march of authoritarianism. I'm sure you know what is going on but I joined the SNP in the wake of the 2014 referendum and saw from the inside what they are like. Apart from blatant dishonesty and instructing campaigners to directly lie, they also tried to put pressure on the police to close businesses which were, at that time, still legal; i.e. legal high shops three months ahead of their ban. I have no great love for the legal high business but you cannot have arbitrary use of laws which are not yet enacted. When I spoke out, I was either made to look a fool or effectively told to shut up so I just stopped attending meetings and let my membership expire. I used to be pro-independence but having got a closer look at the SNP, I don't want any involvement in Scottish politics and just hope that I don't live longer than my Dad!

I was attached to 45 Commando Royal Marines when I worked on Wessex Vs (845 Sqdn) and spent time in Arctic Norway on Operation Clockwork and in Northern Ireland in 1981 just after Bobby Sands had died on hunger strike. Our cabs (helicopters) regularly came back with bullet holes and we just patched them up with gaffer tape - even the rotor blades because they aren't exactly cheap nor repairable in the field. This probably only comes to mind because it was fairly recently that I got in an online argument about helicopters not being able to fly with bullet holes in their blades.

Regarding Louis, I was mainly thinking that in his videos, he makes the exact same point over and over again and by about half way, I am often asking myself why I'm still listening but I do like to hear him say, 'and as always, I hope you learned something', so I usually stick around.

I have various virtual machines installed on my Mac; several old Macs, some versions of Windows and Android. It's okay for a bit of nostalgia and for opening some of the old files I have on Zip drives etc. but it feels a bit sad and lonely, to be honest - no other words to describe it. I did spend a lot of time trying to get Kai Kraus's KPTs (Convolver was one of my favourite toys) running but unfortunately, its practical use is clunky and limited in the HD world. The Windows VMs were for opening odd programmes that wouldn't run on contemporary systems - mainly, but not limited to, radio related software. I have never got the Android VM working but don't really need to anymore.

Just going back to the military, I left in 1986 but still have regular dreams (nightmares really), that I am still in, or at least there, and in the dreams I usually wonder why I am still there when I could have left almost 40 years ago. Very often, I wake up and it takes a while before I can convince myself that I'm not still in the navy. It can be quite scary - even when I realise that it was just a dream, the fact that I woke up and still believed it for 10-15 minutes is disturbing in itself. I did go through some shit in the RN and was diagnosed with PTSD only seven years ago having been misdiagnosed with all kinds of stuff and prescribed some horrific mind altering medication - none of which I have touched since. The Veterans Agency gave me a 30% pension after investigating which, along with my preserved pension which I started getting almost four years ago, is some compensation I suppose but my life hasn't been 'normal' since I was 17, about 18 months after I joined up. The full diagnosis basically says that the coping strategy that I subconsciously employed since certain events from 1977 to 1986 became encoded, for want of a better word, in my personality and that standard treatment for PTSD would not be effective and referred me back to the NHS and the same one size fits all therapy from when I had been diagnosed with depression years earlier and insisted that I be medicated. I declined and just try to keep my head down.

Sorry for the gloomy digression.

Despite supporting independence, I had my reservations which nobody in the SNP was prepared to address (though the reason for this became clear later).

My first concern was the EU. It's hard to imagine it now given the SNP's use of EU membership to drive the independence wedge deeper but before the referendum, I couldn't seem to get anybody to give a straight answer.

Secondly, nobody would give an answer on the monarchy but no need to go into that.

The most important issue, to me, was money; i.e. currency. There was a lot of blah-blah-blah but nobody seemed to have an actual clue! None of the answers made sense and the more I looked into it myself, the more it became clear that there was no solution to the currency question and that the reason for this was that nobody understood where the money came from. Yes, I know that conspiracy theorists know about fiat money and fractional banking but Scottish money is a whole different level. And I got my information from the Bank of England not an online forum. So, anybody who advocates independence needs to take this on board.

It is often asked if Scottish money is legal tender in England and I was surprised, nay shocked,to learn that Scottish money is not even legal tender, technically, in Scotland! Scotland does not, again technically, have any legal tender - not even English money and Scottish money is, in effect, little more than a voucher for English money. The way it works is that for every Scottish pound in circulation, there is an English pound on deposit in a Scottish bank in the form of Bank of England 'meganotes' of £1,000,000. I don't know how that actually works with the three issuing banks but as far as a post-independence currency is concerned, it is an unholy mess and anybody who spouts off about it without even mentioning the above, doesn't know what they are talking about.

I think I came to realise a few years after the referendum that the SNP don't actually want Scottish independence, at least the head of the snake doesn't. It was a little less obvious to me than Boris Johnson not really being in favour of the UK leaving the EU but that's another matter - the main thing is that the independence struggle is the SNP's currency (not the kind just mentioned) and it is their USP. You might recognise the same thing in the environmental movement (of which I used to be a member/activist) and is illustrated perfectly in the recently released film, Climate: The Movie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3Tfxiuo-oM

I recognised this in Greenpeace - I worked on three of their ships a couple of years after l left the navy - it was a business which thrived off environmental problems so actually needed them to exist. I was fortunate(?) to be there as it kind of happened. When I first joined a ship in 1989, everybody was a volunteer receiving a small personal allowance. When I went back the following year, everybody was on a salary and most of the senior crew (first/second mates and engineers) were there for the job not as environmentalists. I visited offices in Amsterdam, Hamburg and London and they seemed to be staffed by agency workers - the London office, I remember vividly had a water cooler with polystyrene cups and my shipmate and I who were visiting looked at it and then each other in disbelief. It was rumoured that the head of Greenpeace International was on a salary of €1m and everybody was on pension schemes. Years later, just before the Iraq war, a friend of mine who I only knew after I had left but was crew on the Esperanza told me that three Greenpeace ships were in port in Amsterdam at the same time and there was a big meeting of all the crews at which they were told that Greenpeace was not going to take a position on the Iraq war as it might affect their funding. It's a cash addicted monstrosity just as the climate complex has become which depends on keeping the myth alive.

Yes, I was at Aldergrove/Moscow Barracks. Funny, I never learned the superglue/sodium bicarbonate trick until I needed to repair an over-filed guitar nut a few years ago.

I practiced a form of mindfulness during a bad patch I went through in the 90s which I must have invented myself. The form that was suggested to me more recently did not appeal. The best thing really was having to fill in the form for the MoD. You know they put something on forms like 'continue on a separate sheet if necessary', well I kind of ran with that and I think I went on for about eight pages of 9pt text and the day after I had posted it, I woke up and wrote another two pages which I then sent. After that and spending a week at Combat Stress, I was told to wait for a referral but having had my eyes opened, I began seeing my whole previous life through the lens of what I had written and realised. It's hard to explain without revealing the nature of it all and I can't really do that - but it explained so much crap that I had experienced.

My girlfriend takes CBD and I take it now and then when things get a bit bad - sometimes I take a betablocker (I had been taking three a day but learned that they can cause diabetes and when I had a blood test showing very high blood sugar, I stopped and only take one if absolutely necessary).

No, never at Gannet. A draft to Gannet (or Culdrose, for that matter) felt like the sort of threat that a divisional officer could hold over you, no offence! I did a couple of exercises north of the border (one at Garelochhead) but just bring an aircraft mechanic, I rarely knew what was actually going on - just fix one cab and wait for the next one.

I'm typing on an iPad and I don't know if this applies on desktops but I can only see about five lines of text as I type and have no idea how much I have actually typed until I hit 'Save' - so sorry for the saga length replies.

No, there is no text field expander on iPadOS/Brave.

Three of the bases I was at are now closed, HMS Fisgard (I joined as an Artificer Apprentice) Portland (HMS Osprey) and Lee-on-Solent (HMS Daedalus) - a bit sad looking at them on Google Streetview. Portland was the draft everybody seemed to want when I had finished my training because due to an accommodation shortage at Osprey, over 18s could live in approved lodgings in Weymouth which is where I stayed for years after coming out of the RN - it might sound a bit confusing with all the things I've done but it took a lot to rehabilitate and I wasn't in a good state of mind so was quite restless. I worked on the Condor hydrofoil for a summer and after my first trip on the Sirius in the Mediterranean, we had to call in somewhere on the English south coast to drop off one of the crew whose mother-in-law was either sick or had died and it ended up being in Weymouth. I remember it being a bit of a head turner for those on the quayside and as we passed the Condor office, I got some very surprised looks from the staff I had worked with - one of whom, the manager, I'd also worked with in the navy. Anyway, Weymouth was a great place back then, fantastic for live music - there was a choice of pub bands every night of the week and I was sort of in the muso scene but even though I played guitar, the competition was a bit oppressive so I never got involved.

I rarely drink these days - I had a glass of wine on New Years Eve but don't remember the time before that. During the time after I submitted my form to the MoD, I decided to do some self-exploration with psychedelics which I had trouble acquiring until I navigated the dark web and found AlphaBay. I had used LSD before but got some more as well as DMT and as the legal high legislation was coming in at the time (see earlier post), online shops were selling off stuff extremely cheap so I got a load of 40x Salvia Divinorum. It was an interesting few weeks but after I was done, I realised that I didn't need to do it anymore. I also bought various bits of weed but after the DMT, even months later, I could only manage a tiny bit of weed - the DMT seemed to have had a permanent effect at some deep level. And anyway, I think I can see things clearly enough now that any clearer is more than I can take.

I spent quite a bit of time in Amsterdam when the Greenpeace ship Sirius was being renovated at Surinamekade. If we needed to go to the office, which was on Keisersgracht, the quickest way to walk was through the red light district. I found it quite sad but sometimes might catch eye contact with one of the prostitutes in a window and give them a facial expression to let them know that I wasn't interested and get a human smile back. I went back in 2003 and it was like Blackpool - full of hen and stag nights. When I was first there in 1989, I could still see, in my mind's eye, the Jacques Brel/David Bowie song, Amsterdam (still one of my favourite songs - the words are sublime) but there was no trace of it in 2003. I hate to think of what it is like now. I'm kind of from the outskirts of Blackpool originally and still go back to see family occasionally and it is beyond depressing. It's probably getting that way in Weymouth too.

It took me a moment to get the joke because I was thinking of another similar joke involving a ring and a watch but it isn't worth telling.

I don't watch television as such so I had to wait for it to appear on The Pirate Bay but I just watched the BBC documentary, The Secret Army about a film made about the IRA by a guy who got inside by gaining their confidence. A strange story but put to bed Martin McGuinness's denials of being a member of the IRA. I'd like to see the film itself but it may never be released. Apparently, its rights were obtained by Viacom when it was a fledgling company but they just left it in the can.

I've no real interest in travelling anymore. The world started to look the same everywhere a long time ago. I was in Ireland, mainly Dublin, in 1990 and it wasn't far from what I had expected, lovely people etc. I went back in 2006 and it was like an Irish theme park staffed by Eastern Europeans; barely an Irish accent anywhere. The first time was with Greenpeace and I'd been having a bad time on the ship, mainly due to a bad relationship with the skipper. Anyway, I'd gone into town to have a quiet Guinness or two alone and found a back room in a pub to be on my own. I wasn't there more than a minute before some bloke came in and started talking to me.

The last time I left the UK mainland was for my sister's wedding in the Bahamas also in 2006. It was as if the place had been made over just to suit the yanks to extract their money - and I don't think I saw a Bahamian dollar the whole time I was there nor did I see any Bahamian food except when we had a private event for the wedding. My passport expired not long after that but in 2010 I was in a job working at a residential community for adults with learning difficulty and was supposed to take my 'house' on holiday so I had to get a passport. However, there were many problems and to cut a long story short, in order that they got a holiday of some sort which they had not had in two years, we ended up staying at a self-catering place at Loch Ness and my passport never got used and expired again.

By the way, I live in a fairly remote part of Perthshire. I'm somewhat less reclusive now but during the whatever you want to call it -demic I only saw civilisation once between two Christmases.

Anyway, my cat is a bit confused by the clocks changing and he and his step-sister want their midday sardines.