Long Form

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    NowTunes – A Desktop Now Playing Widget Application

    I know that AI get’s a lot of stick these days and rightly so in some cases, but I have made something using it that I consider to be really cool and genuinely useful. I’ve always loved having a nice looking mini-player on my desktop that displays album art for the music app I’m using and have been impressed how KDE Plasma has a the media player widget that can do this for anything that’s playing, even if it’s streaming Spotify or Soundcloud in a browser. As I sometimes use elementary OS and GNOME, I’ve missed having a cool looking desktop widget in these environments that display my Now Playing tunes and it’s artwork. Even though I can install Soundcloud, Mixcloud and Spotify as web…

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    Installing Kubuntu On My Apple Macbook Pro

    My faithful 2014 MacBook Pro is now stuck on Big Sur and is too old for Monterey, so it’s been the perfect time to partition it and create a Linux/MacOS dual boot. I’ve been using Linux as my daily driver for around 18 months now and finally over the summer got stuck into KDE Plasma, which has felt like a game changer. As a long time admirer of Solus I have their spin of Plasma on my main desktop Dell rig, which is solid. However I opted for Kubuntu on the MBP as there was less compatibility issues. With Kubuntu everything worked out of the box except the FaceTime camera, but after a bit of digging I was able to install the driver for that…

  • Deepin Love

    Feeling the urge to drop some Deepin love. I recently decided to check back in with Deepin OS, which is a Linux distribution based on Debian, after having a very unstable experience with it at the beginning of the year. I’ve been running version 15.11 for about a month now and it’s way more stable than it was previously, in fact I’d go as far as to say it’s rock solid in comparison to back then. Yes a lot of the apps on the app store are outdated but they are perfectly usable if you don’t need to live on the bleeding edge of tech. The only exception for me was to replace Firefox ESR to the latest release. For my other app needs I’ve…

  • Switching from iOS and iPhone to Sailfish OS on the OnePlus One.

    I’ve recently been experimenting with a different mobile phone operating system called Sailfish OS that is made by a device manufacturer called Jolla, who are headquartered in Finland. I have installed Sailfish OS to the OnePlus One smartphone and this post is about my experience so far and how I have replaced apps and features that I use a lot on the Apple iPhon Sailfish OS Background The team of developers and engineers at Jolla had previously worked for Nokia on the MeeGo mobile OS. Jolla and Sailfish OS was born after Nokia cancelled the MeeGo project in 2011. Sailfish OS (SFOS) is based on the Linux MeeGo OS and Jolla have previously manufactured two smartphones and a tablet to run it on as well…

  • The Watergate Reflection and A Tech Journey To Freedom

    The recent “water incident” with my Macbook Pro has now got me a little nervy about using it portably. As it’s a high end 2014 powerhouse, I’m thinking of confining it to my desk and buying something a little less expensive for going out and about with. The sleek looking Asus Zenbook range, which sports an Intel i5 Quad Core, 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM, is looking appealing at the moment with slightly older models going for around £600 Whilst the Mac was in for repair, I had a great experience using ElementaryOS (a Linux distribution) as my daily driver, so I’d have no qualms about wiping Windows 10 from the Asus and installing ElementaryOS. The only real application that I missed on ElementaryOS was Photoshop but I’d…

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