busybee fluffy rambles

Web browser

Most browsers on the planet are based on Chrome these days, and the only alternatives that people try are Firefox (which is quickly going down the toilet) and Safari (which has its own share of problems). But there’s a few de-enshittified Firefox forks out there.

For the past week or so I’ve been using Waterfox as my primary web browser, and I’m pretty happy with it.

Rather than trying to reinvent the whole concept of a browser’s user experience (like Zen) or going all-in on Privacy Above Practical Concerns (like Librewolf), Waterfox strikes a pretty nice balance to me. The UI has a few tweaks on top of stock Firefox, like separating the search and location bar back out (like used to be standard), and it’s had all of the Mozilla corporate nonsense removed, but it still supports Firefox Sync and it feels a lot more responsive than Firefox had been getting.

Mozilla’s death spiral will still be a problem for things like Waterfox, since the various Gecko browsers are still pretty much just putting a new UI on top of the Gecko engine which still needs to be actively developed, and of course switching to something that doesn’t fund Mozilla at all isn’t exactly helping with the problems, but at least in the meantime I have a browser I don’t mind using.

So far I haven’t found any sites that worked in Firefox but are broken in Waterfox, at least (which wasn’t the case for Librewolf), and the UX changes haven’t gotten in my way at all, although I did disable the somewhat annoying “make it way too easy to close tabs when the tab strip is crowded” default “feature.”

It also supports a tab sidebar that makes it act like Zen, and unlike Zen I can still get container tabs to work, which is good because that feature is super important to me (not because of privacy stuff but because I volunteer for multiple nonprofits which each use GSuite, which falls flat on its face when trying to switch accounts for some things).

Air fryer

That isn’t a euphemism for an old 2013 Mac Pro (which I did have one of for a few years). I actually bought a Cuisinart TOA-26, because I wanted better air frying than the crappy “air fry” mode on my oven and didn’t want to lose a lot of counter space to a full-size toaster-fryer.

I’m pretty happy with it. It’s not quite as convenient as my previous toaster when it comes to toasting sliced bread, and of course it does take up a bit more counter space than said toaster, but gosh, it works great as an air fryer and it’s Good Enough™ as a toaster. I’ve used it a lot over the past week, and it also got me to finally rearrange my kitchen appliances to be a bit more sensible. It also inspired me to do a better job of storing my pizza peel, so that’s a big win for me too.

M4 Pro mini

Okay, so, I upgraded my office machine to an M4 Pro mini. I bought the base Pro (24GB of RAM is plenty for me and I figure that by the time the 512GB of internal storage gets too constraining, aftermarket upgrades will be feasible) with the addition of 10GbE. My hope is that super-gigabit Ethernet switches eventually get affordable enough that I can switch the network ports for my office and studio over, and maybe upgrade my NAS as well, although honestly gigabit is fine for everything I do at present. It’d just be nice to have the option to upgrade if I ever have to do more with archival footage, and the Mac Studio already has it so I’d might as well keep my options open.

(Gosh, I remember when I made the same argument about 1000baseT, and nowadays basically every computer has that standard.)

Because of the complexity of my computing environment and the sheer amounts of data and projects I deal with I opted to do a new installation of everything from scratch, rather than trying to bodge my way through Migration Assistant or whatever. It’s been quite tedious to install all my things and to reconfigure all the UI stuff that makes macOS livable for me.

Some pluses:

• Dang this CPU is fast
• Also it’s so small and quiet, even compared to the M1 Studio (which is also a super quiet computer)

Some minuses:

• My most expensive and capable Thunderbolt dock wouldn’t work with it at all and I couldn’t figure out why
• Most of my less-expensive-but-still-good Thunderbolt docks wouldn’t give me 4k60 on my second monitor
• The dock which did work is this cheap generic piece of shit which has a super annoying port layout but hey it does what I need it to do

I was super right to be concerned about the port complement. Having only three USB-C ports on back is super limiting. Fortunately, my audio interface seems to actually be working off of a hub instead of needing to be directly-connected. So right now I have my NVMe enclosure taking one port, the Thunderbolt hub on a second port, and a third port free for a rainy day (like if I decide to upgrade to a Thunderbolt display or something). And of course all of those ports are Thunderbolt 5.

So far the power button location hasn’t been a problem and it probably won’t be due to how I was able to arrange it on my desk, but it would absolutely be a problem in my recording studio. (Which is why I decided I’d be upgrading my office machine and then putting the office machine in the studio.)

Performance-wise, I’m finding that everything is running really well for the most part, but unfortunately its internal storage is about 20%-30% slower than the M1 Studio’s. It’s still plenty fast, and more than sufficient for the video work I do, at least.

Also, as part of my fresh start strategy, I decided to rebuild my iTunes Music.app library from the ground up this time around, and Music.app sure is running way better than it did on the Studio! It’s actually usable, even. And syncing to my iPhone is also super nice and fast, somehow. Now I wonder just how much cruft had snuck into my old Music.app library, because I was starting to think that the app as a whole had just become irredeemably bad.

Oh and this finally fixed the issue I was having with default album art getting corrupted! Which I’m sure was also indicative of the problem.

Anyway. The next step will be figuring out how I want to deal with migrating my M1 Studio to the studio. I’m thinking I’ll just ensure that all of its project files are safe and then nuke it from orbit, setting it back up from scratch, and just using internal storage for everything (since it has 2TB which is more than sufficient for my recording studio purposes).

In any case, the M4 mini’s name is bean. I should update the inventory.

Oh, and I’ll probably be selling the M1 mini (bucket) that is aging out. Let me know if you’re interested. It’s still a perfectly usable computer that’s great for a lot of things, and plus it’s the computer I’ve used to record most of my music since I bought it in 2020, in case there’s any fans out there who think that’d be a special thing to own or whatever. I’ll even autograph it if you want.

Organization

Of course another thing I’ve been doing as part of this reset/reorientation is to completely pull apart my workspaces and set things up from scratch that I know how things should be arranged. Hopefully I can actually keep things from getting tangled and cluttered for reals this time. I should also print a bunch of my favorite cable management clips for the stragglers. I can never seem to have too many of those.

I also should figure out better spots for storing certain things, too. My desk always just gets so cluttered despite my best intentions. Sometimes when I’m working on tidying up I just feel despondent and overwhelmed and wish I could throw everything out and start from scratch, but that would be a pretty expensive way to go about it.

A lot of what leads me to this is that I generally prefer to reuse furniture that I already have than to try to make a clean break, so a lot of my storage stuff is a hodgepodge of what worked in previous homes, tried to make fit in my current space and with my ever-growing possessions. I do have some ideas about how I could reconfigure my living room but at some point I need to just, like, buy actual shelving/storage stuff that fits my space and current needs, rather than making do with random assorted crap.

Also even with all of the work I put into rearranging my basement last year (has it already been over a year? jeeze, time sure flies!) there’s still a lot of stuff I’d like to do down there to improve things more. Better-fitting shelving, finally pouring concrete into the hole that used to be the furnace pad (and then putting storage on top of it), and also getting my workbenches organized. Or maybe even replacing the hodgepodge of workbenches with, you guessed it, actual space-fitting stuff that’s pleasant to use and feasible to keep organized.

Oh and I also want to get some sort of storage shed for my back yard. Nothing fancy, just something that’ll hold my gardening tools (which live in my carport) and lawnmower (which currently lives in my basement).

Miscellaneous life updates, while I’m bloggin'

Fiona has fully recovered from her illness, and has also put on a lot of weight, which is a good thing! She’s also become incredibly cuddly again, which makes me happy, even if it means I constantly have this big vibrating lump climbing all over me.

Tonight was the first night of Hanukkah. Another year of resisting assimilation and getting to live my genuine self. I’ll be making latkes for dinner. (Fried the normal way, not using the air fryer.)

I’ll be performing at a big New Year’s event on VRChat this weekend! See the other site for more on that.

Even with all the bad shit going on in the world I feel like my own life is on a pretty nice trajectory right now, and I hope 2025 feels the way I feel (cautiously) optimistic for.

Chag sameach.