I finished Inhibitor Phase last night. It worked for me. The Revelation Space universe is terrifying and strange, and the book preserves that mood, but also allows in some warmth and hope. I wouldn’t want to live in that future, but the characters are compelling and human.

The macOS kill ring

macOS has a kill ring! Who knew!? Well, evidently Brett Terpstra knew. Interesting rundown on how it works and some keybindings to make it work even better. I don’t know if you’ll end up ditching your existing clipboard manager, but for some workflows you might end up not needing it as much.

“Note: The kill ring is shared between documents in the same app, but generally not between apps.”

Well, that’s a little less exciting, but still.

The Mac Studio

I moved it underneath the desk today, and out of sight. It’s still connected to the KVM, it is still where my photos live, it’s what my photo backup automation runs through, and it’s how I can run BlueBubbles on all my Linux stuff. So it is still a part of my computing life.

But it’s sort of a moment in my computing history to move it out of sight. Last week I think I spent less than an hour using it, and that was mostly because I was trying to make sure I had pulled everything down from Adobe Cloud and onto the external drive I keep all my photos on, in order to prepare for moving them over to a bigger drive I will have connected to the Linux desktop where I am spending pretty much all my time now.

I don’t think that means I’m done with it, exactly, but I could be getting close. It’s a nice machine – the nicest Mac I have ever owned – but that sense of Apple all-pervasiveness that started tugging at the back of my thoughts several months ago has not abated. It feels a little weird to me, because if you’d put a few ideas in front of me and asked me to expound a year ago, I’d say “sure, I like Apple stuff because it’s one less thing to think about.” I don’t feel that way anymore.

I think I said this previously, on the microblog I got rid of, but in some ways the “everything just works together” thing was beginning to become its own thing to have to think about … a gestalt or collective or monolith that must somehow be preserved.

So, the Studio can cool its heels under my desk, out of sight, spending most of its cycles on running backups every morning at 3 and providing a relay for BlueBubbles. I am not sure what the conditions will be to decide it doesn’t have a place any longer. I’ll need to understand how post-Lightroom life would work, I suppose, or if it even can. I’m sure if I sat down with a pad and pen I could list a few other things I need to figure out to be post-Apple. But it is a compelling idea.

StarCraft on Linux via Steam

A lot of people do it with WINE, etc. Turns out you can just add Battle.net to Steam as a non-Steam game, run the installer under the Proton compatibility tool, and then just install StarCraft (or any other Blizzard Windows game, apparently) and it works fine. I did it with StarCraft Remastered. Runs great.

From reddit:

1. Go to battle.net and download “Battle.net-Setup.exe”
2. Open Steam and click the Games menu and select Add a non-Steam game to my library
3. Click the Browse button and select your “Battle.net-Setup.exe” file
4. That will add “Battle.net” as a game. Open it and click the Manage icon (the gear symbol on the right) and select the Properties command.
5. On the Properties window, click the Compatibility tab and check the “Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool”. A pulldown menu will appear showing “Proton Experiment”. You can leave that alone and close the window.
6. Click Play back on the Battle.net game entry in steam and it should launch fine.