I have some bluetooth earbuds, Jabra Elite 3's, that I use with my phone most of the time. I also share them as well so sometimes they're connected to someone else's phone. I also like to connect them to my macbook. The frustrating thing is though, I've succesfully paired them with all of these 3 devices before, but it's really frustrating to connect them to something other than the last device they connected to.

If they most recently connected to my phone before and I decide to use them with my laptop, I remove them from their case, but they immediately connect to my phone. This is good, because that's usually what I want them to do, but I hoped I could, from my laptop select them from the list of nearby bluetooth devices and click 'connect' and thereby sever that connection between the headphones and my phone, in favour of the new connection between the laptop and the headphones instead. This doesn't work, the computer just says connecting for a long time, and then stops saying that (but doesn't say anything about having failed).

Ok, I figured, that sort of makes sense, after all you wouldn't want people to be able to just break your connection at will if you're using the headphones (although it would require having previously paired them, but still, devil's advocate I suppose). So I reasoned, you must have to disconnect them from the phone first, on my headphones that's achievable by just pressing the button on each bud once. Doing this disconnects them from the phone, but doesn't them leave them available to other devices for connection, they remain only available to the phone if you press the button again. The only way to finally sever this connection to allow the laptop access is to fully switch off bluetooth on my phone. This pisses me off but it's not a huge big deal, but the trouble here is, that's only if they're connected to my phone. The headphones are shared. I would have thought the 'ownership' of the headphones (for lack of a better word) would give precedence to physical access to the headphones. Therefore, if you have the ability to press the disconnect button on the headphones, then you're most likely the person making the conscious decision to replace one connection with another. I can't control someone else's phone, I'm the one with the headphones, but I can't choose what device they connect to.

Rant aside, this genuinely is a question because it just seems so illogical for it to work this way that I'm betting on there being something I'm missing that would allow common sense to prevail and let me replace one connection with another.

I only wonder because, while I know no one could advise per se that people deliberately make bad security decisions, I don't feel as a layman that the nature of the risk is adequately explained.

Specifically, if you use a really old OS or an old now unsupported phone. The explanations for why this is dangerous tend to focus on the mechanism by which it creates a security flaw (lack of patches, known hardware security flaws that can never be patched).

If we use an analogy of physical security whereby the goal is to prevent physical intrusion by thieves or various malicious actors, there's a gradient of risk that's going to depend a bit on things like who and where you are. If you live in a remote cabin in the woods and left your door open, that's bad, but probably less bad than in a high crime area in a dense city. Similarly, if you're a person of note or your house conspicuously demonstrates wealth, security would be more important than if it you're not and it doesn't.

I would think, where human beings are making conscious choices about targets for cybercrime some parralells would exist. If then, you turn on an old device that's long obsolete for the first time in years and connect to the internet with it, while I know you are theoretically at great risk because your doors and windows are essentially wide open, how risky is that exactly? If you just connect, at home on your wifi and don't do anything? Is someone inevitably going to immediately find and connect to this device and exploit it's vulnerabilities? Or does there have to be a degree of bad luck involved?

I've brought up the idea of malicious actors who are human beings making conscious decisions, (hackers), but I was once told the concern is more to do with automated means of finding such devices when they're exposed to the internet. This makes more sense since a theoretical hacker doesn't have to sit around all day just hoping someone in the world will use an outdated device and that they'll somehow see this activity and be able to exploit the situation, but I guess, it seems hard for me to imagine that such bots or automated means of scanning, even if running all day will somehow become aware the minute anyone, anywhere with an insecure device connects to the internet. Surely there has to be some degree coincidental happenstance where a bot is directed to scan for connections to a particular server, like a fake website posing as a bank or something? It just doesn't seem it could be practical otherwise.

If I'm at all accurate in my assumptions, it sounds then like there's a degree to which a random person, not well known enough to be a specific target, not running a website or online presence connecting an insecure device to the internet, while engaging in some risk for sure, isn't immediately going to suffer consequences without some sort of inciting incident. Like falling for a phishing scam, or a person specifically aware of them with mal intent trying to target them in particular. Is that right?

I have an iPad 1. I barely used it when it was given to me and then it more or less sat unused apart from the occasional booting to see if it still works every few years.

I'm fairly sure it would still work today though I haven't tried for about 3 years. Trouble is, it never got much use because when I got it from my Mum in 2012 it was already becoming obsolete and after about a year I couldn't do basic web browsing because almost every site just crashed whatever browser I ran, none of the apps in the app store would work anymore and the bookshelf app (think that's what it was called. Came with the tablet) I tried to use to make it basically an e-reader device stopped working. There were many similar issue I forget the specifics about but basically amounted to the hardware working fine but being mostly unusable even for old software.

I wondered if there were any good ways to make use of or generally rehabilitate this device. I had hoped there'd be a lot Linux options for something like this but it looks like the earliest model anyone made.any progress with was iPad 2.

Any suggestions besides picture frame?

I was sent an email to someone as part of an ongoing thread of emails in a conversation.

I drafted a reply, but felt a bit unsure so I sent it to someone I trust for them to look at first. Initially, the draft had been made by hitting the reply button to the original sender, but I removed them from the to: field and very thoroughly checked they were indeed removed before sending my potential response to this third party. The 3rd party replied to me and for a second my heart stopped because their reply was in the same conversation thread and it looked a lot like the whole exchange between them and myself was now broadcast to the very person I was trying to carefully word my reply to. Making it look even more like that was the case, was that the signature of the person who sent me the original I wanted to reply to was at the bottom of the third party's response to me along with their comments. What seems to have happened is that because I pressed the 'reply' button, despite changing the sender, it still included the whole thread of emails until that point. Which makes sense but was very much not what I was expecting since I don't recall seeing that there in the email before sending it to the 3rd party. I suppose it must have been.

Anyway, it seems to have been alright, there's no trace I can find that the exchange between myself and the third party has made its way back to the person that sent me the messages in the first place. But it's very messy and scary that this, to my mind, separate, conversation thread is now all wrapped in to the same one. It seems like begging for trouble even if I dodged it this time. It's my fault for making it a reply instead of a separately composed message to the 3rd party, but can I manually move those messages out of the thread in mail so I don't see them there in future?

After years of using MacOS I somehow only just now became aware you even could copy the filepath at all (outside of dragging in to terminal which is just stupid) so I'm very happy to discover that, but the thing is, for the most part the reason I want to do this is for easy navigation of a file browser by copying paths from one window or tab to another, especially when I have an item selected in an open file browser window and need to specify in a file browser prompt where to save something.

In those instances on Windows for example, I will press the F4 key to select the text field of the address bar in explorer and copy the parent directory path of an item. If I really need it I can get the exact path of the item itself without the mouse too . While I'm super glad I can now approach this usefulness in Finder, the mouse totally interrupts the flow and begins to make the increased efficiency from copying paths only marginally better than just clicking through folder trees since you stop what you're doing and move hands to the mouse already anyway at that point. I'd love to just immediately copy the current path I'm in into a Finder window and use the cmd+shift+G option in another window or prompt to go the same place. The second half of that operation is easy enough, but getting the path on to the clipboard isn't because of needing the mouse.

I feel like an old grandpa trying to use a computer, but I legit can't find this anywhere and I used to use it often.

If I'm composing a message, when I'm done, I used to press cmd+return to send the message. One of many little QOL things for me that involve using the keyboard rather than the mouse wherever possible or practical. The closest reference I've been able to find as a replacement is cmd+shift+D to "send emails" which is both less convenient and also a bit vague. I want to send this email, as in the one I'm composing or which has window focus right now. Is 'send emails' all emails? Like all open windows if you've got a couple of drafts on the go? All drafts including those that aren't open as well?

Is there a new key command for what cmd+return used to do?

I'm going to very carefully poke the hornet's nest here and ask this basic question that I never really explicitly formulated. It seems apt here on Lemmy in particular because people take as a given the superiority of Linux as the starting point of conversations involved computers generally.

I'm not here to refute this, but I am thinking I should interrogate it a bit more. I'll start with an "average" user, to which I'll have to give some sort of definition.

Imagine somebody with a low to moderate concern about privacy, more than none, but not much more and will happily trade it for useful or enjoyable services. Imagine the use case of a desktop computer for this type of person is productivity software they use at work/school, and occasionally for their own purposes too because they're familiar with it. They also like to watch movies, browse the web, and communicate with friends and family using popular free software packages. Security isn't much of a worry for them, but they do engage in private communication and also banking and will pour a lot of personal information in to the machine in exchange for a lot of useful abilities like paying bills and organising their life.

Now also picture this person is open minded, at least a little and willing to hear you out on the concept of operating systems and of Linux in particular. Is it automatically in such a person's interests to switch to Linux? And is it always a good idea to start with supposition that it is and that the only barrier is hesitancy and ignorance? Would any of their needs actually be better met should they switch? A lot of this discussion tends to devolve in to whether it is or isn't hard for such a person to use Linux should they make the switch and whether using Linux is inherently more difficult than for example Windows but I think what's missed here is, assuming it's super easy to switch for an "average" user and perfectly easy to operate thereafter, is it actually better in such a case? If the needs are so basic, what has been gained? Is it mostly an ideological preference for the philosophical concepts behind the open source movement? That could be enough in and of itself perhaps, you could pitch Linux as "better" within that framework at least for the ideals it promotes. I feel like I sense there's a desire to push Linux for this reason on the thinking that if just one more person joins the fold so to speak, then it generally pushes the world at large vaguely in the right direction in some small way. But is there anything more tangibly superior for an "average" user? It seems like nowadays hardware has long surpassed the needs of users like these such that things like "performance" don't seem all that relevant considering almost any available platform could fulfill these needs so thoroughly that theoretically superior performance from the software would seem not to play a role. There is the security and privacy aspect, certainly for me, that definitely puts me off Windows but if an "average" user says they don't care about this things, can you really say they're being foolhardy in a practical sense? In a wider view, arguably, in the way that it pushes the world in a generally worse direction, but for them directly in the near to medium or even long term, what's going to happen if they just don't even worry about it? People say Windows has poor security, but for the number of people using it, just how many will personally experience actual measurable harm from this? Despite pouring so much personal information in to their computer, I suspect they could likely go a lifetime without experiencing identity theft, or harrassment from authorities, or tangible/financial losses. I suspect they probably know that too. That seems to me again like it really only leaves more of a "digital veganism" approach to Linux's virtues. That's appealing to some, to me a bit even but it's a much narrower basis for proclaiming it "superior"

Now at the other end of the spectrum, the users that are not the least "average" who run Linux on their home systems and probably at work, use open source alternatives for every possible service and do not need conversion as they themselves are Linux preachers. What is it that they typically get out of Linux? I've heard many say they enjoy "tinkering". I get that, is that the main benefit though? It seems then that the appeal is that it's kind of "hard", like a puzzle, but I don't think any of this crowd would like that assessment. What do you want to tinker with though that closed systems would prevent you from doing? This probably goes to the heart of it because it's the point at which I think probably most diverge from say an IT professional or programmer that loves Linux, I am too ignorant here to know what I don't know and I just can't really conceive of a scenario where I might for example want to personally modify the kernel of an operating system. Most examples I see if that type of thing is people making hardware work, and it's ingenious and impressive but the hardware is usually that part of the setup that's not democratised and not open source, it's usually something off the shelf it seems to me that that hardware would have worked already on a more popular platform. Likewise when you eke out of last bit of performance out of a system, what are you actually doing with it? I mean I get that it's a crying shame for hardware to be hobbled by lousy software but if the use for the hardware, the need for computing to be done can be met with existing platforms, what is done with the savings from the better software?

I ran Mac for years but never actually considered using Page or Numbers. A long time ago I gave up on MS Office and switched to Libre Office which was... fine-ish. I also use Google Docs but wouldn't want to give up a local desktop office suite altogether.

Having just bought a new MBP I opened one of my old MS Word documents forgetting I'd not installed LibreOffice yet and of course it opened in Pages. I figured maybe I should give it a go instead of knee-jerk rejecting it. My first issue is that almost anything I ever work on will be something that was almost certainly made with Microsoft Word and it's very annoying to me that in Pages, I can't just cmd+s save a Word document as I edit it, having instead to save a .pages version for safety and periodically 'exporting' a .docx and overwriting the previous export to update it in order to maintain the document's compatibility with anyone else using it in Word.

I also tried recreating my invoice document that I first made many years ago in Word. Editing the original was a non-starter, just impossible to get it looking right but that's okay it wasn't designed for Pages and I was trying to keep an open mind. So I remade it from scratch figuring it was a good test bed as it has some just basic writing of words on a page but also more complicated formatting and tables to recreate in a specific way to make it indistinguishable from my original document. I got there in the end but it was horrendously painful. I haven't given up on it yet because I figure Word is actually probably one of the very first computer programs of any type that I ever used so to say it's just what I'm more used to is an understatement. Because of that, learning anything significantly departing from Word will naturally be hard, and unlike Google Docs and Libre Office Write, it doesn't try to emulate Word. The thing is though, maybe I could get used to it, but I'm kind of wondering, if it's worth the bother. My main reasoning for trying is that it's there already, so why install something else and I may as well get my money's worth and while over-hyped, often Apple software is really nicely polished and a joy to use so I feel like I want to like it and to use it. But with the learning curve plus the compatibility issues with Office, I think the bar for it being worth it raises to the point where it really has to actually be better than word in a meaningful way to justify it, not just as good. Is Pages better than Word? Certainly right now it doesn't look that way, but I'm still adjusting of course.

Does anyone else use it and do they like it? Is it something that once you get used to you'd never want to use anything else? My other problem is that for some reason most of the Apple Support articles and forum posts answering questions I have all seem to be from around Circa 2012 at the latest and very rarely any more recently than that. Often they refer to menu items that are slightly out of date and subtly different now, which is weird. What happened in 2012 that seemed to stop people using this software?

I upgraded to Ventura recently after using High Sierra for a very long time. I'm noticing a few things here and there I don't like so much and want to change. Text edit seems to have been messed with in a mostly unwelcome way. I was able to fix the thing where instead of opening a document when you open the app, it instead opens a file prompt, however now I also want to close a document without saving (or even by saving for that matter), and avoid using the mouse. I definitely used to be able to quit without saving using keyboard only, can't remember about saving although that would also be good.

At the moment, in text edit, if you cmd+Q or cmd+w to quit the app or close a document, you're prompted to save it or delete it, which is good, but pressing tab to go through available options on the save prompt to select the 'delete' option is seemingly no longer possible. For some reason, the newly integrated combo box for choosing a tag for the save file seems to stop the tab selection process in its tracks as you can now only either shift focus between the filename text field, or this drop down list of tags and can't get past them without reaching for the mouse. I guess if I was happy with the default save location I could press return at this point and save the document, but if I don't want to save or I want to change any other parameters in the save prompt, I have to use the mouse. Seems like a minor complaint I know, but it just didn't use to be a problem and I tend to resent new problems that didn't exist before but have been introduced.

On the website via desktop computers.

Drives me nuts as I never use the mini player function and it's a huge and frustrating disruption that I didn't ask for.

EDIT: actually I think I figured it out and it's probably nothing to do with YouTube apart from an unexpected design decision that's probably been around for a while and I never noticed. Turns out if you click and drag a video you're watching anywhere around the screen it launches the mini player. I'm not used to this kind of thing on desktops but I guess it's becoming the norm and could be helpful. I think I've been accidentally clicking and dragging just a little bit sometimes.

I was just looking for parts for a coffee machine but you Italians sure like to party.

This was more difficult to find and more confusing than I anticipated. I have a new MBP M2 Max. I want to replace my current desktop PC with it.

I use 3 monitors, 2xHD monitors that only have HDMI ports on them, and 1 old 2560x1600 DVI monitor. I want to buy a dock so I can easily plug the laptop in to as few things as possible, ideally even only plugging it in to one thing if possible. I have found USB-C to to DVI-dual link connectors online and I know one can buy USB-C to HDMI adaptors (I'm unclear if I can get TB4 to HDMI adaptors). I also use one of the old apple USB keyboards that had a USB 1.0 hub on it for connecting a mouse which I would definitely want connected via a dock in conjunction with the monitors and also speakers connected via 3.5mm jack. I want a dock specifically so that as soon as I plug the laptop in, it functions just like using a desktop and I'm not needing to hook each of these things up individually every time I'd be operating the laptop in a closed configuration most if not all of the time when at home at my desk.

Ideally then I could find a dock that will connect to a TB4 port and will have either HDMI or Displayport ports on it that I can connect the monitors to, or additional TB4 ports that I can hook the monitors up to via adaptors. I'd also ideally then be able to hook up some fast storage to such a dock but that's where I get a bit confused about how the bandwidth situation works and how resources are divided up and how that influences what dock to buy. This is a slightly less important requirement because I probably won't be hooking up storage all the time and when I do, I don't mind using up one of the remaining TB4 ports on the MBP for that, but for convenience sake it sure would be nice if I could hook a USB-C gen 2 drive or TB4 drive to the dock while it's connected to the 3 monitors, just don't know how possible that is.

Something else that's confusing me is, I was looking at the Sonnet Echo 11 and it was mentioned somewhere in a tech specs document that you could plug monitors in to it's TB4 ports with active adaptors. I remember having to make such a distinction a long time ago back when DVI was still a thing, that in order to use the full resolution of a DVI device one needed an active vs passive adaptor to actively convert the signal and that the active variant was much more expensive and contained powered circuitry. This irks me, because if that's what they're talking about here with HDMI to USB-C connectors plugging in to those TB4 ports on the dock it'd be very disappointing because I thought if one shells out a bunch of cash for a fairly chonky dock that it would take care of any such conversions and the idea of having to spend a whole bunch more money to get the "active" adaptors for each monitor in order to connect to the dock that I was hoping would be my adaptor is a bit galling.