Matisyahu's Blog

Yesterday I was sick so I had the day off and today I’ll have the day off because I’m not fully recovered – you get a good run and then suddenly the wind is knocked out of your sails. Today I spent the time resting and pottering around the home getting things sorted out. I cleaned off all the contents of my MacBook Air and Mac Studio because both of them are being sold (the Apple TV 4K has been sold and shipped) – the MacBook Air I’ll send today when I get up. When you’ve moved so far from the Apple ecosystem, first with the move to Android then Chrome, then iCloud to a new provider there is very little remaining justification left to keeping with having a Mac particularly when one considers how good the Microsoft Surface Laptop is with the ARM processor.

As for the desktop, I’m looking at either getting a Dell or a Beelink – I’m in no rush since I use my laptop 90% of the time although I do like to have a desktop for when I’m doing some heavy lifting such as video and audio editing etc. I’m leaning towards getting a Dell because it allows future growth, it comes with an nVidia 5070 GPU, the CPU is good enough for what I need and there is WiFi 7 support whereas the Beelink I want isn’t shipping for another 35 days and that is no guarantee that’ll it ship in that time frame. I’m also looking at a 32inch monitor to go with the computer. I’m tempted to get a new desk because the one I have is a bit worse for wear – I’m tempted to get one that is slightly longer since the tower case will be sitting on the desk and thus I’ll need more space.

Oh, I’ve had an issue with my Exchange account (I signed up for the Exchange Online Plan 2 for my email/custom domain but I use my ‘consumer’ account for my Windows account) – long story short the authenticator application failed which makes me think long and hard whether Microsoft is viable alternative but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there – worst case scenario I can always go back to using Google Workspace and I’ll reset my laptop and set it up with a local account but I’d prefer not to do that given that apart from that hiccup I was actually pretty happy with Exchange to the point that I wonder whether I should make it my primary account with a Business 365 account and use the Outlook.com account purely to use Phone Link with my phone.