The Basement in the Attic

This post begins with my exit from the Appleverse. After 40 years, I'm heading out to the wilderness of Linux and Android. I've decided I don't want to play Surveillance Capitalism anymore, and the Appleverse is getting nothing but higher walls and less privacy.

Ok, Linux is obvious. But Android? Packing up my bat and ball and leaving the frying pan for the fire? Well, sorta. As much as the Big G wan'ts it's hegemony complete, they had to release—literally—an Android Open Source Project version. In the immortal line from the “Marathon Man,” is it safe? No. But there are several teams that have made safe versions. Even some that can be deployed in “truly paranoid mode.” Good for journos and real freedom fighters. Too much work for me.

I had tested an awful lot of Androidy varients with a PinePhone, I think I had settled on Sailfish. Now I had to do things seriously. Eventually I made my choice, ebay'd the best phone for it, and started. I didn't go full-paranoid, then decided half-paranoid was too much, restated the whole project in no-paranoid mode.

Ok, cutting to the central point, I've sorta succeeded.

So long as I pretend not to know about all the deep integration of products in the Appleverse. I get that Never-Applers don't even begin to understand what they're missing out on. Even a wholehearted embrace of the Big G doesn't come close. Android is still a pile of toothpicks and gumballs and you're supposed to build a suitable User Experience on your own. Takes me back to the Days of DOS, when I would be utterly mystified by people going on about HGA vs VGA and what interrupts were where...and I just turn my Mac on and worry about which floppy needs to be in what drive to do what I wanted. I didn't get it.

I definitly got the false-appeal for businesses. Lotus 1-2-3 was cheaper! Sure, there was the hidden cost of the 1000's of person-hours spent “shovel polishing” to get it to work, and training the user in how to construct the mental bridge between the limited display and the actual goal. But every computer had that, right? “WYSIWYG” is a Welsh word meaning “What the fuck are you talking about?”

And so the two paths split. Microsoft has done a lot of work to make a real UX for “that side” to be better. Always keeping that vague feel of “DIY” or “hacking-lite.” The biggest example of this is the 3-ways-to-get-properties. Virtually anything that has some settings or attributes you could fuss with, has 2 or three separate paths to the same thing. Strictly avoided in the Appleverse, though with the Return of Jobs and Advent of OSX, their rigidity was relaxed a bit.

Smartphones happen, and naturally, the reactionaries needed Something Else™ and The Big G needed in on the game beyond writing a big check every month to be the Appleverse's default search engine. So they bought themselves a little start up named Android and once again, the two paths diverged in the woods. The Big G didn't care, they got their telemetry.

Android is sooooo weird. In the guise of “choice,” they surface the need for the user to build a mental model bridging the gap between what they want done and what Android needs to approximate that.

EG: I struggled for weeks and thousands of miles, to get the new smartphone's navigation application to appear on the motorcylce's dashboard display.

It finally turned out I needed to enter a control panel to give the connecting software permission to connect. The software I installed, including answering Yes to the dialog box “Do you want to install this software?” Note there's no name of that software in that question...but yes I did answer and though I gave it access to the network, and my contacts, and my phone, and my Bluetooth devices, and....I'd apparently have to go somewhere else to say “Do the thing I installed you to do.”

That ultimately-obvious but equally unnecessary step is the Android Experience. It's a record player for millenials. It's retro cool but the kids never lived through the PC-DOS era, so they have no idea that they've been hornswaggled. Being sold “choice” as a cover for “just ship it” developement.

And so we are here, attempting to blog in my the Brave New World I have constructed for myself.

And apparently in this World, blogging ended in 2022. That's the last mention of anything like a “desktop blog post tool,” a long gone application called Blogilo. Now it's all about using WordPress's own tools including a desktop application that looks suspiciously like a smartphone application. (A website dressed-up and sold as a free-standing applicaiton.)

When I helped my partner set up their travel blog, their choice of laptop hampered finding an easy to use blog tool. I was confounded by this WordPress thing that purported to be user-friendly. When ever did my solo-traveling partner have time to fiddle with Search Engine Optimization tools? I don't give a flying fuck about SEO here, dear reader, I will trust you found this font of randomness all on your own.

Why is this a thing? Because I've seen the other side. Red Sweater Software makes an application called “Mars Edit” that makes blog posting a joy. AND it keeps a very nice local backup of all your content.

But I've left the Appleverse behind, and Mars Edit with it. And so it was, 6 months into the withdrawal, with all my iPhones and Macs wiped and given away, that I suddenly realized I'd lost Mars Edit.

This is why this post is only coming now. 1) the delayed realization, and 2) the search for a non-existant replacement. I will confess dear reader, that these 2 things, over the last 24 hours, have edged me within minutes and milimeters of calling the recipients of all my Apple Stuff and demanding it all back. Yes, it's that good. Mars Edit is just what it purports to be, simple, clean, and like most things in the Appleverse, no shovel-polishing required. Just install, open, use it.

Oh, there are plenty of difficult-initiation applications in the Appleverse. These have mostly to do with processes that need more than 2 dimensions to display and interact: Video editing (needs Time), Computer Aided Design (needs Z-axis and also Time) to name the biggest ones. But the vast majority of 2D work—like this I'm doing here—is usually really simple.

But none of it is simple in Linux and Android. Nothing “just works” and there might be an application or a small bunch of them you can string together, none of those have any provenance. This laptop has hundreds of added-on thingies written by . I am wholly dependent on the thing that installed them to keep track of any updates to the thingie itself. Said installer being either cared for by a Big Name, or yet another thingie written by .

My brother and I had a long-running play-argument about the “real” vs “cartoon” computers. Or Fruitputers, for short. He used to crack wise about all the things the Appleverse couldn't do, and I'd just tell him they didn't need to do that because they were already letting the user do the work that was the original goal.

Years later, when he was overseeing a small team of engineers, he would complain to me about all the person-hours wasted with every application or OS upgrade. The days an engineer spent getting their PC setup “just right” so they could do the work they were paid for. This is what he called “Shovel Polishing,” the idea of cleaning, oiling, and preparing a shovel to absolute perfection before actually digging the ditch that was needed when the rains came. My brother was a smart guy, he identified something that the Appleverse never trained me to see.

And here we are together, today. I'm trying out the Official WordPress User Experience, and as I've done througout the de-Apple-ing process, consoling myself that I made the right move.

And it would all come tumbling down if Apple would forswear participation in Surveillance Capitalism in favor of becoming the Digital Privacy Brand. True Zero Knowledge computing is still kind of far off, but agreeing to full encryption in-motion and at-rest, with the keys only ever belonging to the customer, would be enough. That's it, right there. Make it absolutely clear that I can have all that cool facial-recognition and -identification in my personal photos, without Apple knowing anything about it. I'd imagine there's a fairly decent market for that stuff, but the stockholders like their current dividends, and the naysayers can legitimatly say they won't convert many/any Android users. The “Anybody But ” reflex is so strong in some of the children masquerading as adults.

I will say that so far, the WP editor isn't bad enough to make me try any of these Content Management/H5P thingies. Merely trying to learn the jargon in order to select one is beyond my decaying mental abilities. I'm really concerned, as I watch my memory failing by the month now, that I'm trying to and depending on, learning new tricks to do simple things at a time when I am not capable of doing so. I'm also hoping that the hacking project that is “Leaving the Appleverse” is helping maintain some brain plasticity.

Sorry to go all dark at the end, but it's a not-so-hidden externality of this entire project and subject. Getting out from under the 2 giants of Surveillance Capitalism may've been me picking up my bat and ball, and deliberately climbing out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Maybe next post I will ramble on about how that analogy kind of sucks.