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I have a metal Apple Watch band that has started filing away the edge on one side of my MacBook just by accident.
It looks almost organic, like a return to some of the earlier ideas Apple had when they weren’t afraid of multiple materials and colors.
Oh. I thought he made them sharper so it becomes a double use laptop:
Nice
No joke, great mod.
Don’t be scared. Fuck around a bit.
I like the cut of their jib.
If I had a nickel for every time I heard that… well, I’d have at least one.
Should be a new life motto
Mine has my name engraved on it permanently as is the case with most of my possessions. I love the horror on people’s face when they hear you’ve intentionally “damaged” something valuable.
Stock items have no character. Customize everything.
I wish more people did this, I sometimes have to convince people it’s ok to remove stickers from the manufacturers. I recently painted my dryer and it’s controls, the washers getting a treatment next. You can just pick up some nail polish and go to town on appliances if you want to start small.
Unrelated, but can you still choose to add engraving when you buy an Apple device?
No idea. I did it myself with a dremel.
Seems like they still do, but only when you buy an iPad
they have deified the consumer product. they forget that the thing is useless after 5 to 10 years no matter how clean you keep it or what stickers you put on it. they forget it’s just a tool
I wouldn’t say useless, maybe if you do CAD work or something.
I know multiple people who daily drive 10+ year-old devices. I’d say everything from Haswell and up is still perfectly usable for everyday tasks.
Since you can’t open the case and salvage much, engraving the case is a solid measure to confirm ownership.
I believe strongly in customizing one’s tools
The irony of saying this about a Mac.
It’s by no means Linux but I actually do find MacOS quite customisable, especially if you spend a lot of time in the command line. It’s going in the opposite direction in the last couple years of course but you could straight up run the i3 TWM in XQuartz on MacOS if you wanted to
What customisations do you find MacOS lacks?
There are tons of utils to customize the MacOS UI, including lots of open-source ones and some that kick ass off anything on Linux or Windows. Anyone saying that MacOS can’t be customized, has never used MacOS.
You inclined to drop some examples?
Hammerspoon and Alfred are way better automation utils than alternatives in Windows or Linux. The absence of these two makes me weep regularly.
Karabiner might be the best too, haven’t looked into third-party Linux remapping utils yet. Both Cinnamon and KDE support only predefined remapping out of the box.
HyperSwitch and a dozen other utils allow customizing cmd-tab switching, namely add switching between windows instead of apps.
Native Clipy clipboard manager is way snappier than CopyQ. At least for Windows there’s Ditto.
There’s even an util called Mos fixing the fact that apps with foreign UI frameworks don’t understand the mouse scrolling speed properly, and treat the mouse and the touchpad differently. Which is also present in Windows.
You know about the touchbar? MTMR allows custom buttons on the touchbar, with custom actions. I’ve used it to connect/disconnect bluetooth headphones or hand them over to the phone (which was also set up as an Alfred command and as buttons on the phone itself, with bidirectional logic everywhere).
Shortcat allows keyboard access to arbitrary UI elements in the active window: sorta like Vimium for browsers, but you type a bit of the text label instead of a two-letter shortcut.
Hazel automatically processes files saved in particular folders, with particular rules — like the downloads. It can e.g. rename, move, or tag them. By the way, did you know that MacOS has tags for files while Windows and Linux have jackshit?
MacOS’ Cocoa UI framework allows addressing any element in an app’s window via xpath (iirc) and manipulate them, if given accessibility permissions from the user. Which permits doing a lot of UI automation without fiddling with mouse coordinates and faking clicks. And can be done with native AppleScript (although I’d prefer that they properly supported JXA instead). By the way, more than a few apps provide their own support for AppleScript, such that for example you can access notes in Evernote with it.
P.S. I also forgot about Automator, which is a first-party app by Apple, bundled with MacOS, that allows creating custom workflows for particular files, apps, or whatever. Neither Windows nor Linux ship with anything remotely like this, and even third-party apps in Win/Lin suck in comparison. iOS also has something similar with the Shortcuts app, while Google phones have the Assistant, which afaik can’t work without phoning home.
Raycast, HazeOver, Nightfall, Amphetamine, Yabai, Glide, AltTab, AlDente, MonitorControl, LinearMouse come to my mind right now. Probably forgot a few.
Wow, I totally forgot that Danger 5 exists.
MacBook != MacOS
Yeah its not the minimalist distros were all used to running but it still is a Unix OS with root privileges no?
Either way its the dudes work PC, probably doesn’t have a choice.
I meant Asahi Linux.
This was on my work computer.
Oh god. The IT department must hate them.
I wonder if they would do that with their personal machines as well…
My IT department doesn’t even let us put stickers on the laptops out of concerns about damage
Your IT department is ludicrous. The resale value isn’t impacted by stickers; they’re sold in lots.
My IT department puts anything capable of storing data into a chipper when its time has come. The guys who load the trucks will throw laptops like frisbees into the steel cage that they lock the devices in between the office and the shredder.
They probably wouldn’t care if you gave your laptop a tattoo or even a piercing.
Right? It’s not like they’re filing down the edges or something
I’m not quite sure whether we’re forbidden to put stickers on our work laptops, but almost everybody does. How else am I supposed to recognise mine after leaving it in a meeting room with a few others and coming back a while later?
I’ve never put stickers on any of my equipment, personal or otherwise … But someone at my work once told me that one could procure plastic shells you can put on Macbooks so you can a. Not damage the device and b. Take your stickers with you when you leave.
How am I supposed to project my corporate signalling?
Its company property, you don’t go putting stickers on company printers or the walls of your office.
And it’s not about resale value, it’s about corporate and professional image. We’re free to destructively mod our personal equipments, but not those of others.
I have deep respect for my colleagues who put stickers on the walls at work.
Found the corporate bootlicker!
----{
That’s the excuse they give you. The real reason is that they don’t want employees expressing their personalities or affiliations while representing the company.
I could see someone putting a sticker over a vent for the aesthetics and cause that’s where the loud noise generally comes from.
I mean, stickers are sometimes pretty hard to remove and leave behind permanent marks on some finishes, but that’s a hard nitpick.
I like seeing stickers on employee’s laptops, means they at least somewhat enjoy working here.
I say this to in general, but the reason why may be because the work laptop doesn’t belong to them?
Are they the kind of person who will doodle and scribble and highlight whole paragraphs in fluo yellow, rip covers and pages, and scorn the corners of a book that was loaned to them?
Some people have no respect for someone else’s property.
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Thanks! I hate it!
Though fair play you should be able to do whatever you want with your own stuff.
Yeah, with your own stuff…
This was on my work computer. I expect to similarly modify future work computers, and I would be happy to help you modify yours if you need a little encouragement. Don’t be scared. Fuck around a bit.
At the risk of being called a corporate bootlicker, it sounds like it isn’t their own, it was their employer’s.
If it’s your own, absolutely, fair play. If it’s your employer’s… Then it feels murkier. I wouldn’t blame their IT department for being quite cross if/when time comes to upgrade and return the laptop and give it a second life. For example, I would be quite pissed if IT gave me a defaced laptop like this as a loaner while mine is getting repaired.
This is extremely funny, thanks
Perfect sentiment! Change your tools so they work well for you.
I really do hate the edges on the unibody macs. I don’t think I can take a file to a paycheque’s worth of delicate electronics.
Wait how much did you file it right by the mouse pad? It looks so weird and uneven in the post.
Yes
I dremeled (with the emory wheel) the four sharp corners on my MacBook Air. Sharp and annoying before. Nicely rounded and smooth now.
on the what?
… on the notch in front of the mousepad.
Looks pretty rounded to me already.
The points on the front edge corners are actually really sharp. They is no radius on the inner curve to the corner.
I’d file mine if it wasn’t the dark gray. The silver is gonna look bad. Maybe in another few years.
it does look more comfortable now ^^
I have one and it’s a pretty sharp edge. This is a clever idea, I love the hacker attitude, but I’m not sure I’m ready to start filing at my laptop’s case.
Same. I salute folks willing to do this, but it doesn’t actually bother me enough to join them even though I’m a regular touchpad user.
What THE FUCK!?!?
