Comment by myself248

Comment by myself248 20 hours ago

6 replies

Post-disaster onboarding is complicated by app store lockdowns and the difficulty of sideloading. Heck, even establishing plain http or self-signed https connections is tricky on phones now.

I'm sure someone smarter than me has a toolkit for these things, I just don't know where to find it.

Store-and-forward-wise, NNCP is designed for this, but it's not widespread yet.

wpm 19 hours ago

I was just thinking about this sort of thing the other day. Thinking if I need a techno 'bug out' bag, my Macs would be the most useless ones to waste the weight on because if anything happened I'd never be able to reinstall macOS without phoning home to Apple for an activation.

  • GTP 17 hours ago

    Throw-in a USB key with a Linux distro that works with your Mac. You could also flash Ventoy on it, so that you can have multiple distros in case you end up needing to boot some other machine.

    • myself248 17 hours ago

      Trouble is a Linux-on-a-key that you've never used before, is still a long way from being productive without a network to install all the packages you actually want to use.

      It takes me about a month after a reinstall or new machine, to feel like I've really spread my wings and have everything installed that I initially forgot about. So I guess the recommendation would be "daily-drive it for a month before refrigerating it". And at that point, you might as well just make it your everyday machine.

    • cormorant 13 hours ago

      With Apple silicon, I'm not sure there is such a thing as a Linux USB boot. The install instructions for Asahi begin from macOS.

      Even if there were, it may be orthogonal to the anti-theft online Activation feature that wpm was talking about.