With the iPhone conference today, and now Sony announcing a tech briefing with Cerny tomorrow, my wallet is well and truly done for 💸
Tagged “Tech”
Stuff This Week #23
I haven’t taken a single photo this week with my phone! 😳 So here’s an emergency Trio picture for the purpose of this post.
Well, it’s certainly been a week where middle aged men are not afraid to tell you their opinions on RSS/Unified timeline apps or indeed podcast apps 1 😜
- 📱 Phone press conference next week, so nearly new phone time. I’ll be excited to try out the AI stuff to see if it makes Siri actually useful. More excited for the cameras. 48mp ultra wide and a 7x optical zoom (up from 5x) are rumoured!
Opinions on the new reeder app are all over the place and that’s fucking great. Good to see something that’s quite different shaking things up.
Reeder is out. Having a play with it now.
Impressive and I like what it’s doing right off the bat. Desperately needs folders.
Reeder iCloud sync has been dire (requiring a 3rd party RSS service to work reliably) so it’ll be interesting to see how this app holds up!
Reeder 5 is now Reeder Classic as the next evolution of the app is an “everything” feed like IconFactories Tapestry. Good to see some competition in this area and be interesting to see how both apps hit and evolve.
In todays episode of “stuff I’ve found clearing out the office…. What the hell am I gonna do with this damn thing….”
A 20+ year old PCG-SR31K 🤯 complete with external CD-ROM drive….
Octopus Mini
Got our funky octopus Home Mini this week and have sent our In-Home Display into retirement.
I’m sure our old display is showing the wrong tariffs for our energy as over the past week it’s consistently displayed a higher cost than the Octopus Mini (which gets more info more often and understands our current tarrif).
This is a really neat little device that gives us some really good data on our energy usage. It was free, it’s made from re-cycled plastic, and also it’s pink! 🐙⚡️
Stuff This Week #18
This weeks photo comes courtesy of some beautiful weather on Weymouth Beach
👨💻 Well, this week contained what is probably the biggest global IT infrastructure outage of all time. 8.5 million devices affected.
As succinct an explanation of what happened is available here
If you don’t care about techie ramblings, skip down this post.
MacOS Sequoia’s Classic Macintosh Wallpapers
My word I love these new MacOS Macintosh wallpapers. Great tribute to the original Mac and Susan Kare’s work
Every device I own apart from my iPad is now on a beta os…. whoops!
🔗 Vision Pro can no longer fill your room with bats
Apple forgot about an AR feature it developed back in 2018. It’s still there in WebKit today, and that includes the Vision Pro build.
All a user has to do is simply visit a website, and a couple of seconds later …
🤣 Amazing. This is some William Gibson tier stuff. Can you imagine in 20 years if AR becomes so much more mainstream.
Reminds me of the (much ruder) second Life incident years ago but closer to “real life”.
🔗 Apple To Launch “Passwords” App
I like 1 password. I’ve used it for years. I would also love to stop paying for 1password and have it challenged. Bring it on Apple.
Stuff This Week #14
📱 A bit of a tech heavy week this week with the arrival of my new iPad which I’m enjoying very much. Still very much in the setup phase. Also, does anyone else have that period with new gadgets where you want to “keep them nice” and are cautious about touching/using them? 🤪
I don’t think I’ll do a write up or review of it. There’s enough of that out there by people much more gifted than me, but I will say I’m enjoying it very much and am still loving the concept of as my primary computing device moving forwards.
I will say the screen is exceptional for photos. I can absolutely tell the difference vs the M1 display side by side before I boxed it up for trade in.
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🐦⬛ The Jumble Trail last weekend was really fun. The plants my wife bought are going well. More plants means more plant pots and so the cycle of greenery continues.
🍕 We enjoyed getting the Pizza oven out last weekend as well. If the weather keeps up I think we’ll be getting the BBQ out soon as well. 🍖
🇨🇦 In further food news, the poutine in the hospital canteen was certainly an experience! 😜. A work friend has friends in Canada and on sending the photograph, one replied “Never show this to another Canadian...you’ll be stopped at the border” 🤣
🇯🇵 I got another Japan Diaries entry out!. 3 more days to write up. One large one and two smaller ones. I’ve really enjoyed writing all these up and keeping the memories of the holiday alive. With the write ups coming to an end, it’s probably time to start to plan where to go next! 🤔
🛹 My youngest son is a big skateboarder, and our newest obsession is skateboarding show KASSO Check it out!
🎮 Finished Red Dead Redemption on the switch and have now started Undead Nightmare.
From the indie scene on Steamdeck I am very much enjoying MiniShoot Adventures which is sort of a BulletHell Zelda.
On XBox Gamepass Little Kitty, Big City is too cute for words...and also is giving me the Tokyo vibes big time!
👨💻 Work wise, I have one week until I go on Holiday. We have a couple of days of out of hour large system updates next week, one of which will have me working unsociable hours on Monday. It’s been a heavy couple of months of planning and pushing at work so I’ll be welcome of a break soon. I cannot wait to unplug a little bit from strategising and scheming on projects.
📓 Productivity wise this week, I hope to watch some of the Obsidian links that @amerpie recommended to me and see if I can get a bit better with it.
🎬 The new iPad has made me re-engage with Final Cut on it as well... We’ll see how far I get with it! 🫤
Anyway, tonight with the weather being so beautiful we’re off for an evening at the beach! 🏖️ I might even see if I can find an ice cream! 😋
🔗 VMWare Fusion Pro Free For Personal Use
Great news for the few months or a year until Broadcom utterly sinks this company.
My random notes from the Apple iPad Event
My random notes from the Apple iPad Event. I’ve already made my choice and it should arrive next week.
1TB, Space black. Pro Pencil. Magic Keyboard.
Don’t really need the 1TB but I want the extra M4 core and 16GB RAM. With my current usage and how I split time between my Mac and my iPad Pro I’m going all in on the iPad Pro and making it my primary computing device.
Anyone wanna buy a Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard? Going at a reasonable rate? 🤣
Aww yeah I think it’s upgrade time for me 🫴💰
The Law Of Triviality and the joys of plodding
The Law Of Triviality or “Bikeshedding” was in full effect at work today.
I had permission to put a message on a system about upcoming changes. When it went live, a bunch of more senior staff thought my message was not quite right and levied their opinions on what should replace it. Eventually, after everyone had spoken, no one could decide on precisely what the message should say and they all just stopped talking about it without making a decision.
🤫 The original message I wrote still remains on the system 🤭🤷♂️
An old friend of mine who very recently passed away,1 once told me
“The rarest technical skill you can cultivate is common sense. And it’s often in short supply”
I think there is a lot of truth to that. People tend to chase flash or want to get involved in whatever the zeitgeist of the day is vs just slogging away at the fundamental bricks that complete projects. We’re easily distracted, turned and moved away from what we were doing not just 30 minutes ago. It’s part of the modern workplace with email, Teams/Slack…distractions can be everywhere… If you want them or not!
I’m often not the smartest technical asset in the room, but what I can do is make a structured list, update it and follow through on it.
If I can’t follow through I communicate why and I ask for help and advice. I send updates update calmly, descriptively and consistently. I feel like these fundamentals are key to collaboration and moving things forwards, but they can very often get lost in the storm for want of the thrill of starting another new project, looking at the shiny new thing or indeed bikeshedding over a two sentence paragraph for 30 minutes in what should be a 5 minute decision.
My wife jokingly refers to how we tackle work as being plodders. We’re At the coal face consistently smashing away and making the pile smaller whilst sometimes someone whifts past and may tell us they think we’re holding our picks wrong before they vanish again to the fresh air outside of the mine.
Someone this week came up to me whilst I was working and told me they were grateful for some work I’d done on a project and felt like I had kept them informed of what was happening and why throughout. At the end of the day, I think that’s what keeps me doing what I do. Providing that measurable consistent delivery that makes a difference to….someone out there.
So I’ll just keep plodding. I hope you keep plodding too.
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Hence I’ve been thinking of them often over the past few days. I never did get to tell you how grateful I was for all your help when I was a stupid young thing. Rest in peace Brett. ↩
I bought a licence for an indie app I love today💸
(I’ve been on the free tier of that one waaaay too long)
Then bought an upgrade for another indie app I love 💸
(Had every version since V10)
Happy to pay and support these apps that I could not do without 👏👏👏