A packed week at work, always struggle the week after a holiday – no time to catch up on the mails from the previous week and a back to back diary. Can’t quite believe Starmer has held on – a caretaker PM now. What I really enjoyed this week was the morning walks – glorious. Not so glorious – some micro power outages at home. Had a handful over two days, not unique to me but happening to others in the area too. Glad I picked up a UPS for the NAS.
Also enjoyed a cracking brunch at Sunny Acre, the southside of Glasgow has some great places to eat.
Finished watching Season 2 of Daredevil which was pretty good, and The Cage on BBC was excellent. All caught up on The Assembly which is such a special programme – Nicola Sturgeons episode was funny, emotional and ended with a great version of Dignity.
Yellowkey – some of the cyber vulnerabilities being disclosed right now are amazing. This one could lead to real breaches of personal and corporate data.
You can make an app for that – Claude and Codex really do make app building pretty straightforward. How much waste is there though from people running almost identical apps but built and deployed independantly.
Halt and Catch Fire – a wonderful TV drama (if you haven’t watched it then find and watch it immediately) but I never thought much about the title – this post explains it all.
A week off work – much needed. Lots of tinkering, house chores and downtime. Also stumbled on two cracking Post Box toppers, one celebrating Star Wars day!
Found these on my daily walks, now on day 3344 of consecutive walks of at least 30 mins…but the weight is still growing!
Politics unavoidable this week and Labour, particularly Keir Starmer, are in a right mess.
Winners – Greens, Lib Dems and Reform. Also SNP but on a reduced vote share and number of seats. Losers – Tory’s and especially Labour given just two years ago they were probably favourites in Scotland.
Seeing narrative that Scotland has moved more right wing – certainly more obvious due to Reform but 31 Tory seats in 2021 now read as 29 right wing seats.
More nationalist supporting MSP’s than union supporting for the first time in a while. SNP said if they got a majority they’d move to have a referendum. That’s quickly pivoted to saying it was a manifesto commitment despite not having a majority hence they will move to have one.
Also seen a few comments that until independence is settled SNP will always be largest party. What does settled actually mean – Scotland is independent? It’s probably more likely given Wales and Northern Ireland are all now being run by nationalist supporting parties. But settled assumes a split in the union, and although number of MSP’s tells one story, opinion polls still suggest 50/50 split and a quick tot up of number of votes from Thursday shows independence supporting parties got around 1.87M votes vs 2.57M for union supporting parties.
Given rise of Reform and the number of MSP’s that were standing down there’s going to be a fresh look in the Scottish Parliament. Not convinced there’s any increase in talent.
Will we see Labour use their majority in the UK Parliament to actually do something? I expected a more radical government but they’ve been shackled by committing to Tory spending plans despite the world being on fire and events causing massive impact. Unless Starmer pivots quickly, which is unlikely, then he and Labour are toast.
Sticking to a manifesto is noble but futile…especially the left is called out when they want to deviate from a commitment but nobody actually holds parties to account on failed manifesto pledges. SNP pledges from 2021 are part fiction as an example, but was hardly a topic in the latest election.
And speaking of holding to account, given the rise of Reform, will journalists actually do their job now and hold them to account? If they don’t like the questions and threaten to walk away…let them.
🔗 Links
Why You Take Notes But Never Get Smarter – I felt seen reading this. Lots of notes, tons of bookmarks, when do I think and learn? So doing a lot of cleansing as I moved to Obsidian and rethinking working week to bake in more thought time.
The era of AI malaise – For all the benefits of AI I can’t be alone in finding it tiring. Breathless release after release, constant threat of upending jobs. And how can I forget – the constant slop on social media.
Taken – god, this is eye opening. What a website knows when you visit…and stores. Nothing is for free especially on the internet.
Dusk – It’s 20 years since the release of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the GameCube…and you can now play a much enhanced version on PC and Mac plus iOS and Android. Love it.
Maybe it’s AI and my constant tinkering via Claude and Codex, maybe it’s because I’ve had some time off from work and wanted to change some app’s. Maybe it’s because I’ve so fecking tired of Safari crapping out on the Mac in some form…but I’ve finally switched a few of the default app’s I’ve used for years.
First up, it’s bye bye Safari and hello Chrome. Well it was until I used Chrome for a day and realised Google has neutered ad-blocking. So after trialling Brave I’ve settled on Firefox as my default browser on the Mac. Fast, great extensions and so far no major issues after a few days of use. Safari was always complaining about high memory usage, had rendering issues and every so often some extensions just failed to work properly. I’ve got Firefox setup on iOS and iPadOS as well but will likely stick with Safari on those platforms as it’s faster.
Next up, Apple Notes. The app has improved greatly over the years and although I’ve not really had any sync issues, I wanted a bit more control over the note-taking experience and I also wanted something that could talk easily via Claude or Codex. Considered Notion but settled on Obsidian. I’ve sued Obsidian in the past and liked it, the challenge will be settling on a view that I like and with limited amount of plugins but its almost impossible not to keep tinkering in the first few days of use.
I’ve cleaned up the notes in Apple Notes and migrated over only what I needed – so much legacy cruft that I just wasn’t using. So far, all working well and syncing across platforms.
And the final change is to ditch Day One for journalling and move all 7000 odd entries into Obsidian. Not as slick an interface in Obsidian but one less app that I need is where my head’s at right now.
Will these changes stick? Hope so as I want to simplify my app’s down but not trade that for less functionality or a drop in stability but already seen an improvement in that front now that I’m no longer hitting daily Safari issues. Whats next?
A busy fortnight, lots on in and out of work. Looking forward to the coming week – my first holidays of the year and a much needed break.
Good catchup with colleagues midweek at Ardnamurchan Restaurant in Glasgow although food was just ok, and not helped by one of the staff dropping leftovers down my back. At least the company was good.
🔗 Links
Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down – Bye bye Tim, hello John Ternus. Not a surprise as widely tipped for over a year but the timing feels right. Apple are making more money than ever and seem to have a slate of product launches ahead so it makes sense that Ternus, a product guy, is now running the company. I’d hope it leads to a more open and less litigious Apple but unlikely.
Another Day Has Come – Gruber nails the stepping down of Cook and links back to the death of Steve Jobs.
How the Tech World Turned Evil – Greed, right wing politics and control are blighting tech leaders. Seeing more and more posts on moving away from big tech and to non American solutions…even self hosting of basics like mail, calendar etc.
I’m done renting my digital life – Another trend is a move back to physical – blu-ray’s, cd’s, vinyl or doing it yourself via a NAS. I really need to write up my NAS build from last year.
Why does it take so long to release black fan versions? – Noctua make great PC fans and I used a lot of them in my NAS build – nice they answered a question I had last year – why are black fans always later than their default colours?
XOXO – Always looked at this internet/tech/media festival with a bit of envy. The topics were always interesting and the speakers varied. This site pulls all the XOXO content into one place. Easy to lose hours.
Out for a walk down the canal today and this magnificent creature was protecting its nest as the rest of the walkers/runners/cyclists passed within feet. Hopefully in the weeks to come there will be a few cygnets.
Rest of the week has been a bit meh. Lots on but a feeling of little progress at both work and home. I have cast my postal vote in the Scottish Elections. So many parties I’ve never heard of, so many people likely voting for Reform. It’s a shite state of affairs.
Finished of season 2 of The Pitt – glorious. If you haven’t given it a try already then seek it out pronto. The Capture finished well on the BBC and if that’s the end after series 3 it was pretty well done although there are some jumping off points if they want to do more. The last season of The Boys has leant in heavily to right wing culture and government and its playing almost as a satire to the current US government. Satisfying.
Codex for (almost) everything – Anthropic and OpenAI are releasing new features it feels like almost daily. Codex updates in the last week brought features previewed in Sky and it’s pretty powerful to see Codex background controlling many of the apps on your Mac. AI + agents makes for a pretty exciting future.
Introducing Claude design – Web based but another interesting AI tool from Anthropic. Definitely given me some good/better design options for my website.
A four day work week – need more of those. As ever there’s lots on at work and already looking ahead to 2027. Also using Claude and agents more and it’s delivering promising results. Also promising, no snow this week at least in Glasgow.
Also a week where I focussed on finances and got a pile of small but building tasks out the way. After a chat with Shak on Friday also spun through my digital, entertainment and utility subscriptions across the year. Feck me. Quite the total and I still keep finding more I’ve forgotten. I need an intervention.
🔗 Links
Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted? – Long, detailed investigation with lots of input from around the tech world including Altman himself. The animation at the start of the article says it all.
Sam Altman Blog – A few days after the article Altman’s house was attacked and he posted on the impact the article and fallout has had.
Project Glasswing – This feels one of the more important AI press releases in the last 12 month but at the moment, thats all it is, a press release and PR from Anthropic. However the idea that they are finding bugs that nobody else has and also how AI is behaving is super interesting and pretty scary.
Is Hormuz Open Yet? – Certainly vibe coded but a really useful site especially as it’s now America and not Iran that is going to block the Hormuz.
Artemis II successfully completed its mission. Loved images from the Lunar Flyby and also these iPhone Wallpapers. Images look spectacular on OLED screens.
A packed fortnight including a long planned and successfully executed application upgrade at work. Great to see the team work so well over a long weekend and despite some hiccups we got there.
Its also spring and if there was any doubt that Glasgow gets some crazy weather, here’s the start and end pictures from my walk yesterday.
This was in the space of 90 minutes – I was frozen and soaked through by the end of it. And we go from a feels like temp on Sunday of -5 to a feels like of 18 on Tuesday. Lovely!
Last week saw Artemis II launch on its fly-by mission to the moon. Nasa did a nice short recap of the launch but its the photo’s released so far that have impressed. Hello, World is an image not taken by a human in over 50 years. So much detail when you study it and taken on a Nikon D5 according to Flickr. I’m also loving they are using a Flickr Album to share hundreds of photo’s from the launch. I’m not as enthused at the tech they are using feels like an extension of the 70’s nor that the USA is currently bombing the hell out of Iran and threatening WW III – puts things in perspective.
Apple also turned 50 on April 1st. So many great articles and videos over the last week, some of my favourites below:
Speaking of finally, finished of Season 4 of The Boys ahead of its final run starting later this week. More than a bit squiffy in places but ended well and sets up the final run of episodes. The Pitt season 2 has again been superb – and it’s finally available to watch in the UK via HBO Max. Not so good – War Machine. Terrible film with dodgy plot and effects.
BBC also on a strong run. The Capture season 3 has been excellent with some good twists and it was great to welcome back Race Across the World. Still one of the best shows on the BBC and the team do so well at getting the right pairings for the race.
What a shit week. However we got some lovely spring weather and the Glasgow Botanics looked smashing on a quiet morning walk. Even saw a bunny.
🔗 Links
The 49MB Web Page – Thanks to ubiquitous fast internet you don’t think too much about the size of web pages now…but this is horrendous. Not just the size but how unusable many sites now are thanks to adverts, auto playing pop up videos, adverts that are 80% of the screen. Here’s an analysis of a PC Gamer webpage thats a meagre 37MB but downloads around half a GB of data if you keep it open. Browsers need to stop this if website publishers are going to be so hostile.
StopSloppypasta – this also feels inevitable as a friend suffers this daily at work with someone abusing copilot to spam their Teams chats. Please don’t.
Google Search is now using AI to replace headlines – this is ugly. Google should not be doing this. The poor AI results at the top of Google search has lead to me using ChatGPT more for basic searches…and its much better.
Our commitment to Windows quality – Quite the admission from Microsoft – Windows 11 had got bloated, slow, full of Copilot everywhere you don’t need it. Everything an OS shouldn’t be. Hopefully the focus is real and we see a significant improvement in speed and reliability through 2026.
Glasgow Subway Goes Contactless – Finally. It’s a small thing especially given how simple the Glasgow Subway is, but this takes some more friction out of travelling around Glasgow. Next – fix the buses.
So a recent post on BlueSky got me thinking – what are my 9 favourite racing games? Not easy and favourite does not equal best. After a bit of thinking and jogging of memories, here’s my list in no particular order. Or is it.
Sega Rally Championship – Saturn
Sega Rally Championship came to the Sega Saturn in 1995. At the time the graphics were state of the art but what shone was the gameplay especially two player split screen. Can remember one memorable 2 player session where you won by carving out a 2 or 3 second lead and it was around 60 or 70 minutes before one of us ebbed out in front enough. Glorious.
Gran Turismo 4
The fourth version of the series and probably the one I played the most despite there being no online multiplayer. Launching in 2004 the graphics on the Playstation 2 were superb as the dev’s knew how to make the most of the platform. The cars handled differently and there were over 700 of them and so much customisation was available – amazing depth for a mostly single player racing game.
While it wasn’t the first nor got the best reviews this was peak Gran Turismo. Future games may have had much better graphics but the online racing always suffered from cheating and the game grew with bloat. I’d hate to see the hours I spent on this.
Project Gotham Racing 3
PGR was a superb racing series on the Xbox with origins from Metropolis Street Racing on the Dreamcast. PGR 3 was peak for me. Released in 2005, racing around London, Tokyo, New York or Las Vegas was all the better for doing it with friends online. That what set this out from Gran Turismo – up to 8 player multiplayer and online scoreboards for various time trials.
PGR 3 also introduced me to Geometry Wars which was available to play in the arcade cabinets in your garage. Glorious – still play Geometry Wars to this day.
F-Zero
I loved this game. Super Nintendo, 1991, one of the best console pads coupled with a futuristic racing game taking advantage of the Mode 7 system on the SNES. Much simpler than today’s games but I was obsessed. Even sent some times into one of the magazines. Been playing quite a bit of F-Zero 99 on the Switch and this is my goto game for testing an emulator or new bit of retro hardware.
F355 Challenge
F355 Challenge on the Dreamcast was such a tough racing game. Small number of tracks, tough computer opponents but once you put the time in it was such a rewarding game. This came out in 2000 and it took a few years before it was bettered.
Forza Horizon 3
Offshoot of the main Forza racing series, Horizon 3 came out in 2016 and was so much fun. Online was rock solid, superb graphics and gameplay second to none. You really could race anywhere and there was so much depth. Tuning, liveries, unlocking more cars. Loved it and looking forward to Horizon 6 coming out later this year.
Driveclub
The best racing game on the PS4, Driveclub came out in 2014 and despite the mixed reviews I loved the physics, the weather and the online racing. Evolution were great at releasing updates and new modes and tracks were delivered for another two years. It’s a real shame that the original release had issues, didn’t have the weather feature and a bit like we saw in the last few years with No Man’s Sky, Driveclub was one of the first racing games to really evolve and get better with each content drop.
MotoGP
Mugello! 2002, I’ve just got broadband installed for the first time (hello green frog) and the Xbox live beta service has launched with three tracks from MotoGP. That first Friday afternoon with Xbox Live was memorable. The first race on MotoGP was with a few of the developers of MotoGP testing out the online performance – awesome – this is the future of gaming. The next race was with a wee ned from Glasgow calling everyone a fanny – oh no – this is the future of gaming. As it was the only decent beta game I put an ungodly amount of hours into this and the full release of MotoGP.
Many friends were made from that first year of Xbox Live and MotoGP itself was never really bettered as future releases changed the handling and made it maddening for me.
Wipeout
It was 1995 and Sony launched its first console, the PlayStation, in Europe with Wipeout. Like most launches you pick up a few games and Ridge Racer had got most of the press, but Wipeout was an instant win for me. Visuals such a step up compared to something like F-Zero from only 4 years prior but it was the handling of the ships, the variety of tracks, the soundtrack and the industrial visuals. What. A. Game.
Follows up’s were also very good but the first version will always be the best for me.
Contenders
I’ve played a ton of racing games over the years so getting down to a favourite 9 wasn’t easy. Some runners up – Burnout Paradise, Daytona, Forza Motorsport 4, Colin McRae Rally, Stunt Car Racer and Super Mario Kart. All cracking games and while some of them may be technically better than my top 9 they don’t have the same hold on my memory.
Lot’s of arcade racers in the list and very little sim – anything obvious missing?
The Union Street fire, started in an unregulated vape shop, devastated a much loved Glasgow victorian building, thankfully didn’t damage Central Station long term and turned every Glaswegian into a building expert. Got to love social media.
I took a walk into town yesterday and the burning smell was still noticeable. Demolition is underway and when you see the damage its understandable as the front of the building looks like it could be pushed over without much effort. Watching the disaster unfold last Sunday was numbing. There’s been many memorable and haunting images shared including some drone shots that really showed the challenge the Fire Service had in not only stopping the fire but protecting Central Station and Hotel. I thought this selection on Reddit were some of the better images from the incident.
The Glasgow Bell has also done some terrific reporting this week on the fire and its worth reading through their article from last year – Tinderbox – which catalogues the far too many, and suspicious, fires that blight Glasgow. If you are at all interested in whats going on in Glasgow and supporting local journalism then it’s well worth subscribing.
“This Is Not The Computer For You” – The best review of the new MacBook Neo. My first computer was an Amstrad CPC 464 with a green screen as thats all my parents could afford. I loved that thing. I gamed on it, wrote little scripts – well copied them from Amstrad Action. I’m chuckling now, I go to such lengths to not copy any text but back in the 80’s I’d sit for hours typing in code copied from a magazine. Also wrote my six year studies dissertation – Pessimism and Hope – The victim as protagonist in the novels To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men and A Disaffection. I was a fun kid. Bought a dot matrix printer for it as well. That first computer lasted for 6 or 7 years until I bought my first PC. And I didn’t care about specs, green screen, tape drives – I just got on with it. The MacBook Neo will be a massive hit. I do wonder if iPad sales will take a hit as you can do so much more on a Neo vs an iPad.
Finished season 4 of Industry – quite the pivot from previous seasons but enjoyed it all the same. The Capture also started well – its been ahead of technology in previous series so we’ll see where this one takes us.
Loved Drive to Survive Season 8 although there were a couple of stories missing from the season recap, maybe due to them dropping down to 8 episodes. Today’s race from Shanghai didn’t disappoint either. Felt like there were battles up and down the standings and although there is something a little artificial around the overtaking the overall races have been enjoyable. The politics are coming to the surface more than ever though with some teams and drivers clearly not liking the changes.
Finally – The Pitt. Loved season 1, season 2 going strong and launches properly in the UK in a couple of weeks. The Guardian had a good behind the scenes this week.
