Shorter work week thanks to May bank holiday but the tasks are never ending at the moment. A real positive was a visit from colleagues to understand more of our business and what we do.
Apple Turnover – one of my favourite pastries but this is about one of my favourite tech companies. Many have called for Apple to change direction, this one from John Siracusa nails some of my feelings about the Apple of today. I’m not sure though a change at the top would be enough – feels a number of the exec team need replaced.
A brief history of the all-in-one Mac – post looking back at happier times. I first used a Mac at Glasgow Uni in the early 90’s and it was glorious. Something so elegant compared to Windows 3.1 and the standard beige PC’s that were the norm at the time.
I despair at the state of politics in the UK. Seeing Reform and Farage being so successful in the last week and being given no real challenge from much of the media is a kick in the balls. What is clear is the two party system in the UK is finished. With it should also go first past the post. Labour also need to wake up. Tacking to the right, trying to match Reform, is not what the majority of Labour voters want or expect and mistakes like Winter Fuel need to be reversed.
Apple lost another court case which should see the App Store open up. Always been ridiculous that a developer can’t even put a link in a description to a website, often argued that it would be too dangerous to allow. I like my Apple devices but seeing the company making arguments to retain control and extract coin from everyone has went on too long.
Ordered Zen Full Fibre which should deliver 2Gbps up and down. Install in a couple of weeks time…and now looking at what other bits of the home network I’ll need to upgrade to make full use of the speed.
Miami Grand Prix was excellent. Season so far has been fantastic with a real closing of the field, exactly what many thought would happen in the last year of the current regs. Impressed with Piastri. And great to see Williams back in the top 10.
No surprise that GTA VI is delayed until May 26. The last few were all delayed 6-12 months from original release date. Get it right – we’ll be playing it for years anyway.
Split Fiction still impressing – highly recommend playing with a friend as the gameplay has kept fresh throughout.
Finished Daredevil Born Again – really good, set up nicely for another season
Watched the first three episodes of Andor season 2. Great to be be back in a more adult Star Wars universe. Looking forward to a rewatch of Rogue One at the end of the season.
Holidays and work got in the way of last weeks update. Spent most of the last week off work and it was a much needed break. Rest and reset with some jobs tackled around the house.
Oh Synology. I’ve had my NAS for just under 10 years and was plotting moving to an 8 bay Synology – easy upgrade, wait for this years hardware refresh, Synology do make managing the device pretty straightforward. Then Synology announced that they were bringing in hard drive restrictions to their devices. They say it’s to reduce risk of hard drive failure, it’s really to make a little more coin as Synology drives are just rebranded third party as they don’t make their own drives. Coupled with the 8 bay refreshes this year using the same hardware as 2021 means I’m done. Going down build my own NAS route – more interesting, more bang for buck, Unraid has interested me for a few years and this news is enough to put me over the edge. Hope to have it done and migrated to by end of May.
Another itch I’ve had for a while is moving this site from WordPress onto…something else. It’s more than I need to run the site, I’ve been looking for something much simpler and over the last 6 months the politics around WordPress has made for grim reading. In the last week employees have found hidden watermarks to catch leakers. Sounds pretty toxic. So I’m looking at ditching WordPress and moving to something like Hugo or Eleventy. Or is it 11ty? Anyway…bit longer in the year for this one but it will be happening.
Long and tough week. Virtually no think time, too many meetings and I need a break – so Easter week and a few days off work can’t come soon enough. Was great to see our Training Academy officially opened and have the weather to match it. Not so great was another migraine and subsequent headaches for a few days after. I asked ChatGPT to sketch my migraine and it did a pretty good job.
Trumps tariffs have caused havoc over the last few weeks. So much harm and for what gain especially as expected he’s backtracked on so many of them. Well it’s clear somebody with insider information has benefited. He’s such a crook.
Getting pretty frustrated with Apple’s software quality. Latest update to MacOS 15.4 has been so buggy. Safari tabs not displaying properly, desktop widgets randomly being deleted after a wake from sleep, Photo’s failing after a few hours requiring restart of the app. Tried multiple restarts and its not helped. FFS.
Dropped Ivory for Mastodon updates and moved to Tapestry instead. I’d backed the kickstarter and enjoyed it but Ivory felt more solid. However the latest update which removes timeline duplicates from Mastodon and Bluesky was enough for me to jump.
Finished The Pitt. Got better and better throughout the season. Great cast, stories that maintained the pace and looking forward to season 2 next year. Can’t quite believe it never got picked up to show in the UK.
Alongside the Switch 2 pre-order, got a pad and memory card incoming too. Fired up the Switch for first time in ages and jumped on F-Zero 99. What a cracking game. Should have been playing this sooner.
Pooped. So much on at the moment, nicer weather helping. Looking forward to Easter week and a break from work as its much needed.
Hard to avoid Trump’s America and its abdication from globalisation this week and was tempted not to post anything but loved this long read on Trump’s Divergence from the Interests of Capital.
And in these difficult times I liked this article on the Guardian flourishing. Although there’s no paywall I subscribe as you need to invest in journalism somehow.
Fiber Optic drones are Changing Combat Operations – I had no idea this was a thing. I was convinced it was an early April 1st but drones with km’s of fibre optics can operate without fear of being jammed.
You really have to be on guard with Cyber Security – even the experts get caught out. A really honest post and shows it can happened to anyone – saw it first hand at work this week with many caught out with the latest phishing test – busy people, hugely distracted and a simple but targeted mail and bang – lots of people caught.
Lot’s of conjecture around AI – it will eat jobs, vibe coding is the way, it won’t be that damaging but I found this post really interesting on what the next 2 years could hold.
Nintendo finally showed more detail on the Switch 2. I missed the launch event, thought it was a bit meh…but I’ve got a pre-order in. Mario kart World looks a ton of fun. The noise around games being expensive – I get it, but comparing hours you get from a game vs watching a movie once or twice…I still think the price is fine.
Tron Legacy was criminally underrated – loved that film – so looking forward to Tron: Ares whose trailer dropped this week.
A busy, chaotic week full of escalations and late night conversations and I look back and wonder…what just happened? It’s part of the frustration with the role – I often look back at a week and struggle to find progress.
Did enjoy a night with retiring colleague and some of the team. Retirement still a good bit away for me but need to get a better clarity on when.
Who knew Signal would dominate the news. Inviting a journalist into your supposedly secret chat group was a pretty impressive fuck up…but Trumps government will have many more and reality is this has had little consequence although hopefully its reinforced Europe’s view on America right now.
You couldn’t go anywhere without seeing the results of OpenAI’s new image generation added to ChatGPT. Some of my tests have generated some really impressive images including accurate text which was always one of the giveaways to an AI generated image. It’s also great fun throwing images into the engineer and redrawing as movie posters, Lego figures…whatever. The Ghibli images though were a bit much although some truly amazing.
Adolescence was amazing. Best thing I’ve watched in ages and it was so well crafted – the love and energy into each episode clear to see. Only ding for me was there was little on how teenagers are being influenced and damaged, a view shared here.
Busy week, juggling lots. So much so I wasn’t in the right headspace to catch up with friends…which would have been the wrong option. Instead a good curry at Green Gates Cafe (tough lamb though) on Thursday and a much needed natter. Saturday a trip to Wex, Yo Suhi for lunch and La Gelatessa for some amazing ice cream. So good…although Yo Sushi has got pretty spendy for what you get.
Been keeping my walks up this year, a little more each week than last year and it’s helping with well being and cracking through podcasts. Improving weather helping too.
Oh Scotland. Amazing result on Thursday…amazingly bad result tonight. Tough watch.
Digital Hygiene – good list of products to keep you safe online. Must give Brave another go.
How I’ve run major projects – practical list of what to do if you find yourself running a project. Will share that with my team.
I’ve plotted out quite the series of upgrades to my home office. Network, NAS, monitors, hub and eventually replace the Mac Studio with a MacBook Pro. Will be gradual over the next year but looking forward to incremental improvements.
The Seneca – one thing I won’t be upgrading to but can still appreciate is this keyboard. So many amazing details but has a ridiculous price over $3k.
Finished Severance season 2. Enjoyed it but found myself getting a bit annoyed with it towards the end. Feel this should have been done with two series rather than spinning it out over more. Getting Lost vibes and that’s not good.
Adolescence on Netflix is the best thing I’ve seen on TV in a long time. Tough but important subject, Stephen Graham can do no wrong.
Another full on week. Supported a day of interviews for another functions role and there was a stand out candidate whose interview I really enjoyed. Focus turning to cost workshops, KPI’s and q1 reviews.
Something is Rotten in the State of Cupertino. A blistering essay from John Gruber after Apple postponed one of their key Apple Intelligence features, personalised Siri, to “the coming year”. What we saw last year at WWDC was vaporware. Something that’s often associated with Microsoft or Google but now Apple is guilty of doing. Most of the Apple Intelligence features have been sub standard. Genmoji gets a pass, Image Playgrounds awful, summarised notification unreliable and most of the Mail features I’ve disabled. Will be very interesting to see what Apple show at this years WWDC in June…and how much will be trusted and delivered.
When looking at how poor Siri is in day to day usage and now seeing Apple postpone its big upgrade, Amazon’s recent demo showing conversational Alexa makes Apple feel even more behind. However theres not much of a surprise that Amazon is forcing your audio chats to the cloud from the end of March. Not a great look, equally running AI on current Echo devices is a non starter.
Are tools like ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini leading us to use the web less? For me yes but like this post highlights, you go down far fewer rabbit holes compared to Googling for an answer.
My Synology NAS is old and more than 90% full. An upgrade this year feels inevitable. Still swithering between an 8 bay Synology or building my own but I love the look of this new storage device from Gridstack. Looks fantastic, will still be noisy unless you go all in on SSD.
FreeMediaHeckYeah – useful list of media sites from emulators to audiobooks and everything in between.
F1 is back. Looks like Lewis Hamilton has swapped last years fourth placed team for this years fourth placed team. Only race 1 but Ferrari’s strategy calls are still the worst. Drive to Survive Season 7 dropped last week and while I enjoyed it, there’s still so much fabrication in it vs what actually happened. In its favour though they get a load of behind the scenes drama that isn’t seen anywhere else.
The White Lotus is building nicely if a little slowly, The Pitt though has been outstanding. Loving it so far.
Another full on week. Each one rolling into another at the moment with little time to catch breath although I did enjoy catching up with old and new colleagues at Ka Pao on Wednesday. Always love the food and atmosphere there – something for everyone and the only place I know that can make cabbage a must have.
Some sensible guidance on owning your calendar. My work calendar often doesn’t feel like mines anymore as meetings, reviews, workshops pile in. Most frustrating are the ones that clearly come in without checking if you are already busy elsewhere.
New Mac’s this week. My Mac Studio is three years old and there’s nothing I do that doesn’t feel sluggish in any way, so it will be a couple of years more I expect before I look at an upgrade. The new MacBook Air’s look good though.
I do wish more sites would make full RSS feeds available, but for those that don’t, Chris Hardie has the answers.
The news that Digg is coming back is interesting but will it take off? The original site was great, a daily driver for me. I’m now finding more via newsreaders and RSS again so it might have a place with less time spent on socials.
Balatro is an amazing game. Many peoples game of 2024, this post on the development of the game and what happened at release is a great read.
Video game magazines were at their peak in the 80’s and 90’s. Here’s some behind the scenes on what it was like to work in the industry. Amstrad Action was my first monthly magazine at the time…and I’m still picking up Edge.
March already, spring is in the air as bulbs burst into flower around Glasgow. More importantly, driving to and from work is now almost in daylight. Sounds a trivial thing but it makes such a difference.
Sad news this week, one of my old gaming buddies passed away following a stroke. Jon was the nicest of people and always went out of his way to help. Met him a couple of times when he worked in Glasgow and was even nicer in real life vs online. RIP Jon.
Last week was an impressively busy week at work. All different topics, a lot needing attention. I saw a blog post elsewhere talk about minutes in meeting and for me it was just over 2000 minutes. Considering that’s 90% of the contracted hours I should work its no surprise I fell massively behind in delivery. Need to make some changes to free up thinking/doing time.
I have often been described as a fixer – might not know the topic but can get to the bottom of a problem and work out way forward. I’ve never been entirely comfortable with that tag but this post on troubleshooting resonated massively. A good read for anyone solving complex problems or having to address a business continuity challenge.
The Pitt is giving me modern day ER vibes. Really enjoyed the first couple of episodes and it feels a more realistic look at todays healthcare where money is tight.
Framework released some nice hardware this week, both laptops and desktops. Modular and repairable hardware ultimately means its slightly bigger and clunkier that a Mac laptop for example, but if I was looking for a Windows laptop I’d be putting these devices near the top of the list.
Also new this week was Hyperspace, a disks space reclaiming app from John Siracusa. There are many similar apps but I’d trust Hyperspace over any others. The icon is gorgeous too.
Picked up some new wall art from Turadh Design Co. Hope it will brighten up my pretty soulless office.
Final link this week is a video that answers one of life great mysteries – Where do Red Dead Redemption 2’s Rivers Come From? Watching it brought back great memories of completing Red Dead 2 and also just how good some of the water and graphics in that game were. GTA VI this year???
