One Man's Notes

Beautiful sunny day in Shoreham by Sea.

Today’s status:

Flipping ‘eck. I can’t wait to use this.

Pixelmator Pro update integrates its entire app inside Apple Photos as a Photos extension

If you use the Speedtest app on your iPhone, press and hold on the Go button. After a while… …something happens.

Fading into twilight

I see it’s “update all the Apple devices” night.

One thing I’ve learnt about myself in recent years is that things like Apple Watch straps and GoPro sleeves (like this one) make me disproportionately happy compared to their cost - as long as the material and colour are right.

Very happy with this one.

This is from a post by a former colleague. It resonates deeply with me:

I’m so freaking tired of social media. Everything is terrible and I feel like every time I log on, I’m either being sold something or told how to feel about something (always terrible). I deeply love social media, I need the friendships I’ve built there, but right now it’s all terrible.

I have been bouncing around the point where, if I didn’t need to be on social media for my work, I’d have quit by now. But, instead, I’m slowly making it work for me again.

I’m quite happy that yesterday I was able to construct something on an issue that’s important to me that went low-key viral on Facebook. Not huge numbers by any objective scale - but a significant proportion of the target audience.

Nice to know that I’ve still got it, and that I can use it for good.

We’re told that too much screen time hurts our kids. Where’s the evidence?:

However, in a world witnessing ecological destruction, political polarisation and growing social divides, should fears about technology really occupy the limited space in the forefront of our minds? Concerns about smartphones might fade away in the coming decade, just as anxieties about video arcades, Dungeons & Dragons and Elvis’s hips did in previous generations.

I remember the D&D panic, as a gamer in the 80s. It seems ludicrous now, doesn’t it?

The whole “screen time” idea is as meaningless as “paper time”. What you are doing with that screen time is the issue, not the existence of the time itself.

To Understand Facebook, Study Capgras Syndrome:

This withering of primate familiarity in the face of technology prompts us to mistake an acquaintance for a friend, just because the two of you have a Snapchat streak for the last umpteen days, or because you both like all the same Facebook pages. It allows us to become intimate with people whose familiarity then proves false. After all, we can now fall in love with people online whose hair we have never smelled.

A couple of great quotes from a piece by Owen Williams on Medium (shudder):

But when we lose the weird internet, we don’t just lose a space where people could tinker and make things for themselves. We seem to have lost the curiosity that inspired that weirdness in the first place.

And this:

The internet made it possible to build something out of thin air without millions of dollars in funding. It’s important we don’t forget that, because it’s the best way to learn and evolve.

I think this photo pretty much sums up my life.

Practicing the art of productive procrastination, by tidying up my Ulysses app.

One of the better spur-of-the-moment decisions I’ve made in recent years was the creation of a Sunday Sunday playlist of podcasts. It’s all outdoors/nature/comedy podcasts, with no politics or tech. Such pleasure from that initial investment of time.

In other news, today I met a ferret.

Today has been rather posher than normal…

We be rollin’, they be hatin’

My eldest on holiday last year.

The Comfortably Dumb - Om Malik follows up in his post about his growing discomfort with embedded tech from the big companies in “smart” devices.

This is fascinating - there’s a new visual language evolving around doing drama in vertical videos:

Chinese vertical dramas made for phone viewing show the future of mobile video

Lovely, random experience this evening. Apple Maps brought me an unexpected route home, showing me a bunch of villages and towns a short drive from where I lived that I’ve never seen before.

At least two of them are now on my “to visit" list for the near future, and another will be the first place I take Hazel on our summer holiday “adventures”.

I think my authorised app connections to Flickr need some updating… (iPhoto 2??)

I’m with Om on this. I’ve replaced our Alexa device with a HomePod as I’m no longer willing to give Google or Amazon audio access to our home:

Hello HomePod. So Long Sonos & Bose

Well now. I did a vlog from Scotland. Vlogging is really not my thing. What do you think?

ln defence of selfies - an interesting take on the social context of photography and sharing.