I’ve just spent the past hour writing a blog post about why on earth certain websites have autoplaying videos that must cost them a fortune in bandwidth. And then it dawned on me. Video ads!

I’ve been browsing the web with an adblocker for so long that I’d totally forgotten about the existence of ads being spliced into video content. Ah, silly me.

But just to be sure ads were the reason the website could afford to run video, I turned off my adblocker for the first time in years and visited the same page/video I was investigating. And yhep there they were. Lots of ads being regularly shown at intervals throughout the video.

Also, a side effect of turning off my adblocker to check for video ads was that I was presented by general internet ads for the first time in a long time. And god was it awful. There they were, flashing and taking up large parcels of screen real estate (along with I’m sure doing their usual tracking creepiness). What an unpleasant experience.

According to this article 27% of American internet users use an adblocker (which seems a little high to me). But either way, the 73% are experiencing a very different internet. And it’s a far, far worse one.

The internet these days has lost a lot of its charm, and I personally don’t find it quite as fun to browse as I once did. But I think without the help of an adblocker I would find it much worse.

As far as I’m concerned an adblocker is a requirement. Install one if you haven’t already.

Also, if you’re interested, below is the post I wrote before I remembered about the existence of video advertising (a happier time).

One of the many plagues of the internet these days is random autoplaying videos on websites. And the magazines owned by Condé Nast are especially guilty of this.

And I’ve always wondered why they’ve become a thing. Put to one side the annoyance to the visitor (thankfully the audio is usually on mute by default at least) and how much video streaming might cost users in countries with high data charges. But what about the cost to the website itself?

I would imagine margins are pretty thin these days if you run a magazine website. Advertising revenue isn’t what is used to be and the money they make for each visitor is probably the lowest it has ever been.

So with that being the case, surely they would want to deliver each and every page as cheaply and efficiently as possible to protect those small margins? So why are they autoplaying videos, which are famously expensive to deliver?

For example, lets imagine you read this article on Vanity Fair which Instapaper says takes 19 minutes to read. And the autoplaying video (they appear to be chosen at random) is this one which happens to be around 19 minutes long. All of a sudden a 5MB page has turned into a 261MB one. (Also, the Vanity Fair / Condé Nast video player isn’t very smart. Unless you make it fullscreen the video player size on the page is tiny. So it would make sense to deliver the video at 360p or a similar small resolution until the user makes the video full-screen, to save on bandwidth. But it doesn’t. As far as I can tell, despite the player being around 200 pixels wide, the video quality quickly climbs to 1080p.)

I’m sure Condé Nast is a large customer for their CDN of choice and are on a pretty cheap tier with a low cost per GB delivered. But even so, again: video is expensive! And I simply can’t see how it’s worth their while to autoplay video on their site. Can anyone explain this to me?!

Well, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman (spez) has responded, essentially with ‘no’:

Dissent is a part of Reddit and the foundation of democracy.

He does on to say:

Reddit is a place for open and authentic discussion and debate.

(This was said in a post which has the comments turned off.)

Censorship is always a very tricky subject. By and large I am dead against it on the web. I want it be open and free. However, rampant lies and the purposeful spreading of misinformation about something so vital as the COVID-19 vaccine does come rather close to needing some stronger vetting by Reddit, in my opinion.

Either way, Huffman’s rather blunt and heavy-handed statement was probably not the best way for Reddit to announce its decision to allow anti - and most likely wrong - COVID-19 vaccine viewpoints and I expect an updated statement for ‘clarity’ in a day or two.

I remember the dark days when I relied on ‘shared hosting’. With companies like A Small Orange offering just 500 MB of storage and 5 GB of bandwidth for $7/mo (and don’t worry that includes unlimited just one website). Or Dreamhost that offered unlimited everything for $3.95/mo! With 59.9999% uptime guaranteed!

A good VPS is the promised land in comparison. A little virtual box that you can do what you want with. And it’s surprisingly powerful. Each time I launch a new website I ponder whether it’s time to maybe spin up a new VPS for it. So I look at my Linode control panel and laugh at how little resources are being used. I mean I’m not exactly running video hosting services or anything like that. Just a dozen or so sites - mostly WordPress based - with a couple thousand hits a day. But I just find it hilarious that the CPU hovers at around 1.5%.

So here’s to you $5 VPS!

We’re living in the Apple era. The Apple brand is universal and unparalleled. Their output is by far the most innovative and beautiful. They’re so dominant that its rivals often seem laughable in comparison. And whilst in certain details they aren’t always the best, on the whole they are.

In fact I’m struggling to think of a single comparative company in history. All the ones that come to mind dominated through monopoly, isolation or acquirement of rivals, not through technical brilliance.

I’m no Apple cultist (half my blog posts feel like they’re moans about the minutiae of Apple’s latest ‘failings’) and I say all this not to gush. But I say it simply because it’s nice not to have to waste time and thought about the subject of what brand to buy. 9 times out of 10 - if I can afford it - Apple is the answer. So I’m free to spend my brain power elsewhere on unsolved issues like the perfect ratio of cheese to cracker.

If it’s too soon to know the meaning of the French Revolution, it’s too soon to know the meaning of Covid-19. But since we still greet sneezes with the 14th-century Black Death prayer ‘Bless you’, it’s possible a few new norms will emerge. Some predict the decline of business travel, others the demise of handshakes. It seems more likely that every household will, from this day hence, maintain a dusty supply of hand sanitiser, paper masks, and emergency loo-rolls. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll remember just how truly essential our essential workers are. #

Sanders and Corbyn fancied themselves to be the new Reagans (or Margaret Thatchers) in terms of the imprint they would leave on their countries, but were not up to the task. The question to haunt the conservative right is, what happens if these two historically peculiar leaders aren’t the Reagans of their movements, but the Goldwaters? And what happens if—or when—the left finally finds its Reagan?" #

[Corbyn has been replaced by Keir Starmer. Want to acquaint yourself with him? The Spectator has a good piece.]

But the main takeaway from the article is that there could be 42 million Americans without broadband. And that’s not good enough:

Three weeks ago, everyone’s point of reference for high-speed broadband networks was the one-way delivery of video services such as Netflix. Henceforth, broadband will be recognized for what it is: a critical two-way connection that can no longer be considered a luxury. #

Is the coronavirus the kind of emergency that requires setting aside otherwise sacrosanct commitments to privacy and civil liberties? Or like the 9/11 attacks before it, does it mark a moment in which panicked Americans will accept new erosions on their freedoms, only to regret it when the immediate danger recedes?

Many countries have already taken creepy steps:

In South Korea, the government is mapping the movements of COVID-19 patients using data from mobile carriers, credit card companies, and the Institute of Public Health and Environment. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the country’s internal security agency to tap into a previously undisclosed cache of cellphone data to trace the movements of infected persons in that country and in the West Bank. And in the Indian state of Karnataka, the government is requiring people in lockdown to send it selfies every hour to prove they are staying home.

But the real question is less about what elements of digital privacy we as a society are willing to trade in right now to help stop the spread of COVID-19 and more about wether we’ll ever get them back.

The article ends with this:

Sanchez worried that the coronavirus, like the war on terror, is an open-ended threat with no clear end — inviting opportunities for those surveillance measures to be abused long after the threat has passed. In the same week that he spoke, the US Senate voted to extend until June the FBI’s expanded powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, originally passed in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks 19 years ago.

I think it’s safe to presume that anything we lose will never be returned.

[DJI CEO, Frank Wang] is perhaps the most private tech CEO of them all, shunning all but a handful of media requests over his 14 years as DJI’s boss and figurehead. He stoodup a planned interview for this story twice, leaving his representatives to apologize and explain that they just never quite know what the man will do. In fact, the rumor going around DJI’s press office is that Wang might not speak to a reporter ever again. […] Wang once threatened to dock the pay of a public-relations executive because Wang had received too much attention in the media. […] DJI’s hiring standards are famously strict… Those who seem engineering-focused enough eventually face a hands-on challenge: soldering drone components together. Until recently, even potential sales and marketing hires were asked to complete this task. The tests don’t stop once an employee is hired. DJI has become infamous for its competitive atmosphere. The company separates workers into groups and challenges them to come up with rival takes on a new product. The winning group gets the glory of seeing its ideas come to market; the losers must help make that happen. Employees are often asked to judge one another in surveys and to rate the performance of other departments. This data is then used to help decide salaries. #

The article ends a little abruptly, but it’s still worth your time.

At the gathering, held at the International Telecommunications Union, a UN agency that establishes common global standards for technologies, they presented a simple PowerPoint. It didn’t bother with much detail on how this new network would work, or what specific problem it was solving. Instead, it was peppered with images of futuristic technologies, from life-size holograms to self-driving cars. The idea was to illustrate that the current internet is a relic that has reached the limits of its technical prowess. It was time, Huawei proposed, for a new global network with a top-down design, and the Chinese should be the ones to build it. #

This is scary:

China is already in the process of building a credit-scoring system for its population, based on online and offline behaviour and past “misdemeanours”, the delegation member noted. “So if somebody’s social credit score dipped below a certain amount because they were posting on social media too much, you could actually prevent that phone from connecting to the network.”

Note: the Finanical Times' paywall and website is awful. They even inject this when you copy and paste something:

Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour.

So I’ve linked to a cached copy of the article. But if want you can read it at its original URL here.

But while it turns out that it is about five years old and is also made by just some dude it most certainly isn’t abandoned. Because after some more poking I found a really cool ‘news’ page. Essentially it’s a mirror of the developers to do list along with their recently completed tasks. It’s a simple but wonderful idea and does a great job of quietly broadcasting the hard work of the developer and signals to users that the service is still very much in development. I wish more services and software did something similar. And Blot itself looks cool. Check it out.

I have a lot of questions. But sadly not a lot of answers. We will just have to wait and see…

“Almost everybody who is hospitalized has this same story,” said Dr. Marco Metra, chief of the cardiology department at the main hospital in Brescia, where 700 of 1,200 inpatients have the coronavirus. “You ask about the patient’s wife or husband. And the patient says, ‘My wife has just lost her smell and taste but otherwise she is well.’ So she is likely infected, and she is spreading it with a very mild form.” […] Hendrik Streeck, a German virologist from the University of Bonn who went from house to house in the country’s Heinsberg district to interview coronavirus patients, has said in interviews that at least two-thirds of the more than 100 he talked to with mild disease reported experiencing loss of smell and taste lasting several days. #

A UK Health Minister Nadine Dorries who had COVID-19 tweeted about not being able to smell or taste too.

More coverage.

Many other products, while not rationed, were nonetheless in short supply. A visiting American found that he could buy chocolate cake and a lemon meringue pie at Selfridges, but cocoa was impossible to find. Shortages made some realms of hygiene more problematic. Women found tampons increasingly difficult to acquire. At least one brand of toilet paper was also in perilously short supply, as the king himself discovered. He managed to sidestep this particular scarcity by arranging shipments direct from the British embassy in Washington, D.C. With kingly discretion, he wrote to his ambassador, “We are getting short of a certain type of paper which is made in America and is unprocurable here. A packet or two of 500 sheets at intervals would be most acceptable. You will understand this and its name begins with B!!!” The paper in question was identified by historian Andrew Roberts as Bromo soft lavatory paper.

In an internal document distributed to Apple Authorized Service Providers this week, obtained by MacRumors, Apple has acknowledged that some iOS 13 or iPadOS 13 users may experience issues with Personal Hotspot.

I have had nothing but problems with Personal Hotspot for a long time. Long before iOS 13. And that’s actually a big problem because when I turn it on it’s because I can’t find Wi-Fi anywhere and I really need it to just bloody work right now. But all too often it fails. An iPhone is increasingly a digital Swiss Army knife and Personal Hotspot is an important part of that. It has to work 100% of the time. Imagine if Apple Pay didn’t work every single time?

In the week that ended March 14, popcorn sales were up 48%, pretzels up 47% and potato chips up 30% compared to a year earlier, according to Nielsen data cited by the outlet. “People are retreating back into comfort habits,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Jennifer Bartashus. #

I think this is less about these items being ‘comfort food’ and more about them having a long shelf life. Lots of shops currently have very limited frozen goods and most people only have so much fridge and freezer space so buying items you can store at room temperature for a long time makes sense. I’m making sure I have plenty of nuts, tuna and tinned meats and vegetables.

In response to concerns about networks not being able to cope with the demands being placed on them, BT has said it has “confidence” that it will be more than able to cope with people spending more time at home. The group says the highest peak its ever seen in demand hit 17.5Tb/s – during coronavirus there’s been a 35-65 per cent increase in daytime traffic but the highest peak has only been 7.5Tb/s.

And Netflix still isn’t delivering capped streams to me, by the way.

Netflix said on Thursday it would reduce its bit rates across all its streams in Europe, in effect cutting traffic on its European networks by 25% to preserve the smooth functioning of the internet during the coronavirus crisis. The move came after talks between European Union industry chief Thierry Breton and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. Breton had a day earlier urged the video streaming service to downgrade the quality of its video to avoid internet gridlock.

Pure PR, I suspect. I’m sure overall internet traffic has increased recently, but I doubt peak traffic has by much. And of all the services least likely to suffer due to overloaded networks, it’s Netflix. They frequently stress test their services and are directly connected to basically every internet exchange (IX) worldwide thanks to their Open Connect programme. This is just helping hand syndrome. Netflix wants to appear like it is ‘doing its part’.

I just went on Netflix and it’s not currently throttled. I’m being delivered full-fat 1080p streams. So either it’s not in place yet or they’re just getting rid of 4K.

And after watching the press conference for these announcements I turned to my Mum and said that Rishi Sunak is the only high-level UK politician currently responding appropriately and sensibly during the coronavirus crisis. James Kirkup of the Spectator agrees:

In some ways, it’s easy and even important to keep Rishi Sunak’s performance in announcing his coronavirus job retention scheme in perspective. It should, after all, be pretty easy to be popular in politics when you are offering to spend literally limitless amounts of money protecting people from economic hardship. […] But even taking those things into account, I still consider Sunak’s performance one of the most impressive I’ve seen from a British politician in more than 20 years in and around Westminster.

With so many governments helping out their citizens finanically at the moment universal basic income (UBI) has appeared in the news several times. I’m still unconvinced by some of the maths and theory behind UBI but I do wonder if the coronavirus crisis will be the catalyst for more UBI adoption worldwide in the same way that the catalyst for the UK’s universal health care - the NHS - was World War II.

I’ve been re-reading “Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration, and Get to Work” recently. It’s a wonderful collection of the daily routines of some of historys most iconic people. One person not in the book though? The Stoic philosopher Seneca. So here’s his morning routine according to his Letter LXXXIII.

He begins his day with some exercise. Usually a run with his trainer/slave Pharius. Only for a small amount of time though because as an older man he “only has to stir and is weary.”

After that he takes a plunge into his cold swimming pool.

Next, it’s time for breakfast and he has the most uncomplicated one imaginable: bread. He likes its simplicity, rejoicing that he doesn’t even have to lay the table.

Fitness, food, and bathing taken care of he follows them up with a short nap.

His morning routine is now over and the rest of his day is “wholly divided between rest and reading.”

Did you see a small problem between the British government’s definition of herd immunity…and what it actually is? Herd immunity is — the real thing — what happens after enough members of a population have been vaccinated. It’s not…just letting an entire nation be rampaged by a lethal virus for which there’s no vaccine. […] The human species never developed “herd immunity” to polio or smallpox or any virus, really — ever, despite millennia of death and illness and misery. Why not? Because herd immunity depends on vaccines. We vaccinate a large number of people, and then all of us are protected, because transmission rates are reduced (among other things.) Let me make the point again. The human race never developed herd immunity to a lethal virus, precisely because herd immunity is not something that emerges naturally. What happens, instead, when we let a virus simply take its course? What happened with smallpox and polio: they just rampage through populations, forever.

Read more.

Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Officer, explained that the aim is to try and delay the peak of the disease and then stretch it out over a longer period so the NHS is better able to deal with it. […] Chris Witty, the Chief Medical Officer, stressed that one of the reasons the UK was not moving to more dramatic measures – for example, telling all old people to self-isolate – was that if the UK moved now, then the public would tire of that at just the wrong moment. Some people argue that people will be happy to do whatever it takes to avoid this virus. But staying home for three months is no small thing and it is not hard to believe that people would tire of this in time.

I personally believe Britain needs to have a massive ‘over-reaction’. Now. Only workers in the utilities, food (supermarkets, not restaurants) and other essential industries should be working. Everyone else needs to stay at home. We can either suffer briefly now for two weeks as a nation or drag this misery out for the rest of the year and and cause a lot more deaths. Even now, in this late hour, everyone I’ve spoken to about Coronavirus is treating it as little more than a joke or at worst just a minor inconvience. In the past 24 hours or so some high-profile names have tested positive for the virus which should hopefully aid public awareness of how dangerous this all is though.

I somewhat fortunately happen to follow a guy on Twitter who has from the start taken a very keen interest in Choronavirus and its spread. And when he said on February 22nd that “we give the chance of pandemic 54% to 75%” I started to take it very seriously. I haven’t been to the gym since and have gotten all my exercise from rural walking and cycling. Sadly I still have to work, but aside from that the only other place I go is to the supermarket. And I’ve been going as soon as they open as it’s very quiet and less hands will have likely fondled my food. And if it’s not protected by a bag I don’t eat it. No more loose fruit or vegetables.

Aside: I don’t know when the Spectator website got a redesign, but it’s both functional and stunning.

I’ve noticed more and more websites now only loading images on a page when you scroll to down to them. It’s called ‘Lazy Loading’ and I hate it. I’m all for saving bandwidth and improving page loading times but this trend is incredibly annoying. Scrolling down a page once ‘loaded’ should be smooth. But instead images flash at you as they load while you scroll. A terrible experience. Look at the Kottke homepage for an example of this. It’s a good blog with plenty of nice images and videos. But exploring it is miserable thanks to this delayed image loading ‘feature’.

I have a bad memory. If I don’t jot something down then I’m going to forget it. Even if it’s a task that I need to do in just ten minutes time I still jot it down.

And I’ve used a plethora of tools for this task. But several years ago I just settled upon individual text files for each task. Simple. But this turned my plain text folder into an out of control, bloated monster. It became so unwieldy that my usual digitally tidy self just gave up and left it be. I was no longer concerned with tagging, naming, and filing. And as a result fairly soon it morphed from a to-do list into an everything-bucket. Any piece of digital text got put into an individual .txt file. Recipes, book highlights, web articles, diary entries, cockney slang, album reviews, wine inventory, places visited, etc.

And it’s been this way for quite a while. A 12.59 MB pile of 5000+ plain text files. But it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done in my digital life. Suffocated by my need for things to be organised I rarely actually just got stuff down. Now everything gets written down, no matter how obviously inconsequential it may seem at the time.

Everything gets written down. Nothing gets forgotten.

I’ve spent the morning listening through The Beatles' first four albums for the first time in a long time. It’s amazing how you can feel how talented they are but also how boring it all so often is. Four albums of 8/10 pop songs all around two minutes in length. Songs so good, but so similar, that they all sort of blur into one another. It’s actually tiring to listen to back-to-back. And I like how “Eight Days A Week” finally hints to something a bit more musically expansive in the opening few seconds before quickly turning into another bog-standard Beatles pop song.

Interesting article on Samuel Pepys and some of the more seedy elements of his diary. I still haven’t gotten around to reading his famous diary yet, but I was broadly aware of his creepiness, and he would often spring immediately to my mind when I’d hear someone say “men use to be much more gentlemanly and chivalrous back in the day”. However I didn’t realise he went quite this far:

In an incident that is difficult to interpret as anything but rape, Pepys recounts entering the home of a ship’s carpenter—a man very much under his control, since Pepys was a naval official—and noting that, after a struggle, “finally I had my will of her.” His only recorded regret is “a mighty pain” in his finger, which he injured during the apparent assault. The victim, identified only as Mrs. Bagwell, had been instructed to offer herself to Pepys by her husband, who thought it would help his advancement. “The story,” notes Tomalin, “is a shameful one of a woman used by two bullies: her husband, hoping for promotion, and Pepys, who was to arrange it. Pepys did not present it in quite those terms, but it is clearly how it was.”

On a more light-hearted note:

Living well, in Pepys’s household, meant accumulating an extensive personal library, which included books, manuscripts, and English ballads. His passion for collecting was part of a lifestyle that depended on steady infusions of cash. Money—the getting of it, the spending of it, the lack of it—is an abiding theme of his diary. […] On December 31, 1661, like many a person then and now facing the post-Christmas blahs, he wonders whether he spent too much, and whether the New Year might be time for fiscal restraint, and restraint in general. “I have newly taken a solemn oath about abstaining from plays and wine,” he writes.

I know the feeling Samuel. My diary often has a similar theme.

Jason Snell (Six Colors):

These updates don’t bring any changes to the exterior of the MacBook Pro — it’s the same base design introduced in late 2016 — but they do bring 9th-generation Intel processors with up to eight cores to the MacBook Pro for the first time. There’s also been yet another tweak to the controversial butterfly keyboard Apple first introduced in 2015.

I’ve had to buy this (I went with the 15-inch base model). My mid-2012 MacBook Pro died a few months back and I’ve been waiting for an update to the lineup before biting the bullet. I was hoping for a whole new refresh with ARM chips. But that was always a little hopeful.

But the main reason I didn’t go out and buy a new one straightway is due to the unreliable butterfly keyboards on this current generation of MacBook Pro’s. I wasn’t waiting for a refresh for that sweet new industrial design. I was waiting simply because I wanted a keyboard that would work reliably.

This update does have an ‘updated’ keyboard though. John Gruber (Daring Fireball) has some info:

First, these new MacBook Pros still have the third-generation butterfly-switch keyboard that debuted with last July’s updated MacBook Pros. But Apple has changed the mechanism under the hood, using a new material for at least one of the components in these switches. The purpose of this change is specifically to increase the reliability of the keyboards. Apple emphasized to me their usual line that the “vast majority” of users have no problem with these keyboards, but they acknowledge that some users do and say they take it very seriously.

Fingers crossed that his update fixes a lot of the keyboard issues. But the simple, sad truth is this: a fancy MacBook Pro is being delivered to my house tomorrow and I’m more apprehensive than excited. Will this new machine last 6 years like my old one? We’ll see.

Step 1 - You might still feel like crap

Accept the fact that you’re going to have to slightly write off a day after drinking. Despite taking precautions there’s still a chance you might feel pretty rough the day after drinking. So don’t drink if you have to work the next day. Save it for those sacred days off.

Step 2 - You will get fat

You’re probably going to drink and eat 2000+ of excess calories on your drinking nights. Accept this.

Step 3 - Don’t start too late

You’ve had a long day of work. You get home late and now you just want to unwind and get plastered. Well, I wouldn’t. It’s bed time in just a few hours and that’s not enough time to get drunk and also take the necessary recovery steps for a hangover-free tomorrow. Save it for another day. A special day. A drinking day.

Step 4 - Learn to get less drunk

This meant seem silly, but after years of chasing the dragon your expectations of drunkenness and your ‘tolerance’ to booze has probably gone up. Spend some time getting in touch with the taste of alcohol again and the more subtle elements of its intoxicating effects. Spend a month or two every now and then just getting a little tipsy and not totally plastered. I’d recommend sticking to drinks that you really like the taste of so you can sip and savour the taste itself, not just its stuporing results.

Step 5 - Please line your stomach

Eat. Eat well. Eat a lot. And close to when you start drinking. I eat my meal 45 minutes before I begin imbibing. The first hour or so of drinking will feel a little too sober, but you’ll be thankful later. And trust me, you will still get drunk. So relax.

Step 6 - Track that booze

This might seem a little too OCD and geeky for some of you, but I recommend tracking how much you drink. I use the app Boozed?. You enter what you drink and it gives you an estimated BAC (learn about how BAC effects you).

Step 7 - Set Timers

Again, maybe a little too over the top. But this step is absolutely vital for me. In certain situations it can be very easy to drink too fast. For each drink (175ml wine, 500ml beer, or 50ml spirits) I set a countdown on my phone for 30 minutes (experiment until you find your correct timer length) and I’m not allowed to get another drink until the timer ends.

Step 8 - Drink water between drinks

I know this is an annoying step, but it’s an important one. Between every alcoholic drink consume 250-400ml of water to stay hydrated. This can be potentially harder to stick to if you’re not drinking at home. So if you’re in a club and you know you’re not going to be that guy asking for a tap water at the bar maybe drink a G&T and ask for extra tonic water instead to up the amount of non-alcoholic liquid you’re getting.

Step 9 - Skip that last drink, drink more water instead

So the night is winding down and bed/home time is approaching and its last order. Well don’t make that last order. That final drink might just push you into hangover territory and by the time the alcohol actually enters your bloodstream you’re probably going to be home or asleep anyway. So skip that last drink my friend and power down some water instead. And it’s better to drink that water now than just before bed anyway, otherwise you’ll be waking up to pee it out in the middle of the night.

Step 10 - Eat before bed

I generally try to keep it mildly healthy most of the time and will munch on a banana or two and maybe some mixed nuts. But let’s be honest here, that kebab looks bloody good. Either way, eat! If you have a choice between eating before or after drinking though always eat before.

Step 11 - Eat upon waking

Don’t skip breakfast please. And this isn’t time for your Instagram-worthy bowl of Chia seeds. Get some disgusting saturated fat down your gullet and feel sorry for yourself like you’re supposed to.

Step 12 - Accept that alcohol is very bad for you

This is my final step and my goodbye. Don’t be ignorant. Please accept that alcohol is very bad for you. It aids violence, mental illness, sexual promiscuity and sexual dysfunction (a cruel combination), over eating (until alcoholism takes ahold later in life and then you can barely stomach a slice of bread), a myriad of diseases and cancers, and is also expensive. So be like Winston Churchill and get more out of drinking than it gets out of you. Think alcoholism isn’t too much of a big deal? Here’s a reddit comment by an alcoholic describing his ailments due to drink.

More:

• Drinking beer? Buy some non-alcoholic beer too and have one after every second alcoholic beer. Trick yourself into drinking less.
• Some people swear by taking B-Vitamins before bed. I’ve never tried this though.
• Maybe just don’t drink? If every time you drink you end up in trouble or you get hangovers after just three drinks maybe your hell raising days are over. Or maybe you have Gilbert’s syndrome or something.
• Only drink with a sugar-free mixer. It gets you drunker and won’t give you full-blown diabetes.
• Remember, you’re not a heavy drinker, you’re a pintman.

Note: Science doesn’t agree with a lot of my points. We still don’t know how to cure hangovers. The only really proven way to feel better the next day is to quite simply drink less. So a lot of my steps are pseudoscience at best. But hey, it works for me. Try it and then email me with your results.

I’ll leave you with this advice by Christopher Hitchens on drinking:

[…] Of course, watching the clock for the start-time is probably a bad sign, but here are some simple pieces of advice for the young. Don’t drink on an empty stomach: the main point of the refreshment is the enhancement of food. Don’t drink if you have the blues: it’s a junk cure. Drink when you are in a good mood. Cheap booze is a false economy. It’s not true that you shouldn’t drink alone: these can be the happiest glasses you ever drain. Hangovers are another bad sign, and you should not expect to be believed if you take refuge in saying you can’t properly remember last night. (If you really don’t remember, that’s an even worse sign.) Avoid all narcotics: these make you more boring rather than less and are not designed—as are the grape and the grain—to enliven company. Be careful about up-grading too far to single malt Scotch: when you are voyaging in rough countries it won’t be easily available. Never even think about driving a car if you have taken a drop. […]

Security researcher John Wethington found a smart city database accessible from a web browser without a password. […] The exposed data contains enough information to pinpoint where people went, when and for how long, allowing anyone with access to the data — including police — to build up a picture of a person’s day-to-day life. […] The database also contained a subject’s approximate age as well as an “attractive” score, according to the database fields. […] The system also uses its facial recognition systems to detect ethnicities and labels them — such as “汉族” for Han Chinese, the main ethnic group of China — and also “维族” — or Uyghur Muslims, an ethnic minority under persecution by Beijing. […] The Chinese government has detained more than a million Uyghurs in internment camps in the past year, according to a United Nations human rights committee. It’s part of a massive crackdown by Beijing on the ethnic minority group. […] The customer’s system also has the capability to monitor for Wi-Fi-enabled devices, such as phones and computers, using sensors built by Chinese networking tech maker Renzixing and placed around the district. The database collects the dates and times that pass through its wireless network radius. Fields in the Wi-Fi-device logging table suggest the system can collect IMEI and IMSI numbers, used to uniquely identify a cellular user. […]

Further reading: One Month, 500,000 Face Scans: How China Is Using A.I. to Profile a Minority

For 10 days a year, he sits in silence at a meditation retreat. Before getting dressed each morning, he experiments with using his home infrared sauna and then an ice bath, sometimes cycling through both several times before he leaves home. He walks five miles to work. He eats one meal a day and has said that on the weekends when he fasts from Friday to Saturday, “time slows down.” He talks about starting each morning with salt juice — water mixed with Himalayan salt and lemon. It is dispensed in Twitter offices around the world.

I haven’t really kept up with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey for a while but it seems he’s now gone full podcast bro.

Last time I saw him was via his long-lasting Twitter profile image. But that chisel-jawed Armie Hammer lookalike is more of a Tyron Lannister from Game of Thrones lookalike these days. That dude is looking lean. Maybe this criticism that he’s promoting eating disorders is partly correct. I wonder what’s next chasing that natural high. Self-harm maybe?

I mention all this not to mock the guy, but because I actually find myself somewhat attracted to the health douche culture, sadly. There was quite a while when I flirted with hipsterhood instead. I had to stop myself buying shit from Best Made Co., having £30 beard trims, and listening to Bon Iver. Luckily the furthest I wandered down that path was buying Iron Ranger boots, raw denim jeans and getting into fancy coffee.

So I must be strong and not let this new fad engulf me. I currently actively avoid minimalist YouTube channels, refuse to listen to Tim Ferris, and won’t read Podcast Notes.

Stoicism and intermittent fasting is all I’ve given in to so far. I read Aurelius each morning. And I’ve actually lost a bunch of weight. So, maybe I should just embrace the douchedom? :|

Further reading: The Podcast Bros Want to Optimize Your Life + Why Is Silicon Valley So Obsessed With the Virtue of Suffering?

In my head this was still a year or two away. But maybe not. Tim Cook:

For our Mac business overall, we faced some processor constraints in the March quarter, leading to a 5 percent revenue decline compared to last year. But we believe that our Mac revenue would have been up compared to last year without those constraints, and don’t believe this challenge will have a significant impact on our Q3 results.

As someone who just had their 6-year-old MacBook die on them and is waiting for WWDC before biting the bullet for a new one I really do hope ARM chips arrive this year.

{via Daring Fireball}

• I actually think it’s a decently designed app. It does nothing outstanding, but it displays stories and their texts simply. It does its job.
• The main thing I’m not a fan of design wise is the time when posted text (e.g. ‘4h ago’, see screenshot) below each article. As long as it was published today I don’t care about the time published. And I don’t like how it’s placed at the bottom of each story block, as it can look a little stranded if the headline is a short one.
• You really need to train it. If News was made by Google or Amazon you’d launch the app for the first time and it would would be eerily good at showing you stories of interest. But this is Apple so it takes some time to set it up to get good results. You have to be very proactive in blocking websites and disliking certain stories.
• The typeface on the Mac version is too small and I don’t think there’s a way to enlarge it.
• I never visit the human curated ‘Spotlight’ section. Nothing has ever caught my eye in there.
• Overall I’ve found a lot of the negatives aren’t to do with Apple News itself and are instead due to the websites that are within it. Online journalism now is too short, too wrong and too clickbaity. And there just isn’t enough good articles published each to day to fill out the ‘columns’ of the Apple News app. But maybe the new higher-quality paid stuff in News+ will help with that problem.

Compare that to the New York Times. - £3.40/mo for the first year. - £6.80/mo thereafter. - Buy with Apple Pay and unlock the desired article in seconds. - Cancel at any time.

(The Washington Post also offers Apple Pay and costs £4.50/mo. A good value.)

Update, 18th September 2019: I forgot to consider ease-of-cancellation. After a few months of my subscription to the New York Times I just didn’t get enough value out of it, so decided to cancel. Well it turns out they want you to chat online to a member of staff to cancel! And every time I tried to apparently they were ‘offline’. But luckily I paid via PayPal so I just deleted the NYTimes as a ‘pre-approved’ payment and it cancelled itself. Something to be aware of, folks.

But money alone wasn’t going to separate Amazon from the pack — Amazon’s $250 million offer wasn’t even the highest bid for the show’s rights, according to a person familiar with the matter. The ultimate selling point, according to people with knowledge of the negotiations, related to Amazon’s original business from over two decades ago: books. The Tolkien estate was convinced that in promoting the series, Amazon could sell truckloads of Tolkien’s fantasy novels, including “The Hobbit” and “The Silmarillion” as well as “The Lord of the Rings.”

So it looks like maybe part of the deal involves the Amazon homepage pushing Tolkien books as hard as it does its Echos.

Amazon Prime Video is a curious thing. It has some good ideas and potential but somehow it’s just not coming together.

According to the above article Prime Video originally focused on ‘high-minded, potentially award-winning content to lure users into Prime’. Which is true, with rather niche films like The Neon Demon, Paterson, and Manchester by the Sea being funded by them. All of which were good, but not exactly mainstream. They’ve had more luck on the TV side, with Transparent and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel finding more appeal. However the rest of their TV offerings haven’t quite cut the mustard.

And now it seems like Prime Video is changing tactic slightly, realising that what really stops people from not renewing their Prime membership is not a bunch of four-star shows, but a couple of five-star shows that customers can’t live without. They’re doubtless aware there are plenty of people who subscribe to HBO GO just for Game of Thrones. And I think that’s one reason they’ve overpaid for The Grand Tour and Lord of the Rings. They need a hit. I’m sure they’ll continue funding lots of original content and seeing what sticks, à la Netflix. But they’re now aggressively pursuing what they perceive as ’ready-made’ hits, in desperation.

Another thing the article mentioned was Amazon Channels, which is essentially a way for users to get streaming content that isn’t on Prime Video into the service if they’re willing to pay for it. For example, $15/mo gets you HBO and $9/mo gets you Showtime. Now that every television network seems to be making its own streaming service, requiring users to deal with a bunch of different apps and bills, why not put all in one easy centralised place? Amazon Channels is a great idea. But it doesn’t quite work. And a large part is due to, what I think, is Prime Video’s biggest weakness: its UI.

Amazon products aren’t exactly known for their design, with nearly everything they make being ugly. But Prime Video is actively dysfunctional. My Mum can’t use it, whereas she has no issues with Netflix. It also makes the catastrophic mistake of showing non-Prime content that you have to purchase alongside the stuff that you get as part of your subscription. You see a movie that takes your fancy and then you realise once you click on it that you have to rent or purchase it. Truly ludicrous. Amazon needs to separate Prime Video and the Prime Video store. And talking of separating. They separate the above mentioned Amazon Channels, the one thing they shouldn’t. Rather than nicely adding Channel content into the interface, it’s almost treated like an app within an app.

If Amazon offered users Prime at $99 rather than $119, but for that they didn’t get access to Prime Video, how many would go for the cheaper plan? I believe a healthy majority would. Prime Video as it stands today, is a fairly limp, ugly offering.

A big reason for this is because like a lot of people I listen to podcasts in the background whilst doing something else. 95% of my podcast listening time is spent whilst I’m either walking, running, driving or trying to sleep. Basically times when it’s not appropriate to whip out my phone and start writing things in my notes app like ‘look up BBC news article about bees in South African plane’s engine that delayed flights’. It’s too much hassle. The most I manage to do is take a quick screenshot which lists the show, episode and timestamp. But then my phone just becomes full of screenshots and I can never be bothered to re-download the episode, find the correct spot, listen to it again and then finally do the research. I just don’t bother.

I can hear you shouting “show notes!”. True, show notes are very handy and thankfully more and more podcasts do them now. But I still have to go to their website, find the episode, and then seek out the correct section. Again, I just don’t bother.

Here’s want I want. It’s simple we kill the batman. I want my podcast player of choice (Overcast) to have an easily accessible bookmark button. In an ideal world it would then grab the audio starting from 1 minute before and 1 minute after and then email it to me, or import it into Evernote or something. But I’d settle for a ‘bookmark’ section in the app which lists all podcast episodes with bookmarks then lets you skip through the them. That feature would make listening to podcasts a lot more productive for me. Episodes wouldn’t just come and go. I could sit in front of a computer, browse through the bookmarks, and do the appropriate research.

Now that I’ve written this I just realised that I’ve blindly been using Overcast for many years now and maybe there’s an app out there that already does this? To the App Store!

I quickly recommended going the desktop route over a laptop since my Dad nearly always worked at his desk and a desktop would last a lot longer. We could have picked up a pre-built machine, but I knew buying the parts and building a desktop myself would be cheaper, offer more spec flexibility and be a lot more reliable. Plus if something did break I could probably quickly and easily fix it by replacing the dead part (and not the whole machine!).

I went with a Silverstone Mini-ITX case (in white, which pleased Mum as it blended in nicely with the study decor), Intel Pentium Dual Core G3258, 8GB of DDR3 RAM, 120GB SSD, MSI LGA1150 motherboard and a 300W Be Quiet! power supply. Total cost: £240.

Next came the OS. There was no way I was going to give Microsoft £80 for a copy of Windows and a lifetime of headaches. So I thought ‘why not Linux?’. It might seem bizarre, but it’s a near perfect OS for someone like my Dad. He’s far less likely to download a virus, Linux doesn’t bother him with popups, it’s easier to keep the same UI for many years (no forced Windows software updates and ‘visual refreshes’), and his computer will still be blazing fast five years from now. And he doesn’t use Adobe Lightroom or Microsoft Excel, his needs are simple, all he wants is a web browser and a word processor. Linux gives him that easily.

There’s lots of Linux distributions out there of course and at first I looked into ones that mirror his old Windows 7 desktop as much as possible. But they also often copied some of the bad and confusing elements too. So in the end I just settled on Ubuntu with the Unity desktop. It’s simple, with a nice large dock to the left.

His new desktop. Minimalistic with just four buttons that he knows as ‘search, documents, internet, and Word’.

However this was all good in theory and on paper, but how would this system and Dad get on in reality? Well it’s been over two years now and there has been literally zero problems. Honestly. Even the wireless printer works flawlessly. It did take him a little while to get used to the Ubuntu file browser. But now he knows to just save everything in Dropbox and click on that folder or Downloads when wants to find something. But aside from that the transition went swimmingly. We get a lot of power cuts and both the hardware and software have even dealt with that (somehow) without issue. The only maintenance I do is run sudo apt-get update every now and then.

I expect this machine will serve him loyally and reliably for many years to come. Thanks Linux.

I learned about this 1937 bestseller while reading Will Schwalbe’s Books For Living. It’s basically a book about the ancient Chinese art of chilling out and living a good life. (One thing: If you pick it up, just skip chapter 8 and Lin Yutang’s sexist views.)

Please don’t do this. That might be the vital chapter and maybe the one you’ll learn the most from. Maybe it will teach you that even the most wise are still a product of their time. That great men and women are often greatly flawed. It might teach you that sometimes you have to reject advice from a person that has given nothing but good advice before. It could help you understand why certain people are sexist, sympathise with them, learn about their flawed logic, and maybe one day convince a sexist not to be one anymore.

Don’t skip chapter 8.

Link discovery chain:
-– Browsing the shawnblanc.net blog archive
-—– Shawn Blanc: How to Read More
-——– Austin Kleon: How to read more
-———– Austin Kleon: My reading year, 2017

I’ve owned a slow cooker for quite a few years now, but I’m not actually a huge fan. A lot of the recipes I’ve tried have been more miss than hit. But this slow cooker creamy tortellini, spinach and chicken soup is fantastic.

Give it a go!

Notes:

• Actually follow the recipe! The balance and amounts are just right.
• Tear the chicken well at the end. I didn’t and the pieces were too big.
• Don’t use too much parmesan. I like cheese so added an extra 20-30g and the sauce became a little too thick and heavy.
• Despite looking bright and Italian this is a pretty heavy dish and perfect for winter.

Right now I all my notes, stored locally on my machine, are fucking buffering.

Notes. Buffering.

I still use Evernote everyday. It’s still my digital brain. But man do I hate it at times.

NOTE: This article is now out of date and likely will not work.

The US Netflix catalogue has famously been superior in quantity and quality to the UK one for a long time now. And while it’s not as bad as it once was the US library still remains superior, with a far better movie collection and TV shows like The Office (US).

But until fairly reccently someone in the UK could easily access US Netflix by buying a VPN subscription and just setting their location to the US. However recently Netflix has clamped down on VPN usage and it is now a bit trickier to access the US Netflix without getting the infamous ‘streaming error’ message.

You now need your own dedicated US IP address, not one that is shared between thousands of other VPN users and thus easily blocked by Netflix. So follow the guide below to see how to do that…

Notes:

• You don’t need a US Netflix subscription to access US Netflix. Just visit Netflix whilst connected to the VPN and it will automaticlly switch to the US library and then revert back to UK Netflix when you disconnect from the VPN. You don’t need two Netflix subscriptions or anything like that.
• I’m using TorGuard.net as the VPN in this guide because the 50% off discount code I use applies for the lifetime of the subscription, doesn’t require a minimum time commitment, and also applies not just to the VPN but also to the dedicated IP address. I doubt you’ll find a cheaper VPN + dedicated IP combo elsewhere. But if you do feel free to use it in TorGuards stead.
• This will get you up and running watching US Netflix on your computer and smart device. Watching it on your TV streaming device (AppleTV, Roku, Chromecast, FireTV, etc.) is more difficult and will not be covered here.2
• Using a VPN to trick Netflix into think you’re actually in a different country is technically against their terms of service. So please do so at your own risk.

Step 1

Head on over to TorGuard.net and go the Anonymous VPN section then choose how often you’d like to pay. Semi-annual at $30 for 6 months represents the best value. Then click ‘BuyVPN’ and it will take you to the checkout.

Step 2

Scroll down to the ‘configurable options’ section and in the ‘Regular Dedicated IP’ box select ‘x1 Streaming IP USA’. Then continue through checkout.

Step 3

At the next page enter TGLifetime50 in the ‘promotional code’ section and hit ‘Go’. Your basket should now update with the new 50% discounted price. Then pay.

Step 4

Once you’ve payed for your plan you need to request your dedicated IP address. So go to the Submit Ticket page and send a ticket to ‘Sales’ with the subject Requesting NEW Netflix streaming IP @ location USA. You can leave the message box blank.

After a few minutes you’ll get an automated message saying which USA location you’d prefer: Michigan or California. Choose which ever is physically closer to where you live (Michigan if you’re in Europe) and respond to the ticket with Michigan as the subject and message body.

Then after another few minutes you’ll get a response telling you your new dedicated IP address. Congrats! You’ve now got an unlimited traffic VPN with your own shiny dedicated IP address. One more step now before Netflix streaming bliss.

Step 5

It’s now time to install the TorGuard VPN software. If you’re going to stream from a PC or Mac go here and click download next to the name of the operating system you’re using. For smartphones you just need to search TorGuard on your devices app store.

Once you’ve installed the TorGuard software, launch it.

Windows/Mac Instructions

Click More settings…

Go to the Servers tab. From the dropdown select United States. Enter your dedicated IP. Give it a nickname. Click Add. And finally Save.

Back at the main menu click Select Server…

Then select your dedicated IP address (it will be at the top of the list).

Now you just have to hit Connect.

iOS/Android Instructions

Launch the TorGuard app.

Tap the gear icon at the top right.

Next to Dedicated IP tap Add.

Choose USA from country dropdown menu. Enter your IP address and give it a nickname. Tap Add.

Now you just have to tap Connect.

Step 6

You’re all done! Head on over to Netflix.com (or open the app) to watch and enjoy US Netflix :)

What hardware do you use?

My main computer is a 15-inch Retina Macbook Pro (mid 2012, 2.6GHz Intel i7, 16GB RAM). It’s often hooked up on my desk to dual Apple Thunderbolt Displays, a Microsoft Ergonomic keyboard, Logitech M570 trackball, and either some old Bose computer speakers or my Beyerdynamic T90 headphones.

I also have an iPad Pro (12.9 inch) which I’ve been using more and more this year as it’s light, helps me focus, and alleviates some hand pain I’ve developed.

Other computers include a Mac mini (late 2014, 2.6GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD) being used as a home server. A Synology DS1815+ NAS with 22TB in RAID 6 for general file storage and backups, 3TB for home surveillance cameras, and 1TB as a Time Machine backup of my Macbook. I also have a gaming PC with an Intel Core i5 4690K and ASUS Strix GTX 970 which is paired with a BenQ XL2430T monitor, HHKB keyboard, and a Logitech G500s mouse.

There’s an iPhone 6 in my right pocket, some keys in my left, and a Chrome Soyuz [cached link] bag on my back.

For photography I use a Fujifilm X100S, Leica M4-P, Bronica SQ-A and a Sony A100.

And what software?

Usually occupying my monitor

Safari for web browsing and TodoTxtMac for todos . I also usually have a Safari window open on my second monitor with my Plex library open, listening to music, or maybe watching some TV.

Daily

nvALT for frequently needed .txt’s. Bear for other important notes. Evernote for all sorts of stuff. Soulver for when I can’t be bothered to go to Wolfram|Alpha. Byword for writing. Chocolat for various text based stuff. MailMate for email. Transmit for FTP.

Occasionally

Acorn and Preview for quick image editing, and Lightroom for the more extensive. Final Cut Pro for video editing. PDFpen mostly for OCRing. Pages for when I need to print my words. Steam for gaming. YNAB for finance management.

Background and utilities

Dropbox, Google Drive , Backblaze and Arq for backups. 1Password for password management. Alfred for quickly launching or finding stuff. Caffeine for keeping my Mac awake. DaisyDisk for hard drive space management. Divvy for window management. Email Backup Pro does what it says on the tin. Bartender for organising the taskbar. Fantastical for adding to my calendar. f.lux for the sake of my eyes. FruitJuice for keeping my battery healthy. iStat Menus for spying on my computer. Hazel for automatically moving and renaming files. KeyRemap4MacBook for making my keyboard more Mac friendly. TextExpander for simplifying the commonly typed stuff. Time Out to remind me to get up and out of my seat every now and again. Yoink for making drag and drop easier.

iPhone

Twitterrific for Twitter. Overcast for podcasts. Newsblur for RSS. Terminology for looking up word definitions. Eidetic for memorising new information. Plex for accessing my home media files. Weather Line for general weather. Dark Sky for rain. Bear for notes. FastEver [iTunes link] for quickly taking short notes. Simplenote for .txt. Evernote for all sorts. FastMail for email. Citymapper for getting around London. Fantastical for my calendar. SwiftoDo for todos. Wolfram|Alpha for answers. VSCO Cam for image editing. RunKeeper for seeing how far I walk. 1Password for password security. Pocket for reading saved web articles. Pinner for Pinboard. Dropbox for accessing documents anywhere. Live Football on TV for well, you know. WhoScored [iTunes link] for checking live football scores. IMDb for when I wanna know the name of that guy in that film. Amazon for mobile purchases. Pushover for notifications of weather alerts. ScannerPro for scanning.

2016 In Review

I skipped posting about my setup in 2015 because not much changed from the previous year. And to be honest not a wealth of stuff (especially on the software side) has changed this year either. I’m a man frozen in time, quite happily using a four year old Mac alongside the same software I’ve been using for equally long. I’m content with my tools.

What would be your dream setup?

I’m not smart enough to know my dream setup in 10+ years.

But in the shorter term, I want my hardware to be faster, harder to break, more reliable, and have longer battery life.

Tags are great because it’s metadata you chose. Take the Evernote note of a painting above. The only metadata that was automatically added was the painting title, artist and the source URL. Is this enough for me to find this note in a years time? Probably not. But by adding the tags cosy night.sky painting shovel snow I will have a much greater chance. It’s personal metadata, so I am more likely to recall it later.

In the past however I would of just tagged that note as photo:painting. Which is better than nothing, and I would of probably found the note again, but that tag may have hundreds of notes in it and I would need to browse through them all to find this particular note. It’s slow and ineffecient. I was severaly hindering myself by being picky with my tags and keeping them overly organised. I’ve now learnt that tags work best when used heavily and without mercy.

Equally stupid was how I used nested tags, so ended up with loads of crazy long ones like travel:england:resource:walking. There’s simply no need for that as both Evernote and Pinboard allow me to search multiple tags at once. And I had to remember the nesting order. That tag was often written like travel:resource:walking:england in error. Tags work much better alone. Context can be added later.

And it wasn’t just overly neat tags that was an issue. It was also my bad habit of spending multiple hours a week ‘cleaning’ the contents and tags of these services. I had to keep them tidy and was often too keen to delete stuff, especially tags with only one item. I’ve learnt to let go now, and the majority of my tags are only being used by one or two entries. And that’s okay. It’s not my real life brain, it’s my digital one, it doesn’t have to be perfectly organised. It’s just a place to store stuff that I might want later that needs to be low maintenance and not take over my life with too much filing. And I think my new way of using these services fits that definition. They’re easier to manage and more competent at finding my data.

“The facts are pretty skimpy right now,” What.cd’s representative says. “We have no official confirmation that servers were seized, but all available evidence does support that, so we are operating as if it is true.” That being said, what.cd’s administrators are confident that its major database of user information was not seized by French authorities: “The site was operational until we shut it down.” That shutdown decision was made by What.cd’s operators out of heightened precaution, as opposed to being forced by an authority to do so, the representative tells Ars.

I’m sure more technical details will follow, but what I want to focus on is the loss of What.cd.

And loss is the right word. To people reading about the news, and not knowing about the site, they will probably think that it’s just another illegal torrent tracker that is deservedly shut down. And there is no getting around it, What.cd was a place to pirate. But it was also the greatest library of digital music the world has ever seen, and a tremendous community for music lovers.

It contained countless musical rarities, that hopefully thanks to the nature of file sharing, haven’t been lost. I first joined around 8 years ago for a copy of the ‘original’ mono first pressing of Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, an album with only 20 physical copies that costs around $15,000 to buy. And thanks to What.cd I am listening to that album whilst typing this.

But of course by ‘thanks to What.cd’ what I actually mean is ‘thanks to a user of What.cd’. Because you had to have an invitation to join the site and could be banned if you didn’t behave, it was made up of some very fine users. The forums were immensely active and full of civil discussion about music.

People created ‘collages’ of albums for easy reference and download, such as ‘Introduction to Ambient’, ‘The Penguin Guide to Jazz Core Collection’, and ‘Christmas Origins: Christmas in Early, Classical & Folk Music’.

You could get a notification when there was a new album uploaded of a musician you like. No subscribing to their spammy newsletter or following their Facebook. Just told when there was an actual album out.

You could request a specific rare vinyl version of an album and be shocked to see how quickly someone found and uploaded a copy. And on that albums What.cd page there could already be many different versions: 1960 vinyl first pressing, 1990 original CD, 1993 Sony Japan cassette release, 2002 Columbia definitive edition, 2005 Steven Hoffman remastered vinyl, 2011 Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab original master recording hybrid SACD, 2015 HDTracks 44.1kHz/24bit web release. And then in the forums there would be discussions about which sounded the best. It was glorious.

Jökull Sólberg Auðunsson said in 2012 [dead link, cached copy]:

Music torrent sites Oink.me, Waffles.fm and What.cd have all had deeper vaults of audible content than any legal music service. They’re like a mixture of a digital Alexandria, a 10,000 square meter bootleg store and a music reviewer early release mail room. The searching and filing is an achievement on its own, through methods of crowd-sourcing and a culture lead by perfectionists and passionate music archivers.

I’ll leave you with that. Goodbye What.cd. You’ll be missed.

Further reading

/r/trackers - It’s Official, what.cd is dead. Memorial thread.
Waxy.org - The end of What.cd, the internet’s biggest and best music collection
Torrent Freak - What.cd Shuts Down Following Reported Raids in France

When the site closed down I had some open tabs browsing it. They give an impression of what the site was like.

Thankfully a year or so ago it became so common and such a menace that considerate iOS developers started to remove it from their apps and it is much less prevalent today.

But now there is a new plague. This time on the web (particularly shops and blogs). It’s the ‘subscribe to our newsletter’ popup and it’s depressingly rampant. You’re slapped in the face with it the moment you visit way too many sites now.

Both these popups are the product of a few things I believe…

Fashion

The web, like most things, has fashions and trends. The newsletter popup has been around for a long time, but it appears in 2016 to be very much in fashion and to have reached a mass scale. Which leads me onto my next point.

Morally okay

When something is so ubiquitous it is less likely to be examined morally. When all your fellow online shops have fashionable newsletter popups of course you want to implement one too. Whereas if you were one of the first you would need to look at wether this is good for your users and examine its pros and cons. But at some point enough people are doing it that the general census becomes ‘this is fine’ and you no longer have to debate it.

Easy to use ‘plugins’

In the case of iOS, two open source projects called Appirater and iRate allowed developers an easy way to implement ‘rate this app’ popups. On the web Wordpress has many popup newsletter plugins and store CMS’s like Shopify have plenty too. Or you can just use MailChimp and a snippet of code to accomplish it.

It works

People aren’t utterly stupid. If these popups didn’t increase newsletter signups they wouldn’t have them.

Finally

So newsletter popups are fashionable, morally okay (in their minds), easy to implement, and work. But fashions die, morally I consider it wrong, easy doesn’t mean right, and a 0.50% increase in newsletter signups isn’t worth plaguing your users. So please, let this trend die.

Below are some popup examples I’ve come across organically in just the past few days…

As I type this Evernote is on my second monitor to my left. It’s been there all day during which it’s been referred and added to many times. I live in Evernote. But despite that I don’t love it. In fact it seems during the eight years I’ve been using it, I like it less and less each year.

Well this may start to change soon as Evernote recently announced that they are moving from their own servers to the Google Cloud Platform and this paragraph caught my eye:

In addition to scale, speed, and stability, Google will also give Evernote access to some of the same deep-learning technologies that power services like translation, photo management, and voice search. We look forward to taking advantage of these technologies to help you more easily connect your ideas, search for information in Evernote, and find the right note at the moment you need it.

This is fantastic news. The main issue I have with Evernote is that it’s a digital brain that’s stuck in 2008. It is a prime candidate for, and in desperate need of, some ‘deep-learning technologies’, as well as being on a modern cloud platform.

I’m hoping these issues I have will be improved:

1. Search. It’s just not quite good enough, and you need to tag and organise your notes efficiently as well as know advanced search syntax to find anything in a large Evernote account.
2. Sync. A sync every 5 minutes is a joke in this day of age. It needs to be close to realtime, especially for business users who collaborate.
3. Related notes. Premium users can see ‘related notes’ below notes. These results aren’t actually too bad, but improvement is needed (For example there’s one Nicholas Cage note I have which Evernote thinks is related to every other note for some reason).
4. Server speeds. Evernote’s servers are obviously somewhere in the US which isn’t good for European users like me. I reach a whooping 150KB/s when downloading from Evernote. I shouldn’t have to watch a 3MB image in my Evernote slowly load when I’m on a 200 Mbit connection. Just the use of Google’s Cloud CDN should solve this.
5. Audio transcribe. I use Evernote to store many little voice recordings. Getting these transcribed would be fantastic. Cloud Speech needs to be put to good use (Though at $1.44 per hour, this would obviously be for Premium users and have a time limit).

That would be a good start to making me love Evernote again. Then they just need to sort out some bugs. Such as how images sent from my iPhone are in the wrong orientation and stretched when I view them in the Mac client and how PDFs never seem to work in the iPhone app.

Alfred is my Spotlight replacement of choice. And one of its features is the ability to do web searches, including your own custom web searches via keywords. So I need just to add YouTube as a custom web search, attach the keyword ‘yt’ and I’m all good. From then on I just need to launch Alfred and type ‘yt van morrison tupelo honey’ to achieve the same results as the Duck !bang.

But in fact using Alfred has other added bonuses.

• It avoids having to type ‘!’ before each custom search.
• I can use any custom keyword choice I want. If I didn’t like ‘yt’ I could of chosen ‘video’ or ‘y’ instead for YouTube.
• Although Duck has a vast amount of !bang compatible websites and they give you the ability to suggest new ones to them, there are plenty of sites that aren’t on their list that I’d like to search. With Alfred I can add any site I want.
• I don’t have to navigate to my browser to do a web search. I can be in any application and just launch Alfred.
• I don’t have to wait around for Duck to process my search request and then redirect me to the relevant search page.
• I don’t have to change my searching habits if I change my web browser. My behaviour remains the same.

So overall, everything went better than expected.

Thanks Alfred.

I first replaced my Apple chiclet keyboard with a ‘proper’ one. And chose the Das Model S Professional for Mac, as most non-chiclet keyboards do not play nice with Macs. However, the Das was just too large and noisy for my small desk and night owl habits. So I replaced it with the HHKB Professional 2. It was expensive, but small and fairly quiet for a ‘proper’ keyboard thanks to its topre keys. I also went with the blank keycap variant to really force me how to learn how to touch type.

When it came to learning, I found Peter’s Online Typing Course to be the best resource.

Anyway, here’s a chart of my average typing speed over the past year.

(My average WPM (words per minute) didn’t immediately drop to its lowest as I was still occasionally chicken pecking at first.)

It took me a very long time to get back to where I was before switching because I just don’t type enough. The most I type at one time is usually an iMessage. But despite the long learning time, it was still very much worth it. My hands feel better, but mostly it’s just really really handy not having to look down from my computer screen to my keyboard when typing.

So if you’re not a touch typist and have been considering learning how I’d highly recommend it. It really wasn’t as tough as I had expected.

What hardware do you use?

Me and my 15-inch Retina Macbook Pro (mid 2012, 2.6GHz Intel i7, 16GB RAM) shuttle between my University dorm and parents house.

At my desk at the dorm is an Apple Thunderbolt Display, Happy Hacking Keyboard Pro 2, Logitech G500 mouse, Razer Goliathus large mouse mat, and Beyerdynamic T90 headphones.

At home there’s a Apple Thunderbolt Display, Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite 2, Logitech G500S mouse, Sennheiser HD 380 Pro headphones, Synology DS411j NAS and a Herman Miller Aeron chair. I also have a Mac mini (late 2014, 2.6GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD) which I use as a home server and as a Plex client, along with four Roku 3’s hooked up to TV’s around the house to access Plex. I also have a PS3 (slim model) and Apple TV (3rd generation Rev. A).

There’s an iPhone 6 in my right pocket. Some keys in my left. A Field Notes Pitch Black edition notebook and Fisher pen in the cargo pocket. And a Chrome Soyuz bag on my back.

For photography I use a Fujifilm X100S, Leica M4-P, Bronica SQ-A and a Sony A100.

And what software?

Usually occupying my monitor

Safari for web browsing. Twitterrific for Twitter. And either Rdio or Cog for music, or VLC for TV/movie.

Daily

nvALT for frequently needed .txt’s. Soulver for when I can’t be bothered to go to Wolfram|Alpha. Byword for writing. Reeder 2 for RSS. Chocolat for various text based stuff. Messages for iMessage. MailMate for email. MarsEdit for blogging. ReadKit for Instapaper. Transmit for FTP.

Occasionally

Acorn and Preview for quick image editing, and Lightroom for the more extensive. Final Cut Pro for video editing. PDFpen mostly for OCRing. Pages for when I need to print my words. Steam for gaming. YNAB for finance management.

Background and utilities

Dropbox, Backblaze and Arq for backups. 1Password for password management. Alfred for quickly launching or finding stuff. Caffeine for keeping my Mac awake. DaisyDisk for hard drive space management. Divvy for window management. Email Backup Pro does what it says on the tin. Bartender for organising the taskbar. Fantastical for adding to my calendar. f.lux for the sake of my eyes. FruitJuice for keeping my battery healthy. iStat Menus for spying on my computer. Hazel for automatically moving and renaming files. KeyRemap4MacBook for making my keyboard more Mac friendly. TextExpander for simplifying the commonly typed stuff. Time Out to remind me to get up and out of my seat every now and again. TotalFinder mostly for listing folders above files in Finder. WhatPulse for key and mouse click tracking. Yoink for making drag and drop easier.

iPhone

Twitterrific for Twitter. Overcast for podcasts. Terminology for looking up word definitions. Eidetic for memorising new information. Quotebook for collecting quotes. Plex for accessing my home media files from anywhere. Dark Sky for weather. Drafts for quickly taking short notes. Notesy for .txt. Evernote for all sorts. FastMail for email. Citymapper for getting around London. Launch Center Pro for quickly launching things. Fantastical for my calendar. Rdio for music. Audible for audiobooks. Due for reminders. Wolfram|Alpha for answers. VSCO Cam for image editing. RunKeeper for seeing how far I walk. 1Password for password security. Instapaper for reading saved web articles. Pinner for Pinboard. Dropbox for accessing documents anywhere. Live Football on TV for well, you know. Yahoo Sport for checking live football scores. IMDb for when I wanna know the name of that guy in that film. Amazon for mobile purchases. Watch Tracker (iTunes link) for seeing how accurate my watch is. Pushover for notifications of weather alerts. MX Mayhem for gaming.

Replacements:

• Apple TV (2nd generation) replaced with the 3rd generation Rev. A Apple TV.
• NetNewsWire (version 3) was replaced by Reeder for RSS.
• PodWrangler was replaced by Overcast for podcasts.
• Today was replaced by Dark Sky for weather.

Removed:

• Schiit Magni Amp and Modi DAC as I forgot to set them up in my new dorm room. I must do that.
• Wedge as App.net is sadly mostly dead.
• LimeChat as I just don’t use IRC enough and it was taking up valuable screen real estate.
• OmniFocus as I just don’t have enough stuff to do to warrant such powerful software. I use Evernote reminders instead.
• Beamer as Plex has removed the need to AirPlay movies to my TV.
• Mountain as I just don’t plug stuff in and out as much as I use to.
• Fitted Lifts as it wasn’t a great app, and it’s too time consuming to enter info in between weight sets.

2014 In Review

In 2013 I really embraced the file system for all my documents, photos, music, movies, etc. so that I wasn’t relying on proprietary software to access my own files. However in 2014 this changed slightly. I really learnt the ins and outs of Evernote, and the risk of long term availability of my files was outweighed by the conveinece of a service like Evernote.

But probably the biggest change in 2014 was my discovery of the wonderful Plex. I used to use DS Video on my Synology to play my media on my Roku. But it was slow in both loading the client UI and the video files. So after I purchased the Mac mini I decided to give Plex a try and was amazed. It fetched metadata perfectly, the Roku and iOS clients were beautfiul and blazing fast, and it could transcode anything into a friendly format for the device it was playing on. It also meant easy access to my movies, TV shows, music, and home videos from anywhere in the world and from every device I own.

It also handled all my music well, and with the iOS app being so good, I removed most of my music from my iPhone and now I just stream it via the Plex app.

Another amazing thing about Plex is how friends and family can access my media files. You give them their own username, and what they watch doesn’t effect your account, and you can even restrict what they can access (home videos, for example). Sadly, the limit is my internet upload speed (15 Mbps), which isn’t fast enough for mutiple 1080p streams, so my friends and familys Roku defaults to 720p to be safe and avoid buffering. But still, a Roku with Plex installed and access to 1000+ of my movies makes a great gift to a friend.

What would be your dream setup?

I’m not smart enough to know my dream setup in 10+ years.

But in the shorter term, I want my hardware to be faster, harder to break, more reliable, and have longer battery life.

There are thousands of these buildings called ‘pubs’ and ‘bars’ dedicated to the consumption of it.

Every supermarket I go to stocks vast quanties and varieties of it at a financial loss just so they get me through their door to buy food on the way out of it.

My family buys it for me on special occasions.

All my friends partake. We enable each other, just like the alcohol enables our conversations.

High class places hide it with their prices and cocktails of ingredients, but the alcohol remains.

And travel is great!

I put my empty carry-on luggage to good use in duty-free. The airport lounges present it freely alongside cold, stale nibbles. On the flight it’s thrown at me. By the steward, “orange juice or champagne?”, with me pretending to think about my choice. And by the steward who has to stand behind the bar even though it’s 4 a.m. and the rest of the plane is asleep. He feeds me drink, and I feed him the sight of something other than tired travellers stumbling to the toilets.

And then I land in a Muslim country. So no alcohol! But wait, that doesn’t include hotels you fool!

Then my holiday consists of two weeks of slave labourers asking me around the swimming pool if I’d like a drink. They use their legs to transport it to you and everything. You scribble your signature and mumble your room number and more of it comes, until you’re so drunk you’re scared of getting in the pool for fear of drowning.

But at least at the end of a booze-fueled day I have the AC cooled sober embrace of my hotel room, far away from Indian immigrants tempting me to drink.

So I relax and turn on the TV. Mmm. Alcoholic beverage adverts with rich looking people doing rich looking things and having what looks like a very nice time. And look! Below the TV is what looks like a small fridge, I wonder what’s in it?

To most people the ISS is just this thing in space where astronauts sing songs, and they don’t realise they can almost certainly see it pass over their head. And unlike many of these space things they don’t have to travel to weird locations only to find out it won’t be happening that night or it’s too cloudly to see. You can see the ISS from the comfort of your garden!

How?

Well NASA offers a service called Spot The Station where they’ll e-mail or text you when it’s going to be passing by your location. And they give you all the details on where to see it in the nights sky.

Here’s an example email:

Time: Fri Jun 07/10:43 PM, Visible: 6 min, Max Height: 61 degrees, Appears: WSW, Disappears: E

Just go outside a minute or so before they say in case it’s early and then look up and marvel.

Everyone I’ve told about this hasn’t known about it before and hasn’t regretted checking it out once I mentioned it. And kids love it. It’s a tangible ‘rocket’ that’s in their garden and not far out in space or in picture books.

Last year Stephen Fry made an appearance on Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast. It got quite a lot of press because in the show Stephen admited to a suicide attempt earlier in the year. But newspaper headlines aside, it’s a masterpiece of a podcast episode. The host Richard Herring was a little bit annoying at times. It may be a comedy podcast, but I felt he kept looking for jokes a little bit too much, when he should of been satisfied with the perfect balance of comedy and honesty that Stephen turned the conversation into.

Anyway, it was a sublime way to spend 90 minutes before sleep, and after listening to it I sat on the edge of my bed for a few minutes thinking. It made me happy, saddened me, and inspired me. It did what all great art should. It took me into its cave and spat me out different and better. Not drastically so. It just added another stick to my mental Beaver dam against everything bad in my world. I hadn’t had a bad or good day, I had experienced what most days are. Boring, dull, tiring, and sprinkled with brief moments of embarrassment, confidence, happiness and sadness. And having in those 24 hours just a glimpse of great art makes it worthwhile, and worth slugging through another 24 to hopefully taste again.

Afterwards Richard Herring wrote:

For a few years now I’ve been side-stepping the censorship, limitations and, let’s face it, lack of interest of television broadcasters and producing my own comedy podcasts. I love the freedom and autonomy of the medium, as well as its immediacy. I can have an idea in the morning and it can be broadcast that same day. With all the hoops you have to jump through to make a TV show, it can take years to get an idea to screen and, by the time it’s on, it has often been interfered with so much by executives that it is unrecognisable. […] I was delighted that one of my all-time comedy heroes, Stephen Fry, agreed to appear, but I was nervous. I had never met him before and was concerned I might just sit opposite him in open-mouthed amazement, unable to say a word. […] It was the most extraordinary and electric 90 minutes that I have ever experienced on stage, showed that independent podcasts can compete with and trump mainstream broadcasters and spread awareness about the effects of depression.

Stephen Fry also later blogged:

The episode, plus the relationship I now have with a magnificent psychiatrist, has made made my mental health better, I think, than it’s ever been.

Podcasts, how I love you.

Download the mp3, listen to it on Soundcloud or watch the video on YouTube.

I favour the ‘Pure’ collection. And use:

• Ringtone: The Pitch
• Text tone: Refined
• New Email: Pretty Pure
• Calendar Alerts: Reflections

Each of the 3 packs costs $17. Or you can buy all of them for $35. Pretty pricey. But they’re gorgeous and you get them DRM-free so you can keep the same tones forever.

Tip: When out and about, with the phone in my pocket, I mostly rely on the vibrate. So I’ve turned down the ‘ringers and alerts’ default volume to around half way in Settings. This means when at home alerts are even less obtrusive and I don’t bother people when on the train, etc. I’d reccomend trying this yourself.

What hardware do you use?

Me and my 15-inch Retina Macbook Pro (mid 2012, 2.6GHz Intel i7, 16GB RAM) shuttle between my University dorm and parents house.

At my desk at the dorm is an Apple Thunderbolt Display, Happy Hacking Keyboard Pro 2, Logitech G500 mouse, Schiit Magni Amp and Modi DAC, Beyerdynamic T90 headphones and a Herman Miller Aeron chair.

At home there’s a Apple Thunderbolt Display, Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite 2, Apple Magic Mouse, Sennheiser HD 380 Pro headphones, Synology DS411j NAS and a hand-me-down office chair. I also have a PS3 (slim model) and Apple TV (2nd generation).

There’s an iPhone 5 in my right pocket. Some keys in my left. A Field Notes notebook [dead link, cached copy] (pitch black edition) and Fisher pen in the cargo pocket. And a Chrome Soyuz bag on my back.

For photography I use a Fujifilm X100S, Leica M4-P, Bronica SQ-A and a Sony A100.

And what software?

Usually occupying my monitor

Safari for web browsing. Twitterrific for Twitter, and Wedge for App.net. LimeChat for IRC. And either Rdio or Cog for music, or VLC for TV/Movie.

Daily

nvALT, because .txt’s are my life. Soulver for when I can’t be bothered to go to Wolfram|Alpha. Byword for writing. OmniFocus for tasks. NetNewsWire (version 3) for RSS. Chocolat for various text based stuff. Messages for iMessage. MailMate for email. MarsEdit for blogging. ReadKit for Instapaper. Transmit for FTP. StockTouch for the stock market. Beamer for streaming to the Apple TV.

Occasionally

Acorn and Preview for quick image editing, and Lightroom for the more extensive. Final Cut Pro for video editing. PDFpen mostly for OCRing. Pages for when I need to print my words. Steam for gaming. YNAB for finance management.

Background and utilities

Dropbox, Backblaze and Arq for backups. 1Password for password management. Alfred for quickly launching or finding stuff. Caffeine for keeping my Mac awake. DaisyDisk for hard drive space management. Divvy for window management. Email Backup Pro does what it says on the tin. Bartender for organising the taskbar. Fantastical for adding to my calendar. f.lux for the sake of my eyes. FruitJuice for keeping my battery healthy. iStat Menus for spying on my computer. Hazel for automatically moving and renaming files. KeyRemap4MacBook for making my keyboard more Mac friendly. TextExpander for simplifying the commonly typed stuff. Time Out to remind me to get up and out of my seat every now and again. TotalFinder mostly for putting folders above files in Finder. WhatPulse for key and mouse click tracking. Yoink for making drag and drop easier. Mountain for quickly ejecting external hard drives.

iPhone

Notesy for .txt. PodWrangler for podcasts. Wolfram|Alpha for answers. Today for weather. Dark Sky for upcoming rain. OmniFocus for tasks. Rdio for music. Citymapper for London. Fitted Lifts for gym.

2013 In Review

This was the year where I realised it was important to not store files needed long term in third party software. So I disposed of Evernote, Day One, iPhoto, and iTunes and embraced the file system and Finder. I used simple folder structures for my documents, photos and music and let Hazel do most of the work. I also replaced journaling app Day One with a new .txt file each day.

What would be your dream setup?

I’m not smart enough to know my dream setup in 10+ years.

But in the shorter term, I want my hardware to be faster, harder to break, more reliable, and have longer battery life.

The ‘activity log’ stream is the first thing you see in the app, and I’m glad, as it’s vital to know your recipes are running fine. On the website it’s always been buried in the nav and I’m sure many users don’t know it even exists.

Elsewhere it does everything you’d expect, like create, find and toggle on/off recipes. There’s also three new channels you can use thanks to the app: Photos, Reminders, and Contacts. Though you have to either open the app or allow it to leave location services on to run recipes these new channels.

IFTTT for iPhone doesn’t ‘automate your entire phone’, but it’s a very good first effort.

Download it for free [iTunes link]

“Usually the only interaction people have with their browsing history is deleting it,” Miller said. But he and Stiksel said they hope Lumi changes that. ”Browsing history gives us a great picture of what people like, without them having to do anything,” Stiksel said.

However:

… the success of Lumi will depend on users being prepared to allow the service to interpret their browsing histories in order to provide them with recommended news stories, reviews and blogs. “The browsing history is owned by the user and securely put onto our platform, only the user has access to it,” Martin insisted. “We are not interested in the data from a commercial point of view.”

This is the problem. Lumi has arrived at the worst time possible. The majority of every interview piece on the service is made up of the creators reassuring us that Lumi is private, safe and secure.

When it came time to upload my browsing history to Lumi I paused… and left. Uploading that data to a web service in this post-Snowden world doesn’t feel right.

The BBC is to suspend 3D programming for an indefinite period due to a “lack of public appetite” for the technology. Kim Shillinglaw, the BBC’s head of 3D, said it has “not taken off” with audiences who find it “quite hassly”. The BBC began a two-year 3D trial in 2011, broadcasting several shows and events in 3D, including the Olympic Games and Strictly Come Dancing.

There are a number of reasons for the lack of public uptake, I believe.

First, there isn’t actually a BBC 3D channel (When the BBC are showing something 3D they take over one of the HD channels.). A dedicated channel provides a place to advertise upcoming showings as well as broadcast 3D nature documentary repeats to get people who stumble upon the channel interested.

Second, even if you have a channel you’re at the mercy of Sky and Virgin Media who put they’re own channels front & centre and bury others deep in the menu system.

Third, people just don’t like 3D. Or don’t like it enough that it’s worth the hassle. Our household watched the last half of the London 2012 Olympic Closing Ceremony in 3D and then completely forgot about its existence.

Being publicly funded the BBC generally are the first to drop a dying service. Not being a fan of 3D myself, I’m hoping this is the beginning of us being rid of the 3D menace.

The definitive Wayfarer just isn’t what it used to be. Cheap, but identical, copies have flooded the market. Ray-Ban have been introducing more and more tacky colour variations and lenses. But most importantly the build quality has been dropping and the price has been rising. The 2113 Wayfarer’s I bought in 2009 for £60 are now double that.

Step in Tom Ford. His eyewear is generally 20-30% more expensive than Ray-Ban’s, but they’re worth it in my opinion. The build quality is unbelievably superior to Ray-Ban’s. My Wayfarer’s now feel like plastic pieces of crap. And Mr. Ford makes some stunning looking glasses. They’re beautiful.

So if you’re in the market for either some new prescription or sun glasses, give Tom Ford a go. Go to a store, try on a pair, I’m sure you’ll love them.

But what does Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin use to blog and write? Well, he uses good old fashioned LiveJournal to blog. And to write? Wordstar 4.0! A program from 1987.

Previously the one/off switch was on the top of the lampshade:

It’s now been changed to a mid-cable switch:

That switch makes zero sense in every circumstance (and particularly on a balanced-arm lamp where you’re constantly moving the arm around). I’ve had to use those switches too often for too long now, and I still cannot see a single benefit. Imagine, you get your lamp out of the box, place it on the table top and then for time immemorial you have to bend over, squeeze your arm through the small gap between the table and the wall, and then run your fingers through the cable to find the switch.

Is there a single scenario where that is a better choice of switch? Placed on my desk, I’d have to get my arm over 4 feet of wood every time I wanted to turn it off/on. On my bed side table, I’d have to dislocate my shoulder to reach it. It’s insanity.

The only reason I can see why it’s so popular is due to low cost for the manufacturer. Or am I missing a benefit or reason? Please email me. I genuinely want to know why this switch exists so prominently.

Sony’s Moment of Truth (Nicholas Thompson)

[reading time: 2 minutes]

It’s short and makes all the right points:

[…] The company also kept putting its money on crippled horses. “3-D will sweep the world,” Howard Stringer, its previous C.E.O., said less than three years ago. And Sony holds onto products, and proprietary systems, for too long. The Walkman was awesome. And it should have been the iPod. Instead, it became the MiniDisc. By the time Sony won its fight to make Blu-ray a standard, physical discs were becoming obsolete. Now, gaming consoles are in trouble, too. A million Angry Birds have crashed into them; Farmville Farmers have dug up the grass around them.

When I was growing up (I was born in 1991) Sony seem like the company. Everything electronic and worth more than £50 seemed to be made by Sony in my household. They were considered reliable and it was just what you naturally bought. Your old Sony TV would die, (ours died after in 2002 after 20 years of loyal service) and you’d buy a new one. Now however Sony is just one of dozens of companies making televisions that all look the same as each other. So you just go for the cheapest one which is considered reliable. (Which is either Samsung or LG in our house these days.) However despite its demise elsewhere, one Sony product has remained with me throughout my life: the PlayStation. I use to love them. But for me each one has got worse and worse. And this new PlayStation will be Sony’s last chance. I have the standard complaint about the PS3: the software updates! They are endless and never get anywhere near maxing out my internet connection.

This is my usual routine when I want to play a game:

• Put in disc
• Software update is required to play game
• Play a game on my iPhone until it’s ready
• Software is finally updated
• Cannot be bothered now
• Turn off PlayStation

The only reason I haven’t switched to Xbox is simply because of the controller. The PlayStation one has stayed roughly the same for years and I find it perfect. The Xbox controller is horrible to use. That’s all that’s stopping me from switching sides. The new PlayStation had better be bloody good!

February 21, 2013: Well, the PlayStation has been what seems like 22% announced. We’ve got some of the details, but not all. I watched the event and it was dull, dull, dull. Plus, there’s a whole new controller that looks pretty terrible:

Sale of personal gene data condemned as ‘unethical and dangerous’

[reading time: 3 minutes]

It’s summed up in the first paragraph:

Private firms will soon be able to buy people’s medical and genetic data without their consent and, in certain cases, acquire personal information that might enable them to identify individuals.

This scares me. You expect this stuff from DNA testing companies like 23andMe, but not from the NHS, a publicly funded health service. Yes, this information is important. I’m sure all the great medical breakthroughs of the next century are likely to come from studying genetics. So thus all the money from the problems they solve and the information they discover will too. And that gets Big Pharma excited. Which is why they’re willing to pay a decent amount of money to the NHS for this data. Which means basically the NHS is just going to be a middle man, and the middle man never gets rich. The NHS will do okay from these deals, sure, but not enough to justify selling the most personal of all data about the people who pay for the NHS with their taxes. It’s not worth it. Instead of just keeping this data saved somewhere and maybe fiddling around with it to see how obese the nation is and how many people have descended from a Bavarian sheep farmer, they should go on the offensive, despite their limited money now-a-days, and try to do some real good. I’d much rather read the headline “NHS cures Alzheimer’s”, than “GlaxoSmithKline cures Alzheimer’s.”

And of course selling the data is a side issue to the main issue that they’re collecting it at all. But I’m not going to get involved in that whole affair, especially as I don’t even know how I feel about it.

I’ll just say this: I don’t trust the NHS with my postcode, let alone the gene data that makes me, me. (And how could you blame me when the section of the NHS in control of all this data has a website that looks like this [dead link, cached copy].)

Blogging is serious business now. And one common way of building up an ‘audience’ is only talking about one particular subject. Basically you need to appeal to a niche, however big or small, in order to build loyal readers. However, for the majority of people, blogging is just a bit of fun and they talk about whatever they feel like. I do this for example. And I’m sure some of the blogs you follow do this. So it’s understandable that some of the posts are about a subject you’re not interested in.

Thankfully a service exists to help you. It’s called Yahoo! Pipes, and you can use it to filter out blog posts you’re not interested in. Here’s how…

Note: if you do not consume your blogs via RSS, or don’t even know what RSS or Google Reader is, please stop reading.

For this tutorial I’m going to be using Yahoo! Pipes on the blog ‘The Happy Hermit’. Andreas Moser, the man who runs the blog, sometimes posts film reviews. But let’s say, as an example, that you have no interest in film reviews. You can filter his blog to block out his film reviews.

Here’s how:

1. Go to pipes.yahoo.com

2. Click the blue button ‘Create a pipe’ at the top middle.

3. You’ll need a Yahoo! account. If you have one, sign in. If not, sign up.

4. Drag ‘Fetch Feed’ to the ‘drag modules here’ grid.

5. Now you need to find the RSS feed for the blog you want to filter. Most blogs have it somewhere on the sidebar.

6. Copy the URL of the RSS feed and paste it into the ‘Fetch Feed’ box.

7. Click ‘Operators’ on the left sidebar. Then drag ‘Filter’ to the ‘drag modules here’ grid again.

8. In the ‘Filter’ box change ‘All’ to ‘Any’ from the dropdown menu.

9. Next, click in the box under the word ‘Rules’ and select ‘item.title’ from the bottom. (If you plan on filtering words that appear in the actual blog post rather than just the title, choose ‘item.description’. Though I’m not sure how reliable this is as I’ve never used it myself.)

10. Now in the final box add whatever words you want to filter and block. In this example I’m using ‘Film Review’.
    

11. Join the white dots.
    

12. Name your Pipe.

13. Press ‘Save’ and then ‘Run Pipe…’ at the top.

14. You’re all done! Now click ‘Get as RSS’.

Yahoo! Pipes is also very useful for big high volume blogs like The Verge and Ars Technica as you can filter as many things as you want. Here’s my Yahoo! Pipe of Ars Technica for example:

Anyway, Flickr is currently enjoying a bit of renaissance due to its new iPhone app and the fact that Instagram has announced its less than favourable new privacy policy. Lots of people on my Twitter stream are now sharing photos from their iPhone with Flickr. However, there’s two BIG reasons why I won’t be doing the same.

First: whenever you go to a Flickr photo page for the first time Flickr tries to shove their new iPhone app down your throat. A fullscreen banner pops up which you have to get rid of before you can see the photo.

Second: their mobile layout is terrible. I’m here to see a photograph right? So what do they do? They make the photo tiny!

So basically, they force you to make an unnecessary tap (which is a big deal in the fast paced, on the move, Twitter world) and don’t display the content properly.

Here are some of my favourites:

I’m Feeling Ducky — !: Go straight to the webpage of the top result of a DuckDuckGo search. Example: ‘! bob dylan’

Google — !g: Sometimes it’s handy to be able to quickly search DuckDuckGo’s evil alternative.

Wikipedia — !w: I use this endlessly.

Amazon — !a: With this !bang, 1-Click purchasing and Amazon Prime I can buy stuff fast.

YouTube — !yt: Quickly find a video.

Google Cache — !cache: If I go to a webpage that is offline for some reason I just type ‘!cache’ followed by the URL into DuckDuckGo and it will take me to Google’s cached version of that page.

Searching Membership services

Pinboard — !pinboard: If you’re a member of Pinboard this is very convenient.

Rdio — !rdio: I do not usually have the Rdio Mac app open, so this is a good !bang to know for when I want to quickly listen to one particular song within the browser.

Other Google services

Google Images — !i

Google Mail — !gmail

Google Maps — !gm

Google News — !gn

You can see DuckDuckGo’s full list of !bangs here.

8 December, 2012: One the great things about DuckDuckGo is that you can submit your own !bangs. I submitted Coral CDN the other day and it has just been added! I find Coral CDN better than Google’s Cache so from now if a website’s down I’ll be using !coral to see it. Example: ‘!coral cnn.com’

This is my favourite bit:

On the drive-time radio show in Port Douglas, Australia, the host promises to bring on an astrologer to talk about “what the eclipse means for your life”. But for me that’s the opposite of what makes it wonderful. The eclipse doesn’t even know you exist. Nature provides a brief alignment of the Moon and Sun that is completely foreordained, immutable, and will happen with Swiss precision for another billion or so years, whether or not anyone is looking. It is on us to aggregate into litttle bubbles of protoplasm, develop eyes, emerge onto land, discover fire, evolve language, ask the brainier among us where the thing will happen, and make the appropriate travel arrangements. A good way to feel small is to look at the Wikipedia list of future solar eclipses, and think about that fact that between one and another of them you are going to disappear, but the eclipses will keep happening, about one a year, until the moon finally drifts too far away from the earth to perform the magic trick anymore. It’s the greatest thing that happens in the sky. Find one on the list you can go see, and see it!

Read the rest here.

Luckily a website exists to help you. Fuelly.com is ‘a site that tracks your gas mileage over time, helping you calculate fuel expenses as you drive.’ And Fuelly has ‘tracked 3,271,504 fuel-ups in 153,654 vehicles over 922,356,497 miles of driving.’ This means Fuelly knows what MPG pretty much every car in the world actually gets.

So head over to Fuelly’s ‘Browse All Cars’ page and pick the car you’re interested in to find how many MPG it is actually getting.

I’ve been trying out Pro for a few weeks now as a Beta tester and this is my little review.

Features

For $30 a year (or $3 a month if you don’t want to pay annually) you get:

• Larger files and increased storage. Files up to 1GB in size and 100GB of storage.
• No ads. This includes seeing ads on other peoples stuff. (While you’re logged in)
• Statistics.
• Private Drops.
• Customized Drop Views. (Well, three differen’t colours.)
• Option to use your own domain.

Thoughts

Pro isn’t a key to an unknown Droplr world. It doesn’t transform the experience. The Pro features are just lovely additions to an already great service. I don’t mean this badly. Pro simply embeds itself effortlessly. No fuss or fluff.

One of the main reasons you’ll want to upgrade is for its value for money. For example, its big competitor, CloudApp, has a Pro option that costs $15 a year more and the only features are:

• Unlimited file uploads a day.
• Upload files up to 250MB.
• Option to use your own domain.

Dropbox even comes up short as they charge $200 a year for 100GB (I know Dropbox is a very different service to Droplr). Droplr’s $30 Pro looks amazingly good value in comparison.

Conclusion

If you share stuff online, Droplr, and Droplr Pro is for you.

Honourable mention: the sign up proccess for Pro is amazingly simple. The simpliest I’ve ever encountered.

Instapaper is a truly great app and is the original and still the best ‘read later’ service out there.

However, there’s one thing that bugs me about the app. And that’s the way it handles read articles.

When you’re done reading that awesome New Yorker article that you’ve been putting off for weeks because it’s so long, you’re happy. You’ve doubtless enjoyed it, but are now ready to stop seeing its title and its endless page-indicating circles haunting you when you open up the app. So what do you do?

Well this is where I got confused the first time I used Instapaper. I’d heard Instapaper was basiclly a to-do list for stuff to read so I presumed once you’ve read something you’re meant to tick it off the list. But there didn’t appear to be an option for this. There was a ‘trash’ button, but I didn’t want to delete it. I stumbled around the App for a little while trying to work it out. Eventually I dropped the isssue and moved on. But after reading a bunch more articles, and with my Instapaper account clogged up I decided just to delete them. But when I did tap the trash icon I was suprisingly presented with two options:

This was kinda baffling. I didn’t understand what ‘Move to Archive’ meant. Is that normal procedue for a read article? These two options were so negative I presumed they weren’t the route you’re supposed to take. I thought I just couldn’t find the the ‘You’re awesome for reading that article, click here if you’re done with it’ button.

In the end I just assumed ‘Move to Archive’ was what I should be pressing and continued happily using the app to this day.

However, everytime I tap that trash icon and am presented with those two options – the ‘Delete’ one standing out in bright red – it feels like such a cop out. It’s so negative.

Marco Arment, Instapaper’s creator, says he doesn’t like to blatantly copy a competitors feature, even if it’s better. He prefers to come up with a new, smarter way of doing it. I can respect that, and I respect Marco greatly, but please, dear God, just rip off the way Read It Later handles it.

With their app, once you’ve read an article you just simply tap the ‘tick’ icon. It’s then swiftly gone, and your back at the main article list screen ready and roaring to read another article.

(Also, a tick is such a positive little fella. It reminds me of doing well in school and the ticks yogurt companies put on their pots telling me all the good stuff that is in it.)

And of course tapping the tick is quicker. It’s one tap, not two.

Read It Later

Instapaper

But maps are hard. Really hard. And Apple have failed. And now people are angry because this new Maps app is worse than it was before, when it used Google’s glorious Map data.

Personally, I’m not too angry, as I now use Waze for navigating in my car, and use public transit rarely. However, the Google-based Maps app was great for finding addresses, and navigating when walking. And lets be honest, a step backwards is always a bad thing. And iOS 6 Maps is a step backwards. I’ve used it just a couple times, but each time it has failed in some regard.

For example, when searching for ‘Heathrow Airport’, (one of the biggest and busiest airports in the world) Apple goes to a minicab company many miles away. And when you do eventually find the right Heathrow Airport amoungst the collection of irrelevent dots, you’ll find that Apple’s map of Heathrow is awful. Nothing is where it should be. Roads go over the terminals, and even over the bloody runway!

Being Apple, the maps look beautiful, but its data is poor. So please, if you spot an error with the map, lay a pin on it within the app, tap on it, and then tap ‘Report a problem’. User power triumphs all.

However, Google’s AdSense algorithms are as smart as its PageRank one, and it’s one of the few trusted and effective ad publishers out there. Despite this thought I thought I was pretty damn good at avoiding the ominous ‘sponsored links’. However, according to my Google ‘web history’ I seem to average around 1 sponsored click every day! That’s a lot more than I thought it would be.

To see this yourself, visit https://www.google.com/history/. You’ll now see all your Google searches. On the left are filter options. Click ‘Sponsored Links’ and… there you go! Every Google ad you’ve ever clicked.

And, this is Google and the Guardian doing this. Sort it out guys.

Gmail gets it right though, displaying actual useful tools that I’m likely to use when scrolling:

Anyway, I went to a few games and slowly became less interested in football. Last year though I started playing Football Manager. It’s a simulation game that to most sounds as dull as Snow Plow Simulator. However, it has a massive audience and is amazingly addictive, even for someone like me who had been away from the football ‘scene’ for 5 years. I eventually wanted to see these data ‘players’ for real. (Well, on a TV screen) I wanted to put a face to a set of attributes and I slowly began watching TV football games more and more, consuming every game I could.

After a year of watching frequently on the TV I last week decided to go to a live game again. I decided to watch ‘my’ team. Chelsea. This is where the nightmare begins.

I go to ChelseaFC.com > Tickets > Buy tickets online > Match tickets > Non-members. I see a game called “annual lunch”. Apparently it’s an away fixture. ‘Mmmm,’ I thought. ‘Never heard of that team.’ I click “buy tickets”. I’m presented with “£168”. ‘OK’ I thought. ‘I’ll try an unofficial site. It is a little odd I can’t buy tickets from the fucking Chelsea FC website though.’

I Googled around, but… nothing. Nothing as in ‘not one game’. No site was selling available tickets. I eventually found a website called viagogo. It appears to be a website where people, and presumably companies, sell-on tickets. I didn’t like the idea of that, it sounded dodgy. But, yeh, ‘I’m desperate.’ ‘Yes! Arsenal game! Arsenal game! Oh. £158 a ticket.’

I go back to ChelseaFC.com. I find my way to the membership page. It seems becoming a member for (at least) £42 you gets you more access to tickets. ‘Okay. Whatever. I don’t care anymore. I’ll do that I guess.’ I pay £48 for a two year membership for “tickets only” on their SSL-less shitty website and after a couple of days my membership finally becomes active. I log in with the password they sent me over e-mail. [They required a password when I signed up. Quite why I don’t know, since they reset it and send you their own chosen one anyway.] ‘Okay. There are more games available.’ It seems the only home game that isn’t already sold out is over a month away. ‘That’s a long time, but okay.’ I spend quite a while evaluating the seating plan attempting to get the the right seat. I call my Dad to make sure he’s off work that day. He is but complains, like me, about the price: £51 a ticket. (That’s over 50p a minute). I go to buy. ‘Mmm. So it seems I can only choose the stand where I want to sit, not even the section, or let alone seat. ‘Huff Whatever.’ I go to payment.

“You can only buy one ticket per member.” ‘One fucking ticket?!’ … … …

Seriously?! I completely understand a limit. They don’t want one member buying 30 tickets or anything silly like that. I also understand that Chelsea has a small-ish stadium for the size of a club it is. But they limit it at 1?! Say you’ve got an American friend to visit and he wants to see a Chelsea game. He has to become a fucking member to buy one single ticket just once?!

Maybe I am just over-reacting. However, I’m cutting my loses now and just getting away from this whole dirty rotten business. I don’t feel wanted and neither does my money.

Note: This seems a common problem, not just with Chelsea. I’ve attempted to buy many tickets this past week. I tried Bayern Munich and Ajax. I thought I’d turn it into a little holiday as my birthday just passed. But, Bayerns ticket site isn’t in English and Google translate is no good. With Ajax I can’t remember the specifics. The only thing I do remember from their buggy website is that I had to buy an overpriced buffet if I wanted a ticket.

I’ll probably eventually go see my local team, Watford FC, play. Despite being such a small team they had the best ticketing system. They were the only team where you could pick your actual seat. However, at the moment “there has been an unexpected error” on their site. Also, it’s powered by the bastardly Ticketmaster. Not good signs.

One day, some day, I’ll manage to buy a ticket.

October 22, 2011: Look! An actual ticket for an actual football match!

Every 6 months or so I go to my local newsagents and buy every newspaper on the shelf, hoping to find a news companion I can maybe subscribe to.

I sit on my floor and spread them all out and spend the afternoon reading them but I never really like any.

I was going to now go into great detail as to why. How I think the Daily Mail is pretty much the worst publication to ever be put to print in the UK. (It’s not just bad, it’s poisenous in fact.) I was going to talk about how The Times is just straight up boring and how the Guardian go overboard with sport articles sometimes, publishing stuff that seems forced just to beef up their sports section.

But anyway, all you need to know is none of them fit. I don’t mind the Guardian and the Independent, but would I want to spend £300 a year reading one? No. Because I only read around 1 in every 15 articles in the paper and that ratio isn’t good enough.

So, why can’t I subscribe to the individual journalists I like? I want someone to create a writers network website. The fantasty is that all news and magazine publishers allow their staffs work to appear on this network, for a price. I can then subscribe to a journalist for a certain amount per month or per article/photo.

It won’t just be a website, of course. They’ll be an iPhone and iPad app that produces your custom ‘newspaper’, a bit like Flipboard does with your social networks. There could even be a Magcloud like service that would print and send your ‘paper/magazine’ every month to your door. A reccomendation engine would accompany all this. ‘Hey, you like Kevin McCarra of the Guardian so why not subscribe to Sam Wallace of the Independent? Start your free 2 week trial of this writers articles now!’

This is my dream.

December 17, 2011: Journalisted offers some of the functionality I yearn for.

August 15, 2013: The Guardian have implemented a ‘Follow by email’ feature. Example:

January 7, 2014: It seems the Guardian have removed the ‘Follow by email’ feature.

It’s called DuckDuckGo and is amazing. I did some basic tests comparing Google to it and Google did just win. However, DDG (DuckDuckGo) has great character and some nifty features which makes it my default. Also, when I did these tests I was looking at the extreme end of search. So I was seeing if it could tell me when Hendrix died, the time in Oslo, my local weather and if it could do various conversions. Google edged this because it did it so gracefully and beautifully. However, when I stopped doing niche searches and just used DDG day-to-day I found it an equal to Google and that is incredibly high praise. I did more tests and in the first draft of this post talked about them but they’re really too boring to talk about here so I’ll just say Google beats DDG at certain things and vice versa. Which again, for a one man site, is amazing.

Here are some particular things I really like about DDG:

• !bang syntax. I mainly used Google’s ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ feature. So I’d search ‘in bruges imdb’ and it’d take me right to In Bruges’ IMDB page. However, when I needed multiple results and wasn’t sure of the page I wanted I would have to go to google.com and search. DDG avoids this with the !bang syntax. So now I search ‘!imdb in bruges’ and it’d take me right there. If I don’t know the site I wanted but am ‘feeling lucky’ I’d just search ‘!ducky in bruges’ and it’d take me to the first result. Or say I wanted to buy a Bob Dylan album on Amazon. I’d normally go to amazon.co.uk and search. Now I can just type ‘!a bob dylan’ and DDG will take me right to Amazon’s search results page for Bob Dylan. That is very handy.
• Security. Google is very smart. It’s constantly working out ways to get you clicking stuff and tracks you in very intricate ways. DDG doesn’t do this. Also, Google does have SSL support but it takes away a lot of Google’s usual search features. It’s also not smart. DDG knows I’m searching on its HTTPS site so will take me to the HTTPS version of the link I’m clicking where possible.
• It’s customizable. You can edit pretty much anything you like. Colors, text size, layout and you can even turn off ads!

There are some things I did really miss about using Google though. Here are the cons of DuckDuckGo usage:

• No iOS support. Currently you’re only allowed to use Google, Bing or Yahoo as your default search engine in mobile Safari. You can go to ddg.gg everytime you want to search, but that’s tiresome. There is also an actual DDG iOS app, but you don’t want that.
• No auto-complete when searching.
• The spell checker is bad. Google is the best in the world at spell checking because they have so much context.
• Google is prettier. DuckDuckGo is like Samuel Johnson. An ugly mother-fucker who occasionally stutters but is charming and clever, so you forget all that.
• Google.com is the hub. You visit it and from there you access your e-mail, documents, news, maps and more. DDG becomes another unnecessary non-Google site to visit.
• Consider DDG ‘the face of the web’. If you want a deep extensive search and plan on trawling through many pages DDG will say ‘no more results’ and give you the option to redirect to Google, Bing, etc.
• When I search for a cinema Google gives me showings, a map and the telephone number all without clicking a single link. DDG isn’t as smart in this regard.

I’d imagine most people will prefer Google, if only for familiarities sake. However, DuckDuckGo is a great, endearing alternative. So please give it a try!

September 27, 2011: Another con of using DDG: as I mentioned, the site is customizable. It uses javascript to impose your favoured colours, layout, etc. This can be slow. Generally only a second or two, though it can be longer. This doesn’t sound like too much of an issue, but it will be after a few hundred searches. Sometimes I find and click what I’m looking for before my settings ‘arrive’, so to speak. Please consider this.

September 29, 2011: I listed bad spell checker as one of the cons of DDG. However, this probably proves me wrong:

May 8, 2012: I’m still using DuckDuckGo happily. It’s gotten a lot faster recently and I’ve become a Jedi at using !bangs.

November 21, 2012: Still loving DuckDuckGo!!!

January 7, 2014: Using it everyday, still.

Improve the squad

This current team are constantly being called the greatest in the world. I disagree. I think they may have the greatest starting 11, but if you ignore those 11 and concentrate on the rest of the squad it’s actually rather weak. Barças rivals Real Madrid have a far superior squad with a very good reserve player in nearly every position. The Catalans on the other hand have an assortment of over priced aging players and various young Spaniards from Barcelona B that have occasionally proved unreliable.

Barcelona’s fabulous 11 is almost too much of a team. If one of them is missing the system is prone to breaking. In fact, the 11 didn’t even draw a game in La Liga last season. All draws and loses occurred when at least one backup player started. Of course it sounds obvious that a backup player isn’t going to perform as well as one from the first team and that’s to be expected. But the problem is that, as I said, the 11 rely on each other so greatly to function as the ‘best team in the world’. They are a mind-blowing system of players whose styles compliment each other in an exceptional way. (That’s why Lionel Messi scores almost half as many goals for Argentina as for Barcelona.) When a new player comes along they seemingly struggle to be part of that system. Even the youth (La Masia) players, raised the Barça way, occasionally stick out when alongside others from the 11. And the likes of Milito and Mascherano look alien alongside them. And this brings me onto my next point…

Shrewd transfer dealings

Maybe it isn’t surprising, considering their reliance on players coming through La Masia, that Barças purchases in recent years have often been so poor. But is is odd considering nearly every other aspect of the club is so well run. In just the 2008-09 and 2009-10 seasons they spent roughly €140 million on what many consider flops and €50 million on ‘good’ buys. That’s a terrible ratio and if you include wages and fees, they have wasted an awful amount of money in a very short space of time.

Barça also never seem to bag a bargain and are constantly over-paying. Whether it be for young, unproven players like Keirrison (20, €14M), Chygrynskiy (22, €25M) and Cáceres (21, €16.5m) or aged, experienced ones like Henry (29, €24M) or Milito (28, €17M) and Villa (29, €40M). Naturally, many would rightly argue that investing in young talent is a good thing as they are buying players at the right age, as their wage demands are small and they could be sold at a later date for a similar or greater price. But these young buys never seem to reach their potential and are usually loaned out and loose their value and demand before being moved on. This could be down to bad luck. But you surely can’t have €140 worth of bad luck in two years?! If it wasn’t for the financial weight of the club and the quality of La Masia graduates Barça could be in a very different position in the table.

Aside: does any one else think if Barça had Arsene Wenger as Director of Football they would be unstoppable?

Keep hold of Guardiola

Guardiola’s contract seems to be pretty much extended one year at a time season-by-season. Whether it’s his or Barças idea to do it this way I don’t know. All I know is that ‘Pep’ is often curiously self-deprecating. He insists he’s just steering a very talented ship. Maybe he’s just being humble, but I think deep down he doubts his own abilities. He may just believe he’s advising other managers players and playing with a system inherited from Johan Cruyff. Also, when asked about rumours of moving on to another club he seems open and flattered by the prospect and gives the stock ‘my contract runs ’til 20XX, after that you never know’ line.

He’s been at Barcelona his entire coaching career and most of his playing one and you would imagine that’d would breed the sort of man who would be inherently loyal. But it seems he’s certainly not going to be the Catalan Alex Ferguson and may likely be tempted to prove himself elsewhere.

Anyway, I believe Barcelona need to hold onto him. Not only for the the Ferguson-effect of stability, but of course because he wins trophies consistently. La Liga three times in a row and the UEFA Champions League twice. A sensational record! Just imagine if Bojan’s late goal versus Inter Milan in the 2nd leg of the semi-final in 2010 stood? He could of won it three times in a row by now!

Ignore the critics

Barcelona are loved by nearly all. Even the Manchester United fans seemed content to loose to such a brilliant team in the Champions League final recently. They are known as the good guys in football; financially secure and the best team in Europe. Maybe they should just keep doing what they’re doing! :)

Next I typed his email address into Google hoping it would take me to one of his online profiles, but it returned no results. I tried to add his Brother on Facebook and get in contact that way, but Facebook search is awful and I couldn’t find him. It couldn’t find Sam either. Well, the right Sam.

I eventually remembered that when I needed to reset my Facebook password a few weeks ago it listed all my associated e-mail address to choose which one I wanted to send the new password to. I typed in Sam’s hotmail account and clicked ‘forgot password’? and sure enough it listed his Gmail address.

I thought, ‘great, I’ll send him a quick e-mail now’. I’m halfway through asking for his details when I hear the indistinguishable noise of that Facebook chat beep. I go to the tab and sure enough I can see a chatbox. Sam and his Brother are chatting back and forth about what he wants for Christmas. ‘WTF’ I thought. This was bizarre. I typed in “Matt?”. He replied “yea”. I said “Sam has been hacked. Ha. Facebook security. Bullshit.”

I got to Sam’s profile page and sure enough I am logged in as him. I can post and change settings. I didn’t, but I could. I haven’t tried this with any other accounts, because you know, it’s probably illegal or something and this may of just been a one-time glitch. But still, an idiot like me managed to hack into a Facebook account. By accident! All I needed was his e-mail address. No password – nothing. WTF Facebook?

Design

From the few I’ve spoke to it seems that men like the new design and women don’t. The ladies don’t like the stainless steel around the edges or its sharpness. They find it unforgiving and masculine. Personally, I love it. Seeing stainless steel in an increasingly plastic society feels refreshing. Plus it’s a nice design wink to Dieter Rams and old Braun products. Most Apple designs are – but traditionally the iPhone never was. I’ve found the 4 to be both terrible and terrific in the hand because of its hard edges. Most reviewers loved the feel, and I do. But only sometimes. That cold stainless steel makes holding it very mechanical in portrait mode. It’s comforting and industrial. And after a while that feeling welds itself to you and it feels familiarly beautiful holding it. I imagine hand gun owners get that same feeling of ‘home’ when they rest they’re hands on it in their holster.

However – for me – in landscape mode when taking a video or photo it feels pretty bad. It feels pleasant but not comfortable. You have no grip and feel like your going to drop it. The problem is likely magnified with my large hands. But it’s the main reason I’m ordering a nice, round, grippy case.

I had my 3G for 2 years and dropped it quite a few times caseless and it never broke. I had some minor scratches and an obtrusion at the bottom from when I dropped it heavily once. But, it never broke, and I never experienced any of the fragility others reported. Yesterday I dropped my 4 from just below waist height. I was confident there would be no large damage. And there wasn’t. However, there are some really horrible scuff marks. Because of the square design each corner takes the full weight of impact. On iPhones of old the rounded bottom would sort of soften blow. But not with the 4. And these scuff marks are horrible! They aren’t too noticable by sight but are in the hand. The smoothness is now replaced with sharp scratches and it feels rough. Sure, it’s my own fault. But if you own it for 18 months (24 in my case) your going to drop it. And after several shunts I can imagine the phone looking really battered.

The flat, glass back makes it sit nicely on tables and it looks splendid. But I’d prefer a plastic back. Having glass on the reverse of the phone doubles your worries of dropping it and doubles the chance of damage if you do. Also, you don’t want to touch the rear. It’s smooth and lovely, but with sweaty hands it feels slippy and makes you not want to touch it for fear of smear. Yet another reason for purchasing a case.

Tech

Jesus Christ!!! The screen is stunning. Beyond belief stunning. It is mind blowingly clear. It’s so perfect you don’t want to touch it. I just want to load up a Andreas Gursky picture and mount my iPhone. Other phones screens are like regular printer paper; the iPhone’s screen is museum quality paper. (It makes me so excited for the new iPad.)

Other reviewers have praised the 4’s camera saying it’s pretty good but not top of the range. That may be so, but this new camera is more than enough. I consider it just as good as nearly all point and shot cameras. As a photographer I honestly believe I could use the 4 on assignment in most cases. Not for studio based stuff, but certainly onside on location. It’s hard to take a bad picture with it. The point to focus feature is nice but I rarely use it as the large f-stop often makes it irrelevant. It’s handy occasionally though. The flash is okay. Again, nice to have. I haven’t used it enough to really critique it. It boosts everything nicely when using it in medium to low light. But the 4 is good generally adequate in low light. It’s good at night to get the job done. But whitewashes - like most flashes - so don’t expect too fine results.

It’s 720p video capabilities are better than it’s photo taking. The video is so good! Everyone I’ve shown videos to have been blown away. The biggest problem I’ve found with video is exporting it. I like to share it the moment I take it, on Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo, e-mail, etc. Most websites give you your own e-mail address so you can attach it, send it, and then the website will upload it. Bit of a problem though. Firstly, it’s compressed before the phone evens sends it and by the time the website of your choice compresses it again and converts it to flash it will look terrible. Really terrible! Secondly, you can only e-mail short videos. It’s based on how long it is and I’ve never been able to upload a video longer than a minute. That’s not very long. Say you’ve taken video on a holiday and edited it all together with the iMovie app. That could easily be 5 minutes long. So, the only way to share it is wait to you get home to your computer, connect your phone, and export it using a software of your choice. So much for cloud computing. The poorly compressed problem is also magnified due to the phones amazing screen.

The battery life is pretty poor. The tech on the iPhone is so immense that it was never going to be great. And all things considered the battery life is decent. But mine has never lasted more than a day. It lasts ages on stand-by. For example, I’ve been up 4 hours and am yet to touch my iPhone since fully charging it over night and the battery percentage is at 98%. Which is great. But the moment you start using that beast of a screen it tumbles faster than a V8’s MPG. Last week it lasted half a day with heavy usage. I shouldn’t have to worry about battery percentage 5 hours after its last full charge.

iOS4

The iPhone’s software has always been one of its plus points. Joyful and easy to use, it defined the product and put other phones interfaces to shame - and still does. On the surface iOS4 looks like any of its previous iterations. It looks exactly the same. The main new features are folders, the ability to group apps in folders; the ability to gift apps; wireless keyboard support; tap to focus video and 5x digital zoom. And, multitasking. I thought multitasking would be magnificent. And it is. But the 4 is so fast it’s almost pointless unless your in the middle of a game. And even then most games take a few seconds to start up and continue from where you left off. Also, to use multitasking you double-click the home button. Well, I’ve found only ninjas and pac man enthusiasts can do this. You have to tap it twice to quickly it’s unreal. Maybe it’s just me, but 70% of the time I want to bring up the multitasking dock it takes me back to the home screen.

The Antenna Issues

I have had some antenna problems. If I put just part of my finger against the bottom left black line of the phone I will lose bars. Usually at a rate of 1 per 5 seconds. I can easily avoid holding this area when using the screen. It’s when I’m talking on it that I experience the problem. That black line is right where my pinky finger likes to sit. So, as a result I have to move my whole hand higher or lift the pinky and look like I’m a posh twat sipping on a cup of tea. My friend Thom got the exact same model, from the exact same store, on the exact same network right before me and has experienced no issues though. So maybe it’s only on certain phones. Or maybe he’s just missing a pinky. Personally I don’t think Apple will be able to do much just by changing software. It certainly seems like a hardware issue. Despite all this it doesn’t bother me that much. I mean who uses there phone for phone calls now-a-days anyway? I’ve been on the phone for 9 minutes over the week I’ve got it and most of those calls where only to gloat. But joking aside, if your a heavy caller you’ll probably find this more of an issue than I have.

All things considered

This is a truly great phone. Reviewers are arseholes. We nitpick because it’s impossible to critique a perfect product and equally impossible to claim something to be perfect. If you’re a previous iPhone owner this will be a nice upgrade. The 4 isn’t what the 3GS was to the 3G. This is a whole new phone. And if you’re not an iPerson, now will be the perfect time to jump on the Apple ship.