Walking in Silence

Have you ever developed new habits or changed existing ones without realising it? There isn’t an abrupt shift, but rather a gradual evolution in your subconscious mind. You suddenly ‘wake up’ to this change with a sense of surprise. This realisation hit me today when I went for my daily walk with my dog and my headphones died. I’m not even sure when I began to wear them for my walks, but their sudden absence made me acutely aware of my new routine.

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Essay

25 Nov 2023

My Big Flip Phone Failure

I have been trying to write this post for a very long time. Trying to outline my experiment of using a flip phone again because it is the culmination of a few years of wanting to try it, knowing I can’t and then slowly walking myself back from the edge. This time my wife pushed me over the edge with words along the line of “stop talking about it and do it” with comical results and some realisations along the way.

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Essay

22 Nov 2023

The Search For A New Interface

There are numerous tech things I am intentionally quiet about. Not because I don’t have thoughts about them, but because I would rather not add to the noise of initial emotion blog posts and hot takes. The Humane AI Pin was one of those things, and while I don’t see it catching on, I think it is a fascinating device because of what it signals. For years now, technology commentators have been theorising on what comes after the smartphone.

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Essay

18 Nov 2023

🔗 Apple’s flavor of RCS won’t support Google’s encryption extension

According to a report from TechRadar, Apple won’t adopt proprietary extensions like the one made by Google that adds end-to-end encryption to RCS. Instead, Apple intends to work with the GSMA to add encryption to the RCS Universal Profile.

RCS is already a fragmented mess.

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17 Nov 2023

The Walls That Keep Me In

I spotted an interesting post by Nick Heer this morning while catching up (also, you should be reading his blog; it’s great). He presents the idea that sometimes hardware is as much of a barrier to switching platforms as software is, which is often overlooked by those considering doing so. The barrier to switching from, say, an iPhone to Android is usually thought to be software — iMessage, for instance, comes up frequently.

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Essay

15 Nov 2023

🔗 Humane pins its hopes on AI - by Casey Newton - Platformer

employees stressed to me the convenience of not having to dig a device out of their pocket to perform quick tasks. The pin has a speaker of its own and connects to headphones and earbuds via Bluetooth, making it an ideal computer for bike rides or just walking around town, they told me.

Just like… a smartwatch?

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13 Nov 2023

🔗 Meta’s doing another referral traffic bait-and-switch

I know for a fact that to do well on algorithmic platforms you have to make content in the particular way a platform wants you to. And I like what I do here in Garbage Day and I like how I do it. I don’t particularly want to eat ice cream out of a toilet bowl for views.

That what I said!

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13 Nov 2023

Bear Notes Turns 7!

As I wrote about twice in the preceding days, I use Apple Notes for everything, but I always keep an eye on, and test the new features of Bear. So I’d like to share a few thoughts on its recent updates and the celebration of its seventh anniversary. The past year has brought notable changes, including their 2.0 update, and the improvements coming look fascinating. Bear 2 launched in July with significant updates including tables, nested styles, pinned tags, and quite a bit more.

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Essay

10 Nov 2023

Coffee Shop Adventures vol2

After a full morning of running around in the head office and helping everyone out, I needed to get out and catch up on things, but didn’t want to go home. So I went on the next instalment of coffee shop adventures and stopped off for a Black Forest Hot Chocolate on the way back. There’s no quaint little coffee establishment this time. It is a full-on capitalist franchise, Costa Coffee.

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Essay

10 Nov 2023

My Homescreen

Since sharing some thoughts on the default apps blogging trend yesterday, I have had a few emails from some people, which is always nice, asking about even the few apps I did highlight. So I thought I would concede that perhaps even my setup might be interesting and share my homescreen for the first time since 2021. I don’t like to have many apps on my actual homescreen, as that tends to prompt me into usage that I don’t want to have.

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10 Nov 2023