I wasn't going to write anything today. When driving home after work, I had decided against it because I've had a busy week so far and just wanted to relax and watch football. Arriving home, I soon discovered we had no internet and no TV. Our provider, Virgin Media, were having issues, and we were one of thousands affected by the outage.

No big deal. At least for me, my son likes to watch a bit of gaming YouTube before dinner and Lucie loves her Cocomelon, but it's not the end of the world. It's not like we don't enjoy each other's company or anything. Best to double-check the service status and see what's going on. That's when I strayed into the worst Twitter thread I have seen in a while.

Scrolling through, it's hard to work out if the whole thing is some kind of joke I am not in on. Stinking to high heaven of entitlement, all because of an issue that means they can't watch TV. No one is really put out, but don't you dare take away their telly programmes! I haven’t seen anything quite like it, and Twitter is a pretty crappy place. The replies and entitlement would be annoying if it wasn't so hysterical.

The thing is, that could be any of us. We live in one of the best times in history. With long lives to live. Well, if this damn virus stops trying to kill us, with very few real problems. Most of us live in nice warm homes with internet access (well how else are you reading this) and live a life of true privilege.

It’s dead easy to take all this for granted. Letting your ego run amok. Leading you to act as if the whole world owes you something. It is a constant risk. Taking a step back and looking at the much bigger picture is important every time something like this crops up. It’s much better for you to think though things fully because scrubbing those entitled tweets from the internet might be harder than you think.

For as long as my daughter Lucie has been with us, my sleep has been disturbed. The first weeks of broken slumber that are supposed to gradually reduce are still with us 11 years later. Her genetic condition means she suffers with several disabilities, but also seems to have the superpower of needing very little rest.

The nights and early morning I am awake are a burden. One I must carry for life, with no solution available (seriously, we have tried everything). Dependably, I am awake on average 5 nights from 7 at 3 or 4 am, sometimes much easier. Where most people suffer from sleep deprivation because of their choices, be it screen addiction or fixation on hustling, I would love to sleep more.

The weird thing is, on the occasional days Lucie does sleep until a reasonable time, I miss it. Not the headaches or the chronic tiredness, but the extra time. The early morning runs and the work completed at silly times of the night are a giant bonus. When I only have a ‘normal’ number of hours to use up, I run out of them far too quickly.

How on earth are we supposed to fit all this in. In 24 hours we need to sleep for 8, are expected to work for at least 8, leaving only 8 left. Just 8 short hours to do all the things that we need to do. Eating, washing, dressing, housework, commuting, and you know actually do things we enjoy. The modern world is broken, and it is no wonder lack of sleep is such an epidemic.

I am in a much better place if I just steal a few hours of sleep and use them for something else. Of course, my health isn’t it's literally killing me, but my enjoyment improves. The world is a much quieter place at 4 am, and I love it.

Joshua Ginter’s thoughts on publishing every day:

There are nights where you just want to veg and play video games rather than throwing something together for the blog. There are times when you don’t have a fully formed opinion and you sort of puke it out into existence. Or you create filler pieces to get through a few days.

This whole piece covers some of the thoughts that have been floating around in my head since publishing more often. I thought about posting something similar later on this week but Josh does this far more eloquently than I would. So I thought I might as well throw some of my own words behind his.

When I first set my goal to publish every weekday for a month I had loads to go at. Ideas were flowing and at one point I had 4 days worth of posts ready to go. This gave me some runway to slow down a little and let thoughts arrive, and of course, they arrived less and less as the days went by. So as I got closer to days where nothing was sat in my ideas tray I began to feel the pressure. Rather than writing when I had something to say, I wrote because I had to say something.

Some posts I am proud of, some not so much, but I have learnt a lot along with way. My practice of writing every day is years old at this point (most of my words are just for me) but it helps me get ideas straight in my mind. Writing blog posts is no different. I often start with a small idea, pull on that thread and it evolves into something new, and often interesting.

I love thinking about things and blogging is me doing that in public. It gets tiring giving yourself pressures and goals, so I will slow down, but I still want to keep the momentum going somewhat as I love doing it.

If you’re a bit sad like me, one of the most interesting features of iOS 15 is Focus Mode. Bringing some much-needed updates to do not disturb that went before it, and also making your phone much more customisable in different situations.

Unfortunately, it is a first-gen product if ever I have seen one. Being overly confusing, and actually a bit complicated to understand. My biggest help in diving in to this was Matt Birchler’s excellent walk through video. This allowed me to get mine set up in three different scenarios.

Home

This set up was the easiest to implement as it represents pretty much where my phone was in ‘normal’ mode. Taking the regular set-up screens and making all the apps I have installed available. What Focus mode allows me to do now is remove the use of my work email app, and also make work people not able to contact me outside work time.

Now I am even less tempted to check me email, and also any rogue calls or text that creep through sometimes on days off are no loner an issue. This did take a lot of tweaking over a few days to get the contacts right, it would be great to see Apple do a bit of work on this, but it’s a good starting point.

Automation features allow me to switch this on effortlessly. I am in ‘Home’ whenever I finish working hours (early morning/evening) and all weekends.

Do Not Disturb

The best mode! Very similar to the DND I had set up previously but even more powerful. I have all apps restricted and only a very select few people can contact me (close family).

Due to being able to use different home screens at different times, I have put in a nice dark wall paper and made my screen empty using a fake black icon with MacStories Icon Creator Shortcut. This mode is active at night and whenever I am in meetings using Smart Activation.

Work

Any other time I am not home, I am working, so it needs it own mode. This mode removes all needless distractions and helps me work deeper. Bringing my task list and flagged emails in front of my face at every opportunity.

I love the location automation here that turns this on whenever I arrive at my office. Unfortunately, it doesn’t turn off if I leave, meaning that I had to use the ‘Home mode” switching at times outside working hours. I feel like I could go further with this set up, but it is fitting in very well and removing quite a bit of distraction from my day.

Improvements

My biggest take way from doing this is the surprising realisation on how unapproachable this feature is. It is both the best and worst new featured added in iOS 15. Due to this overly complicated UX, I would wager that most people won’t even try to understand it, which is a real shame. Outside this, there are a few things I would like to see.

Lists

The first being implementing lists of contacts. It gets quite messy having to add in all the people who can notify you. Adding in custom lists would help no end, or simply being able to select a few contacts that cannot contact you rather than having to add in everyone else.

Icons

The icons on the Home Screen bug me more than a little, as they also display on my Apple Watch. Being able to add in restrictions to the ‘normal mode’ would help with this. There is no way to have a mode for every other situation, but also add in restrictions to apps and contacts.

Syncing

I love the way that this feature syncs across devices, but it’s all or nothing. Adding in selective sync or perhaps even a feature to only display notification on some devices and not others would be a massive improvement. I don’t mind being tapped on my watch, or something silently appearing on my phone screen at work, but don’t want it popping up on my Mac.

If this post prompts you to dive in and get something set up, then I would love you to share it with me. I think I can go further with this, but it took me so long to understand the feature and then set it up, I am reluctant to fiddle too much. Don’t let that put you off though, give it a go and see if you can improve your phone.

During one of our many meandering chats, my wife and I were talking about her phone. She’s using an iPhone 11 and although there is nothing wrong with it, the phone has seen better days and the battery is not what it should be. We were discussing if she wanted to upgrade to something better, and her response is something well worth thinking about.

Her approach was, “I’ve never gone to do something and not been able to do it, or had an issue that a new phone would solve”. As with many things we talk about, this gave me lots to think about. How many times have I purchased tech on the promise of it helping me do something that I’ve never even thought about doing.

This can’t just be me. A brand promises me that “feature x allows me to y” and I am all in without even thinking. The fact that I have never even tried to do Y means that maybe I don’t need this new thing after all.

Undoubtedly, there are exceptions to this. New features that enable users to do even more can be valuable editions. However, that is seldom the case for me. I look at other lenses for my camera and think, oh that smaller f/stop will mean I can shoot in even darker conditions, or with even better separation. When in the truth is a lens with a larger aperture has never stopped me getting the shot I want.

Buying a new phone every year is my biggest weakness. I tell myself that the upgrades are worth it. That the things I value get better, and then proceed to never look at my photos and don’t use my phone enough to actually make it worthwhile. Sure enough, I have never gone to do something with my phone and not been able to. A new phone might do some things better, but what am I actually missing out on? Not much.

Arthur C Brooks brings the fire to make you understand that No One Cares

If I wouldn’t invite someone into my house, I shouldn’t let them into my head.

I highlighted far too much of this article to share, the quotable things just kept coming. So I had to go back and read it again, just to make sure I got the real feel of the words on the page, and found it quite revealing.

To discover something that Marcus Aurelius observed almost 2,000 years ago that applies perfectly to todays worries is quite shocking to me. “We all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own,” should be a waring post on social media. Why worry about what others are thinking when you should really be worrying about yourself?

Because it feels very personal when we feel socially harmed, even if that is only perceived. Our brains are made for < 150 person groups of gatherers, not thousands of people online so it's important to remember that there is no need to worry about what others think, because in actual fact they don't care.

Many years ago, I think my blog was on Medium, I wrote a post with the same title. It has been lost to digital rot, but my thoughts are the same as they were. The importance of feeling and touching things in a world filled full of apps and devices can’t be forgotten. There is nothing that comes close. Holding books in your hand, turning the pages of a magazine, the process of picking up and examining a purchase before deciding is just impossible to beat.

The argument against this of course is a kind of sudo minimalism. Not having to put up with ‘things’ is often a much better solution. Who wants loads of book lying around that you are not going to read again? What on earth do you do with used up notebooks or journals? If a digital service can replace these things, and remove the hassle of them hanging around once spent, then it could be a much better solution for some. In today's modern world there is an app for everything, but I can’t feel anything about a bit of code.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my Kindle. Well, I love an E-Reader, I hate that the best solution is a Kindle. It allows me to read several books at once and carry around something so small and light I barely know it’s there. Yet, I never feel the bookiness that my heart desires. With a physical copy of someone's words, I feel like I own it, rather than renting it from Amazon until my devices breaks. Using digital services in many situations make sense, but an E-Book never feels like I am reading a book. It feels like I am staring at another screen.

For the risk of sounding a bit out there, and picking things that the modern world seems to have lost its love for, the same must be said for writing. Journaling, or note-taking, is one of my favourite things to do. I just love scribbling things down, even in my terrible scrawl it feels fantastic. I can make the case for digital journals to a certain extent because they offer something more secure and easy to keep, but holding a pen and feeling it scratch on paper makes my heart sing.

All the algorithms and cleverness in the world from things like Obsidian can't replace me writing things down and forgetting about them later. Reading an incredible page turner of a novel doesn't feel the same swiping on a screen. I don’t buy books, of course, only a few reman from purchasing them in days gone by. Journals and notebooks no longer litter my house, replaced by apps and services because they just make more sense in the modern world — but that doesn’t mean I can’t yearn for something more tactile.

When I got my first big break in my working life, it was for a giant corporation with a robust training regime. If you’ve never had the miss fortune of having to jump through these hoops, consider yourself lucky. Whilst they are mainly built sincerely, and at least instil in your staff base the same basic level of competency, they often suck.

Sales training was the worst. Someone, I presume years ago, had read far too many psychology books and put together a plan you could not deviate from. They handed out a massive dossier to learn that boiled down to “if the customer says X, you say Y” in as many situations they could come up with. So, I learnt it, went on my way and tried as hard as I could to regurgitate the manual as frequently as I could.

I had no choice in this, secret shoppers were another dirty trick of this company, so you felt like a robot at all times. Let me tell you, I sucked. I sold next to nothing and struggled so much I felt like quitting. Until one day I was so fed up with feeling like this I decided I was going to leave, so I talked to every customer ‘normally’ and my sales took off.

Don’t get me wrong, after months of spouting the lines some of them still come out, but they felt more natural because I was taking to people as myself, not just going through the company motions. People stopped looking at me like I was trying to sell them something, and they bought something from me instead.

I realised at that point that my problem was that I was not being true to myself. I didn’t believe in what the company was telling me to say, and that is straightforward to spot from the outside. You can’t fake it until you make it if you’re not even sure you want to — and this applies to so much else.

As I wrote about a few days ago, I didn’t really want to make technology videos, I went through the motions and made some because I thought that's what I was supposed to do. They sucked. I expanded from writing and talking about technology into another field that I have seen others do without actually wanting to. I went through the motions without thinking about what I was doing, as if I were following instruction on “how to build a brand”.

How many other things in life do we go through the motions without our heart being in it. The results of which will be nowhere near those that result from proper motivation. These sorts of ill-fitting ideas are preached in far too many mediums to those looking to get rich or build something. I have lost count of the times I have seen headlines similar to “Follow these easy steps, and you too can be as rich as me” or “check out the morning routine of this billionaire”.

The idea being that massive results are as easy as going through these steps. There are sometimes you have to buckle down and go through the motions, but very few where you should expect a net positive result.

There is nothing more annoying that technology not working the way it should do, without any fix. Well, maybe there is, but this is me we’re talking about, and I’m pretty neurotic about these types of issues. I have been battling being able to log in to third-party Twitter clients for ages and have finally stumbled on a fix.

This will also address some issues with using Twitter to sign in on other services. Some users have issues not from a third party client but simply sharing to Twitter from elsewhere. The error in question has no code, no help, but lots of hassle. When trying to log in to Twitter, it displays “Nothing to see here”.

Upon some cursory Googling, it seems that only iOS users suffer from these issues. Perhaps Android just handles these things better, let’s be honest, iOS can be user hostile when it comes to many web things. Solving them sometimes a puzzle in comparison to more user-friendly solves from Google.

The answer thankfully seems to be simple, if impossible to find, so here you are following my guide.

Option One

The first thing to try, and the one with the least aggravation, is to try your email instead of your username. Seems to sort out some issues, but failed to be the answer to my prayers. This is the fix that most third-party apps suggest, along with turning off two-factor authentication, signing in and then turning it back on again. Give it a go first.

Option Two

You’re going to have to purge all the Twitter web information from your device. This is the likely culprit and unfortunately, when compared to macOS or literally any other operating system, it is all or nothing. There is no option to only clear Twitter related data.

Head into your setting, go to Safari, and tap on ‘Clear history and website data’. This should resolve the “Nothing To See Here” appearing after putting in your login details. Allowing you to log in to a new app or authorise a secondary service.