tin.fish

Well.  This is not the month I expected to be having, how about you?  Some chap in Hubei decides he fancies bat for tea, lets the bat sneeze in his mouth or something before he pops it in the microwave and boom - you got yourself a movie-quality pandemic on your hands. What happened next varies for everyone.  To use the popular wartime rhetorics, the war against coronavirus was also a million tiny battles.  The battle to keep the small business open, to keep the community safe, to get a supermarket delivery slot. Billions of people discovered who they really were overnight.  Stripped of the comfort of normality, the spirit laid bare, they did what came naturally.  Some got in contact with neighbours they had never spoken to before and threw up support networks immediately.  People dropped their political views and agendas and began conforming to instruction for the common good.  Social media (the megaphone for the worst) became the tendril th...

Damn it.  As a parent, I find myself unable to refresh my Apple tech yet again.  It seems the iPhone target figure is £1,000 and that's just absurd money for incremental functionality gains.  I was tempted by an Apple Watch refresh but, having seen my Series 3 is worth £50 trade-in, that's a lot of watch for not a lot of residual value.  iPad is essentially the same. An iPhone8, AppleWatch3 and iPad Air2 will do me for another year.

Problem Statement Worst case scenario: our emissions are cooking the planet.     Every commute and cow fart is melting a polar bear’s back yard just a little more and he’s pissed off but mainly hungry - and they are higher up the food chain than us.     Sea levels are rising and we may lose Scunthorpe.     Scunthorpe !     Whales are gagging on coke bottles and dildos and coral reefs are being boiled, threatening the gap year tourism plans of about 30,000 students per annum.

Notes for becoming a more tolerant human. (Total work in progress though lol)

I’m putting a lot of work into Notifications to make sure they are effective for notifying me of stuff, without becoming something valueless that I ultimately ignore.  It’s a slippery slope and I think the key is going to be just managing and considering notifications habitually and also regarding each individual notification on its merit.   I guess the idea is to be guided to the phone less and have the time on the phone the highest possible value. Laptop Minimal notifications to hold focus.  There is nothing worse than a popup or banner when you're right in the middle of something. DnD is your friend.  Use it when you need to concentrate.  Perhaps align them to Pomodoro sessions? Review notifications at the end of a DnD window.   Make it clear when you use DnD via status messages that you're not available. Tablet No notifications!  This is a device for reading or writing and and time here should be sacrosanct. iPh...

I have a friend - actually that’s an overstatement right away.  Let me start again. So there’s this douche. He and his lady wife brought another lady into their relationship some time ago.  I guess it’s important to get such taboos dealt with early on if you are so inclined and I dare say this makes them progressive.  This new squeeze was called Alexa and she seemed to be the answer to so many questions.  The wise girl who knew exactly how old the oldest person in the world was; who could pop the bedroom lights on to an inviting hue before the three of them retired to bed; who could be custodian of the shopping list and the DJ over Spotify.  When my friend asked Alexa a question when she, in fact, was not there, it had become clear that so pervasive was her influence on their lives that it was assumed she was always present. In my life, there was Siri.  My non-gender-binary assistant essentially faced off my home automation.  Lights on, he...