I’m still using a six-year-old Apple MacBook Air M1.So I wrote about that for Stuff. This ageing laptop is not perfect. It has the odd wobble and makes its limited storage known. But that I can still run my favourite DAW (Korg Gadget) and do some of my writing on a basically silent Mac that’s never caused any major trouble is quite something. I imagine Apple will ditch support for the M1 chip sooner or later and render all those first-gen Apple Silicon Macs redundant. That will be a sad day.
The latest Stuffis out. Issue 340 (November 2026) has my interview with Laura Kidd/Penfriend and, excitingly, my Stuff column in print for the first time, along with my overview of the best tips for Apple’s latest operating systems.
I’m back in MacFormat too. Actually, I have been for a while. Anyway, MF435 includes a feature by me on repurposing Intel Macs, tutorials on DockDoor and Wakeout, and reviews of Soulver 4 and BBEdit 16. So, er, buy a copy.
Facebook has gone bonkers. I mean, even more than usual. My feed has long been crap, but the site is now desperately demanding I use its GenAI to convert seemingly random images into seemingly random styles. Also, it suggested I create a ‘celebration’ post because something I posted got over 10 reactions. I’m no expert on social media, but I’m thinking reaching double figures for a post isn’t exactly news.
Nutcases have remade OutRun in C64 PETSCII.This is totally and utterly mad. Still, a nice tribute as OutRun hits 40 (more on that here) and Sega seems pretty relaxed about this sort of thing. Want more PETSCII goodness? Check out these C64 games and – arguably even more impressive – these PET homebrew titles.
Yes, yes, it’s late this week. But if it wasn’t, a feature would have been late instead and an editor would have taken my knees. And I like my knees. Anyway…
I hate letting gear and games die.So I wrote about how iMazing and an APK extractor have let me breathe new life into old iPods while also ensuring my favourite mobile games of old can be brought back from the dead.
OutRun is 40. Sega’s classic arcade game is getting on. And – *whisper* – I never really liked it that much. Sure, it was a technical marvel and Magical Sound Shower lodged in my brain forever. But the gameplay never entirely clicked with me. OutRun 2, though? That’s the best racing game ever made. Agree? Disagree? Either way, read my piece about the entire OutRun series.
Apple upgraded all the things. iOS 27! iPadOS 27! macOS 27! hardware-Apple-Barely-Remembers-ExistsOS 27! I dutifully wrote tips on Liquid Glass, Siri AI, Photos and a bunch of other stuff.
The Portal app is rather lovely. And now it’s reached version 4, which brings a bunch of updates and an interface refresh. I wrote about it for TapSmart, which, alas, will be my final contribution to the publication. It was a good almost 14 years…
I switched to Feedbin. This wasn’t entirely by choice. But I’ve been testing (and getting really into) a Boox tablet, and I wanted to get as much of my digital reading onto it as possible. That meant RSS. The tiny snag: most Android RSS clients are bloody awful. Capy Reader is not. In fact, I’d say it’s just as good as my iOS favourite, NetNewsWire. The one snag? It only supports Feedbin, hence the switch. Still, it turns out Feedbin is rather fab. I should have switched years ago.
Minecraft went splat. In spectacular fashion. Mini-G showed me the game on her iPad. Various things were glitching. Most of the interface was invisible. I assumed it was either her iPad or just that model of iPad. Nope. It was basically all iPads, along with quite a few iPhones and a bunch of Nintendo Switch consoles too. And, yes, I did wonder if some AI shenanigans had been at play.
Retroid is having a sale. I wouldn’t usually mention that kind of thing here, but the Pocket Classic at $99 is stupidly cheap. I bought a yellow one a while back (for $149) and it’s fab.
I won’t go back to X. I’m seeing an ongoing push to encourage people back to Elon Musk’s heaving bosom. Quite a few folks in the Apple and tech space are arguing everyone should return, and many political commentators never stopped. Thing is, even if I ignored everything else about the site – and there’s a lot – it’s run by someone hurling millions of bucks at extremists in my country, demanding they push for insurrection over entirely imagined events. “But you might have more reach,” they say. Yeah, I burned that bridge long ago, when I quit the site. I took a significant hit in terms of work and connections. But it was the right thing to do. It still is.
Apple’s event was weirdly dull. Maybe I’m just getting jaded and cynical, but there was little excitement as I dutifully sat down to watch Apple’s iPhone Duo event and then smash out words about it. That wasn’t always the case. And a lot of it, for me, is down to the format. Or, rather, how Apple’s desire for control has led to it turning live events into sterile videos. More on that here.
The JVC HR-3300 is 50. Which is mildly terrifying, on the basis that I grew up with the UK version of this in the family living room. It was a beast of a machine. Check out my piece about the VHS deck that changed home entertainment forever.
I own far too many retro handhelds. Helpfully, then, Retroid announced the Pocket Duo and then kicked off its usual days-long drip-feed of information. I covered the initial reveal and what might make me buy the dual-screen handheld and then added updates when more actual facts were known.
Is AI about to kill us all? Sorry, Ian. But at least the rest of my headline was “The answer might surprise you – but, well, probably won’t”. Because it probably won’t. That’s my take on the panic that erupted last week after an AI researcher claimed there was a 10% chance AI will wipe out humanity within the next decade.
Brett C is done with AI. In fact, he was done with it last month, when he wrote about why. But I only read his post this week. It’s pretty great, not least for “I really like what Cal Newport encourages in his book Slow Productivity: work at a natural pace.” Today, everyone is obsessed with immediacy. That’s not good.
‘Xbox everywhere’ is dead. I somehow missed the news that Xbox Cloud Gaming’s most expensive tier now limits you to 15 hours of cloud streaming per month. That’s not a typo. 15 hours per month. I’d been using it now and again on smartphones. Now? No chance.
Disney are a bunch of muppets. Alas, according to Deadline, this has had a major impact on the actual Muppets, on the basis that Disney, The Muppets Studio and Point Grey Pictures are finding it difficult to land on a series premise they can agree on. Amazing. They did the special. People liked the special. Just do… more of that?
Was Lego better in the old days? Spoiler: no. My longer thoughts: here.
I like Lego, despite long having been a fully grown adult human. I’m now ‘don’t give a flying fuck about what other people think about what I enjoy’ years old. If people sneer that I like faffing about with plastic bricks and piecing together buildings, cars and miniature blocky takes on characters from Pixar movies, I don’t care.
What I do find strange, though, is a kind of ongoing grumble about how Lego was always better in the old days. Around the time I was updating my best upcoming Lego sets 2026 roundup for Stuff, I spotted a Bluesky post from someone torn about how Lego is a great antithesis for kids on screen and helps people be creative, yet generates “an absolute shit-ton of unnecessary plastic”. That inevitably led to people complaining that Lego isn’t creative anymore, because people just buy massive and expensive display sets rather than huge boxes of bricks.
I’m (fortunately) not old enough to remember the dawn of Lego, but I do have fond memories of growing up with it during the 1980s. And here’s the thing: I and most other people I knew started with sets for building specific things, rather than massive piles of bricks. But I’d often dismantle my sets and make whatever I fancied with the pile of plastic rubble I’d made. And that’s pretty much the case today. It’s just bollocks to argue that no one builds creatively with Lego anymore. My kid did for years. Plenty of adults do too, as anyone who’s ever visited a Lego show will know.
Sure, there’s a tendency towards display sets when people age. But that’s also… OK? I don’t think it’s any worse to spend £100 on a dust catcher for a shelf that you put together yourself rather than a roughly equivalent pre-made ornament. Moreover, that Lego is still Lego. It will last for decades and – if the current owner feels like it – can at any time be turned into something new. (And if your response to that is something something specialist parts, maybe take a look at how the inventive folks at Lego reuse even the most seemingly specific of parts.)
That’s not to say Lego (the brand) is perfect. Nor is Lego the toy. But I do suspect an awful lot of adults banging on about how Lego isn’t as good as it was back in their day are parping their nostalgia horn rather than being objective about how a toy is used by the bulk of its target market and the sheer quality and range of sets available today.
Apple Intelligence isn’t great. I know: shocker. But I’ve spent a fair bit of time with it of late, for mag work. It’ll be interesting to see how it shakes out in terms of people’s expectations. But experiments over the past month or so have just added to my scepticism about consumer-facing AI.
The revamped Clean Up feature in Photos varies wildly, regardless of the new ‘High Quality’ option. Reframing images is mostly abysmal beyond very slight changes. Automated shortcut creation is fine if the result works. It often doesn’t. The revamped Siri is an improvement insofar as it no longer mostly directs you to Safari or ChatGPT. But, as I expected, it’s no more accurate than a typical consumer-facing LLM. Which means when Shortcuts screws up, don’t expect Siri to help you fix things rather than giving you plausible sounding slop.
Obviously, I wasn’t personally expecting better. All this stuff is varying degrees of smoke and mirrors. But carefully stage-managed demos from tech giants set certain expectations for the average user – and I’m not sure they’re going to be met.
Sony’s PlayStation is back. But this time you have to build it yourself out of 1,911 Lego pieces. Entertaining, also, that this new Lego kit echoes Sony’s current thinking in not giving you a disc. (It has little dioramas inside instead.)
Speaking of Sony,Game File reported on a recent court filing in which the gaming giant claims it’s already obvious digital games aren’t owned by consumers. The company argues “reasonable consumers would not be misled” into thinking they own the games they pay for, on the basis terms and conditions state software is “licensed to you, not sold”.
According to Game File, Sony also bizarrely adds that people buying a digital game inherently understand they can’t own it because, if they did, no one else could have a copy. I guess all those digital games (and albums and books and comics) I’ve bought, downloaded and now own are just figments of my imagination.
Identity verification is broken, according to a Gizmodo report. The reason? 153 million driver’s licences are up for sale. Gizmodo’s not wrong. And so many people in tech said this is precisely what would happen when politicians screamed THINK OF THE CHILDREN when actually thinking of how age-gating might play with a certain portion of the voter pool. A pity they didn’t think more about what happens when everyone has to upload identity documents to access an increasingly wide range of websites.
MapQuest vs Trump is the, er, map-based story of the week. President Orange decided to ‘rename’ Lake Ontario, on the basis it would annoy Canada. The new name? Lake America, on the basis he has precisely no imagination. Most of the world sighed. But US tech giants dutifully got in line and updated their maps within the US to be Trump-friendly. Google was first. Apple then capitulated after a few days of goodwill towards the company. Microsoft did the same. MapQuest… didn’t. And, as The Guardian reports, it’s now gained a lot of new users.
Danny Boyle and AI, sitting in a tree. I didn’t see this one coming, but Boyle confirmed his new film uses GenAI. Deadline reported that Ink uses it to reanimate old images of the Kray brothers and Margaret Thatcher. Because, you know, there’s no other way that could possibly have been done without GenAI. Never before have we seen old images animated on the screen.
What’s even more bizarre about this is Boyle then saying that the “danger with the tech giants and their AI is that they will be able to replace journalism. They’ll be able to have an AI journalist who’s much more efficient, cheaper, etcetera, ecetera, and will that AI journalist speak truth to the power that created it?”
I mean, he’s not wrong. But there’s also a danger in, say, seasoned filmmakers deciding to use GenAI and therefore further normalising it, thereby putting people in the creative industries out of jobs. (See also: Eurogamer’s strangely casual dismissal of Crazy Taxi’s AI use.)
I just watched Coyote vs ACME. I had high hopes for the movie, not least after how Warner Bros. tried to kill it as a tax write-off. It’s a great shame that it hasn’t performed amazingly at the box office so far, because the film is a lot of fun and, as Mark Kermode said in his review, not only has a plot that properly fills its run-time, but real moments of emotional heft and pathos. Also, do check out the AMA with Wile E Coyote – and especially this wonderful interaction.
