Ack. Nearly forgot this week. Anyway: onwards!

Published stuff

Over at Stuff, I wrote X marks the rot. Don’t buy into Elon Musk’s lifelong crusade. My point: an everything app is the last thing we need from a company that can’t be trusted. My implementation: initially dipping into a terrifying future where your life depends on giving Elon Musk a daily X. Yikes.

For TapSmart, I added Device 6 to my classic apps list. Nothing else has for me ever matched this app’s combination of writing, design, style, smarts and full-on touchscreen integration (including some very meta elements). I also wrote about some of the new meaningful sharing features coming to iOS 17.

Upcoming stuff

I spent much of last week buried in a big feature for Stuff that digs into top hardware and services from the magazine’s lifetime. It’s always interesting to revisit tech from a decade or two ago that was revolutionary at the time, but that would be meaningless today.

I particularly fondly remember our Toppy (Topfield PVR). This let us pause TV (handy, since our then puppy always wanted to go for a wee when a show started) and record two channels while watching a third. But even better: it was customisable. You could replace the entire UI and do pretty much whatever you wanted with the device. I miss that kind of flexibility; but I don’t miss TV that requires any kind of planning. On-demand suits me. It is the way.

Other stuff

July in the UK is taking it out of me. I’ve elsewhere described our weather this year as follows:

  • January: January
  • February: February
  • March: March
  • April: March
  • May: March
  • June: July, but imported from Spain
  • July: April

It looks like August is going to be just as grim as July. Cool. Grey. Dull. Obviously, that’s better than the nightmare happening in Southern Europe, but combined with all the horrifying graphs about climate change I’ve seen online, it’s getting me down. I don’t feel like myself right now, and I’m struggling to figure out how to right that.

I did at least get to the second day of Digitiser’s 30th anniversary, in an attempt to cheer myself up a bit. Digitiser was a daily games magazine on Teletext in the UK. To say it had irreverent humour is putting it mildly. The games industry hated it. The traditional publishing industry hated it even more. Readers loved it. The mag was relentlessly fun and creative.

The 30th was a live event, drawing more from what Digitiser has morphed into as a YouTube channel than its games history, although a follow-up to the original Digitiser The Show is now in the works.

Anyway, it was all very silly, with everyone having an awful lot of fun on stage. A little ray of sunshine in a country that has too little of that right now.