Summer happened. It was on Thursday. Spring before. Autumn now.

Published stuff

Over at Stuff, I wrote What is X, why does Elon Musk want an everything app, and why did Twitter have to die? Technically, it’s an X explainer. (An X-plainer?) But, erm, I may have added snark.

This week’s column is: Packing tech for your summer holiday? Hell-o-day, more like. Which has me reminisce about watching the top third of an in-flight movie while surrounded by smoke, and then moving to modern-day trips, where there’s less smoke, more screens, and – surprisingly – just as much ‘Tetris’ packing.

For TapSmart, I wrote about why Apple should take OS parity seriously and macOS Sonoma features I want on iPhone and iPad.

Other stuff

Despite having had two days off this week, I’m knackered. Primarily because the days off involved packing in summer holiday things for the youngling, in the final days before our Merlin pass runs out. On Thursday, we were at a weirdly empty Chessington. Today: London. All good. But I’m now apparently Gets Tired Too Easily years old, and also Knee Randomly Goes Sproing On London Bridges years old. Tsk.

One major plus this week was that our Chessington trip aligned precisely with the south of England’s ‘summer’. It lasted one day and was glorious. Given that we’d planned the trip weeks in advance, I felt grateful. But I do imagine I’m going to head into autumn feeling robbed about this year’s non-summer. I’ll take it over the horrors of fires and such in the south of Europe, but as someone who has trouble with lack of light, I’m already feeling the evenings drawing in. And there have been so few bright ones this year.