Pain, pain, go away, (don’t come) again another day.

Published stuff

This week for Stuff, I write about the latest wearable on the street: Humane’s AI Pin won’t replace your smartphone – but I think phones should steal its best ideas. I also reviewed Apple’s new flagship laptop and may have had a hand in Stuff’s 2023 mobile app and game of the year awards.

Over TapSmart way, I delved into my favourite StandBy widgets.

Upcoming stuff

I’m currently putting the M3 iMac through its paces, while cursing that Steam’s overlay apparently no longer seems to work. (This after last week in discovering the widgets system in iOS is still flaky as hell, although at least an iPhone restart was all it took to get new ones to show up. But seriously, Apple, why doesn’t this work better?)

Other stuff

As I wrote about in my Apple Watch Series 9 review, I had a bad fall on holiday. At least nothing’s broken was my thought at the time. I’m now wondering if things were broken, just not badly; because everything still hurts. Although perhaps that’s just getting older. (If things don’t improve soon, I’ll ask about an X-Ray, but the state of the local NHS services now is such that our local surgery sent out an email inferring they don’t want to hear from anyone unless they’re basically dying.)

My HomeKit issues from two weeks ago resolved. All it took was going to Spain. During that time, Steam Guard also stopped being useless. So my default tech fix recommendation to everyone now is – if you can afford to – go for a week’s holiday. Maybe that won’t fix your problem, but at least you’ll have a nice break.

Finally, my iMac helpfully informed me it doesn’t have enough space to hold my entire photos collection. Which isn’t that big. And yet the Mac has a 1TB SSD. Turns out I have a lot of junk stored. And everywhere else.

I have a ‘paranoid’ back-up system. I run Time Machine on my iMac. Weekly clones to SSD, to two drives that I swap. Ongoing Backblaze. And when I change my main computer or upgrade to a major new OS, I take and store a full clone. So I have multiple copies of anything important. But can I get to them? Can I heck.

So my next problem during a magical period when I actually have free time is to figure out a local ‘archive’ (or, as friend and ex-colleague Chris Phin refers to it, ‘vault’ – which is much better). I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do as yet. I’ve had various recommendations, from full-on Synology systems to buying a Mac mini and plugging drives into it. I quite like the second of those, because it’d give me redundancy if the iMac conks out.

More thought needed.