Published stuff

Things started to get festive over at TapSmart, with my feature on Christmas Day apps. I also added the superb White Noise+ to my classic apps series.

For Stuff, I wrote about another Quarter Arcades unit – the superb Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I managed to hold myself from yelling COWABUNGA! Just. But I did have enough shoutiness left for ‘Dumb things my iPhone does (and that I do) that could be fixed by AI’. Which attentive readers might spot is a cunning way to air a few choice iPhone gripes. Ho ho ho.

Upcoming stuff

On the home straight now, with just a couple of articles left to file before I collapse in a heap for a week and change. So upcoming stuff for me will mostly be not writing anything much, building lots of Lego with my kid, playing with a diminutive TMNT cabinet, and sorting a new vault for my old digital files.

Which to me sounds like bliss after the insanely busy December I’ve had.

Other stuff

Some weird tech things walloped me in the face this week. The first was Pocket. I’ve used this read-later system since it was called Read It Later. I’ve hundreds of articles stashed in it. And now I’m locked out. Not sure why.

Two lessons from this so far. The first is that this is a rare case where I had no backup/data recovery system in place. Clearly, I needed one. The second is Mozilla’s support system is comically awful. The first response I got misunderstood the problem. And then when I tried to reply, anything I sent was bounced as spam. Since then, Mozilla has hassled me with a follow-up request. I’m hoping this resolves well, but won’t hold my breath.

The silver lining: Alfread. If you’ve not heard of that app, it gamifies read-later. The interface is like a dating app, where you swipe left/right. And in only ever showing a single article, it forces focus on your to-read pile. But also, I discovered it has a cache. Which means every article I added until I last opened Alfread (on 4 December) might still be accessible. Although there’s no way to export them somewhere else, they at least are not lost.

Still: fume. Mozilla is not in my good books. Also not in my good books: everyone on social media banging on that X is evil and that anyone still posting there is a nazi.

Look, I get it: Musk is awful. Many of the people on X are awful. I myself last posted there on 26 August, after having quit semi-regularly posting during July. But I would have thought one of the lessons the X fiasco would have taught us is to have more empathy and kindness.

There are all kinds of reasons why people continue to post on X, related to friendship circles, keeping alive independent businesses, and so on. But many people elsewhere – and especially on Threads – appear to now be on a moral crusade to damn anyone still on X.

Frankly, given that most people’s reasons for still posting on X are convenience and larger audiences, it’s a bit bloody rich of folk on Threads in particular to scream morals when posting on a Zuckerberg platform rather than Mastodon, not least given that their reasons for not using Mastodon are typically, yep, lack of convenience and lack of larger audiences. (Naturally, I got called a nazi by more than one person for this viewpoint.)

Perhaps everyone just needs a bit of end-of-year downtime. I know I do.