Published stuff

Over at TapSmart, I dig into the good, the bad and the ugly of Apple and AI, messaging apps for iPhone and the best Apple TV apps.

My column for Stuff this week: Dumb phones and smart rings won’t help when I need a tech detox. Aka I’m starting to bristle at the notion that to use tech less, we need more tech. No. We just need to know when to put something down.

Other stuff

I have two guilt piles. The first is my eBay pile, which now takes up the entire space under an office desk. And a huge box in a cupboard that we do not speak of. And half a dozen boxes of comics in the garage. This… is not great. And also an excellent example of what happens when I lose eBay momentum.

The bigger guilt pile is the ‘read pile’. Books. Comics. Magazines. I buy a lot of collectible graphic novels and interesting non-fiction titles in print (rather than digital). Beyond that, I buy print magazines, including Wired, Stuff, Retro Gamer and Blocks. And, it turns out, they increase in number when they’re not read. Who knew?

However, while reading through the latest Blocks, I realised I have ‘magazine completism’. I know I should zip over things that don’t interest me. But I feel duty bound to read the things from cover to cover. I suspect this is a manifestation of whatever flavour of OCD I have, which is mostly geared around “but what if I miss this important thing?” (So: I’ll check the front door more times than is strictly necessary, let’s say, in case I somehow missed that it wasn’t locked, thereby leading to nefarious types cleaning us out. Reader: that door has never not been locked on my returning to check it again. And again. Sigh.)

This isn’t ideal, because the pile grows faster than I can get through it. Just as well I don’t have the symmetry/orderliness aspect of OCD, or I’d be really done for. On the bright side, I’m squeezing every last drop of value out of these magazines, and so that’s something.