Published stuff

Two AI articles this week. For Stuff, I wrote about smartphone photography and Halide’s new Process Zero in Why I’m excited about an anti-AI iPhone camera app that does less, not more. And for TapSmart, I looked at apps that give you AI on any iPhone or iPad right now.

Outside of AI, I wrote up an iPhone toolkit for minimising distractions, griped about the lack of sort options in the iOS 18 Home Screen, and checked out the best upcoming Lego sets. 

Other stuff: new music and old covid

Last week, I caught covid for the first time. I’m still isolating. Day nine now. I’ll take another test this afternoon, but still expect it to be positive. I’m… so over this. And it’s increasingly depressing to be away from my family and confined to a room. But it is what it is. At least neither my wife nor my daughter have caught covid from me. And isolation did spur me on to release a new piece of music for the first time in over a decade. You can listen to Where I Want To Be on YouTube. (I’m pretty happy with that bass line. A good reminder of why I need to write more music with actual instruments, rather than prodding at a screen. Anyway…)

If nothing else, catching covid has also been a reality check. My wife mentioned my covid to our elderly neighbour, who looked shocked and asked how I managed to catch it, as if I’d made a special effort to do so. Friends who’ve caught it recently say they’ve had similar responses from people. In the UK at least, it’s as if covid doesn’t exist, despite us just having had the biggest wave in a long time.

Worse, our medical service has no interest whatsoever in helping anyone who’s not ‘at risk’. So while I hear from people in the US and Switzerland who received medication and boosters in recent years, in the UK it’s a case of “take a couple of paracetamol and hope you can shake it off in a couple of weeks”. Oh, and no boosters again for the majority of the population this autumn either (unless you can find somewhere to buy one, for the first time), because the way to stop covid is still apparently to have people repeatedly catch covid. Bonkers.

Heaven help us if a more dangerous disease ever sweeps this country.