Published stuff

My column this week is: Now winter’s drawing in, the gadget I most care about is a sunrise alarm clock. I’ve known for years I have have a form of SAD, and that means mornings are tough when it’s dark when I get up. So this column is my love letter to niche tech that deserves no love. Because although it’s effective, it seems uniformly designed by people who don’t understand actual humans use technology. 

Other than that, it was a week of Apple. I reviewed the new iPad mini (“a mini update in almost every sense”) for Stuff, and over at TapSmart mulled that it went ‘Pro’ but not in the way I was hoping. (I also updated my iPad guide.)

For Stuff, I also checked out the iPhone 16 Plus (“The iPhone you’d pick last for your team”), while TapSmart got a round-up of 20 cracking single-purpose iPhone apps.

Other stuff

The clocks change this weekend. I hate it. Losing an hour of daylight makes me miserable. And while people will doubtless suggest I get an up hour earlier, then, the world doesn’t bend to my schedule. Lighter evenings are times for playing with my kid in the street, and enjoying the final warmth of the day. That’s all gone until April.

It’s always interesting around now to see how divisive changing the clocks is. In the US, I suspect many people forget how far south they are. By contrast, here in the north of Europe, not changing the clocks would either make for bizarre summers with sunrises at 3am, or very late sunrises in winter if we stuck with summer time all year. 

On the latter, that’s the main reason I’m unconvinced that the UK should change the clocks one spring and then never touch them again. It’d be rubbish for Scotland and that’s not fair. But that doesn’t mean I have to like the status quo either. Time to fire up the SAD lamp again…