I’ve written several times about the impending appocalypse. If you’ve not heard, 32-bit apps are dead as of iOS 11. They simply won’t open. This will consign many great iOS apps and games to oblivion.

Fortunately, many games have been updated since the issue became widely known, including Osmos, Beat Sneak Bandit, Mos Speedrun, and the original Reckless Racing, but a recent TidBITS piece by Marc Zeedar flagged another important issue regarding swathes of apps ceasing to function:

Worst of all, some of my obsolete apps are linked to hardware. For instance, years ago I bought a toy car that’s controlled via an app on my iPhone. That app is on my obsolete list. When it goes, the car is useless.

For Stuff magazine, I recently reviewed smart robot Cozmo and Sphero’s R2-D2. Both are very good – I was particularly taken by the former – but both are also totally reliant on smartphones to function, to the point that they stop working the second you close their controller apps.

It’s curious to think that as technology evolves, and companies furiously try to interlink everything, we’re setting ourselves up to make so much technology obsolete. At some point in the future, these controller apps will simply stop working, after an OS update. Then Artoo and Cozmo will be little more than paperweights.

You could of course keep an old device specifically as a controller for a favourite, but it’s sad to think we’re zooming away from electronic toys a child might one day be able to share with their own children. And that’s all before we start thinking about smartphones and apps being vital for critical aspects of a home, such as security, lighting, heating, and dealing with appliances.

Still, I’m sure it’s all worth it to not have to get off of your arse to turn on a light.

I have two Macs. My reasoning behind this is I try to keep one for work and one for regular reinstallation. After all, when you review a huge number of apps, some of which worm their way into the operating system, you occasionally need to nuke from orbit. Because of this, I’ve only just upgraded my main work Mac to macOS Sierra, which I now use daily rather than specifically when writing about new Mac apps. And it turns out that either my installations of Sierra are broken, or Apple’s had a massive brain fart.

If you use a Mac, chances are you use Photos. It merrily sucks in all the stuff you shoot on iOS devices, providing a central repository for pics, videos and screen grabs. Lovely. Except that on macOS Sierra, you don’t appear to be able to drag and drop a photo on to a Dock icon, in order to open it in another app. That’s right: Apple has managed to fundamentally break one of the key aspects of the entire Mac experience. To which I ask: does anyone actually test these things? (Or is this another aspect of ‘courage’, like dropping the headphone jack?)

I’m an advocate of proportional representation. My belief is that parliament should broadly mirror the votes made by the public, rather than being hugely imbalanced. I’m also keen on the idea of electoral pacts, in the event that parties outside of the conservative sphere have little other chance of making headway.

Polling suggests in the upcoming general election, a pact might not be enough to stop a Conservative majority anyway. But with a fully strategic approach, it’s possible many of 2015’s Liberal Democrat losses could be flipped (not least due to the party’s pro-EU stance), the Greens could make minor gains, and Labour could benefit in key seats through being backed by a majority of Liberal Democrat and Green voters.

The tiny snag is political parties and the voting public in the UK often won’t have any truck with this. The country en masse reverts to tribalism, and I just don’t understand it. Earlier today, I on Twitter spoke of a fantasy idea where the broadly progressive parties sat down and mapped out a way forward. A response I received was as follows:

Would this result in people being denied a chance to vote for policies they believe in, due to the party candidate tactically not standing?

I think this is the wrong way to look at things, but it’s also commonplace. The British have been trained to take an ‘all or nothing’ approach to politics. Compromise, concession and collaboration are all dirty words in the minds of a great many people across the entire political spectrum.

To illustrate this point, I for a while was a member of a Green Party group on Facebook, largely to try and get across to its members my thoughts on the party’s approach to copyright (which I considered deeply flawed) prior to the 2015 general election. There were people there fuming at the prospect of any cooperation with parties that supported nuclear power. When asked what their plan was, they responded they would wait until the time there was a Green Party majority government that could implement its policies in full.

The reality is that there will almost certainly never be a Green Party majority government in the UK, and nor will there be a Liberal Democrat one. There cannot be Plaid Cymru or SNP majorities, and it also seems vanishingly unlikely Labour will be able to get a majority either. And so we again come down to tribalism versus compromise.

My position is that I’d rather have most of what I want than nothing at all. Under a Lab/Lib/SNP coalition, the resulting policy will be more authoritarian than I’d like, with – due to Labour – more overt compromises on Europe. Similarly for those anti-nuclear Greens, imagine a coalition where Caroline Lucas is in government with the energy brief. She wouldn’t be able to shut down all the nuclear power stations, but she would be able to begin transforming the UK’s energy situation, rapidly increasing renewable power.

In other words, the compromise position will always likely be better than what you get in deciding on all or nothing. But, as ever, despite the most urgent need for electoral cooperation in modern British history, the chances of that happening at the party level are almost nil. In part, the voting system is to blame – with a proportional representation (or even a run-off) system, you’d be able to vote with your heart and provide subsequent pragmatic ‘support’ options for other parties. But mostly the lack of political will among fairly like-minded parties (most notably right now Labour and the Liberal Democrats) and among voters will stop millions getting anything close to what they want, and will leave them with nothing.

Various sources report Theresa May will announce the end of free movement for new EU migrants in March. I find this terribly depressing. My family exists because of free movement. In 2002, I moved to an EEA country, because I could, and to see how things would turn out with someone I’d met and who subsequently became my wife. I was – as now – a freelance writer, but that didn’t matter. I didn’t need a visa. I didn’t need a job and a work permit. I just showed up, lived, worked, paid my taxes, and so on. After a while, we switched countries and moved to the UK.

Now, we’ve no idea what the future holds in the country of my and my child’s birth. The government has at varying turns suggested it would guarantee residency rights for EU and/or EEA nationals. But then there have been various caveats tossed into the ring: EU27 specifically (i.e. not necessarily EEA/Swiss); only those making “full” use of rights (i.e. in work); residency only (i.e. not necessarily including access to healthcare, making staying unviable for many and problematic for a great many more); and residency only for those who meet the UK’s arbitrary earnings threshold. Additionally, those people wishing to secure residency or citizenship have found the process opaque and in some cases blocked by broadly unknown technicalities.

It’s not a good time for those of us in this situation.

But while this kind of story is already somewhat in the public consciousness, I do wonder how many Brits – and especially those who voted to leave the EU – realise this cuts both ways. I’ve seen various surveys that show a huge disconnect in the way British people see immigration. Such surveys asked British people whether EEA nationals should have the right to settle in the UK, which met with a broadly negative response. The same people were asked whether British people should have the right to settle in the EEA, at which point the majority view switched. It probably doesn’t help that language in the media and beyond for years has referred to Brits overseas as ‘ex-pats’, as thought they are somehow different from other immigrants.

They are not, and this is something the UK is going to become very suddenly aware of. Because when we are free from freedom of movement, that adversely affects the British too. Had your eye on retiring in Spain? Tough. Fancied moving to Sweden, just because you could? Too bad. Got kids hankering after university in Germany or the Netherlands? Best hunker down with a pile of paperwork for visas and hope for the best.

I mentioned this on Twitter earlier, wondering at what point we’re going to see the Daily Mail and co. recognise this problem, and scream about “EU SPITE” regarding their readership’s rights to reside overseas suddenly evaporating. Someone noted Daily Mail readers were up in arms on day one. One political commentator I follow online also mentioned a while back that a Conservative MP in a Commons debate said many Brits want to retire to Spain, and this “important right” should be retained – all while his party was dismantling the regulations that make such movement possible.

And yet for some Brexiters, even none of this is a concern. They slam residents here for not taking citizenship (even if many cannot, for various reasons), and note that British people have for years been able to move, live, work, study, and love in countries beyond the EEA. The movement point is of course true, but freedom of movement within the EEA was broadly about security and ease. It didn’t come attached with massive costs and administrative burdens, the immediate threat of deportation if you lost employment, the limitation of a single country, and a lack of security on your status always looming in the background.

Brexiters like to think that without immigrants, the UK will suddenly revert to some kind of glorious age – but they’re wrong. (And which age? That halcyon moment never existed anyway.) They also think that the British will benefit when freedom of movement is abolished, and that this doesn’t come with any downsides. They’re wrong about those things too.

I was recently pointed at a Guardian interview with Brian Eno. The piece is perhaps most politely described as confrontational. At one point, Eno apologises for being ratty, but the write-up mostly showcases a writer slamming into a wall on discovering what an artist wants to talk about isn’t what he himself had in mind.

Often, it seems Simon Hattenstone, for whatever reason, has an obsession with Eno’s past. There are questions about Eno’s background, and of his many collaborations. Eno is not interested in discussing such things, at one point noting the journalist can find answers to such questions in countless interviews elsewhere (“But you can do research. That’s your job!”), and so a big chunk of what’s reported seems to paint him as controlling. Relatively little of the piece is about the things Eno’s currently interested in: art; ambient and generative audio; society.

It’s an uncomfortable read, not only as a typical reader, but also as a writer. I’ve interviewed plenty of people myself, and you’d perhaps expect me to side with the writer here, but I don’t. I always prefer interviews where I get out of the way. Once, I interviewed Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov, but the transcript is closer to a lecture. I just sat and listened as he spoke about the things he wanted to and was interested in. The end result was far better for that.

Additionally, I find the notion of repeatedly revisiting the same old thing curious. If you’re going to get a short time to chat with someone like Brian Eno, why on the day dredge up his dad being a postman? Why waste time grilling him on working with Roxy Music, Bowie and Talking Heads, when he’s talked about that so many times before? Why not instead spend the time finding out something new, talking about ideas, thinking and projects that cement the interview in the present? That’s got to beat unnecessary confrontation, and trying to get someone to reword something they’ve said many times before, on subjects they’ve long had enough of discussing.