Matthew Lang

Over the last year, a line has been forming between my laptop and my phone. And it became really clear last week when I tried out Obsidian Sync for a few days.

I thought it would be good to run Obsidian on my phone as well as my laptop, so I set up Obsidian Sync, got the remote vault working with my local vault, and set it up on my phone. I must admit, it was tricky to get my local vault up and running with it, but that wasn’t the reason why I cancelled it.

After a few days of use, I found I didn’t like using my phone to interact with Obsidian. I preferred a bigger screen, and so, I found myself reaching for my laptop more during this time. The sync feature wasn’t the problem. Trying out Obsidian Sync solved a different question. Which device do I want to use? The answer was obvious: the laptop, almost every time.

It was from this point that the divide between phone and laptop was clear.

My laptop is for head-down work. Coding, writing, researching. Anything that requires me to spend more than a few minutes on a single task. Anything like that and I use the laptop. There are two benefits to this.

The first is that the laptop is a dedicated workhorse. There are very few social media applications on it, so notifications are infrequent.

The second is that I no longer require as many app subscriptions. Many subscriptions are based on the premise that they can sync your information between devices. With just one device, that cost disappears. And given that just about everything is a subscription these days, that’s not a bad thing.

For everything else I do, and there’s not much left thankfully, there’s my phone.

I use it mostly for messaging family and friends as well as for golf club-related comms. I use it to arrange teams matches, organise competitions for the club’s junior section and organise other junior events.

I do use social media on my phone as well, but I keep my interaction light there. Reddit is still a good source for many things. I’m more of a lurker on Instagram. I prefer to share most of my photos on my blog rather than on Instagram. Then there’s BlueSky and Mastodon for news.

There’s one exception to the laptop rule. I have iA Writer installed on my phone and my laptop. Why? Just for when the need arises for putting some words down and I’m away from my laptop. For everything else, though, the divide between them is clear: each has its own dedicated use.

It’s taken me until I am almost 50 years old to get to this point and recognise that each device has its purpose. It’s taken a while to get here, but at least I have arrived. Better late than never.

After a few months using Proton, I decided it wasn’t for me. I found it cumbersome to use, and despite its excellent reputation for respecting users’ privacy, I missed a few features since moving from Hey.

This evening, I completed a switch over to FastMail. I managed to migrate all my email from both Proton and Hey, and FastMail has the features that I am looking for to mimic what I had in Hey.

My move back to using my own domain as my primary email address has been relatively smooth, with just a few hiccups along the way. It has highlighted a few things that I should remember if I ever consider changing email addresses again (which I hope never happens again).

Email on your own domain is flexible

When I signed up for Hey’s email service five years ago, it meant moving away from using my domain for my email address. At the time, I had slight reservations about using hey.com as my email address, but I figured it was just an email address, and I had changed it before.

One problem is that with this type of email address, I am tied to Hey’s email service, and if I want to switch, I need to change my email address. This isn’t a problem if you use a domain name you own for your email, though. If, after a while, you don’t like the email provider you are using, you can switch to someone else while still retaining the same email address. And yes, Hey does support email for custom domains now, but that wasn’t available when Hey was launched.

Using your own domain for your email address ensures the longevity of your email address but also allows you to move between email providers.

You can’t change your email account everywhere

The last couple of weeks have seen me reviewing my password manager and conducting a spot check on all my accounts to ensure that I have migrated all of them to use the new email address.

Unfortunately, not every service allows you to change the email address associated with it. There are two scenarios I have found where this is the case.

Services that don’t let you change your email address

Some services just don’t allow you to change your email address at all. You need to delete the existing account and create a new one. This might be an issue if the service is one you have used long-term and has numerous purchases associated with it.

I have one account with a service that has several e-books purchased against it, but I haven’t been able to update my account to change my email address. Additionally, despite contacting the service’s support team, they haven’t responded promptly to allow me to change my email address. I’ll download the e-books I have purchased in the past and then create another account for any future purchases. Fortunately, these books are technical and mostly outdated, so the loss is not significant.

Services that use single sign-on

Some services don’t have a fully functional single sign-on experience, where your email address associated with your authenticating service may change. I’ve noticed this with several services. I have changed the email address on the authentication service I use to log in, e.g., Apple, but the end service I am using doesn’t recognise that it’s the same account, just with a different email. From a user experience flow point of view, this seems like a red flag.

Having experienced this, I think I might avoid single sign-on logins and instead use email or usernames wherever possible.

Not that I’ll need to, though, because I am not about to change my email address. Right?

I’ve encountered several issues since trying to migrate from Hey to Proton Mail, but the process has been mostly painless. I’m still updating all my accounts, but I’m almost done.

A couple of things emerged from this migration that others might find interesting.

1. Hey doesn’t support IMAP, and Proton Mail doesn’t support importing email using MBOX, so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to move all my emails from Hey to Proton Mail. Fastmail supports importing email using MBOX, so if moving your email across is a requirement, you may want to consider this option.
2. Hey doesn’t currently allow you to send plain text email. It might not be a deal breaker in this modern internet age, but there are still people who prefer this option, and I recently encountered this issue when I started using Sourcehut. Sourcehut’s mailing lists are easier to use with plain text, so I was glad to find out that Proton Mail allows me to do this, enabling me to start using Sourcehut’s lists feature.

It will be another couple of weeks before I am fully migrated over and using Proton Mail daily.

Today, I moved the email for a domain I own from Hey to Fastmail. Lots of factors have been niggling me to do this for the past few months, but the main factor has been cost. I just don’t need to pay that price for an email address associated with a domain.

After a couple of hours, the DNS changes finally propagated through, and the email is now fully switched over. An hour after that, I had transferred the emails from Hey to Fastmail, set up the calendars, and configured the email setup in a similar fashion to Hey, as I quite liked the idea of the Paper Trail and Feed areas for emails.

There are a few things I would like to see in Fastmail, such as a bit more spacing in the user interface. However, for now, I am quite happy with the reduced cost and the fact that the email just works without requiring me to relearn a new user interface.

I still use Hey for my personal email. I’m not quite ready to move this over to Fastmail yet, but I haven’t ruled it out.

Deloitte’s system to manage the management of vaccination has come under fire for being unusable and in some cases, even abandoned for paper-based solutions.

Clinic workers in Connecticut, Virginia, and other states say the system is notorious for randomly canceled appointments, unreliable registration, and problems that lock staff out of the dashboard they’re supposed to use to log records. The CDC acknowledges there are multiple flaws it’s working to fix, although it attributes some of the problems to user error.

— What went wrong with America’s $44 million vaccine data system?

This isn’t great for any system that is rolled out for the public to use. But the staggering thing for me is that they were awarded the contract on a no-bid basis as they were the only responsible source to build the system. Also, $44 million should get you a website that doesn’t get trumped by a paper-based solution.

Imagine for a second if GitHub had the resources to build this, or even Basecamp or Shopify. Not only do they have the experience of websites that are heavily used every day by millions of users, but they also have the knowledge of building for the public. Their websites are used by millions of people every day, and they have to ensure that design changes need to be clear to the people using it.

Could these companies build a better vaccination system?

Vivo also achieved another technological feat. Unlike Apple, it managed to incorporate a fingerprint scanner into the screen itself. The reader sits directly below the glass, and you can can just rest your finger on the front of the phone near the bottom to unlock it, with no need for a dedicated home button or fingerprint reader anywhere else on the device that would have reduced display size.

— A new smartphone found a novel way to make the entire front of the phone one giant screen

Sure, a slide-out camera is nice, but I’m pretty sure we’ll see both the camera and the fingerprint scanner sitting behind the display in the near future. Just a question of who’ll get there first.

I’ve had pre-paid cards in the past but the app that accompanies the Monzo card should provide better insight into spending habits and make me think twice about my spending habits.

A fair argument about abolishing timezones and the whole planet using Coordinated Universal Time. I like this reason the most though for ditching timezones.

Perhaps you’re asking why the Greenwich meridian gets to define earth time. Why should only England keep the traditional hours? Yes, it’s unfair, but that ship has sailed. The French don’t like it either. “The U.K. would turn into a time theme park,” suggested an English Twitter user, John Powers, “where you could experience 9 o’clock as your grandparents knew it.”

— Time to Dump Time Zones by James Gleick for The New York Times

Many might see the recent annoucements by Micrsoft and Apple as a win for Micrsoft and who can argue.

The company are finally interesting again and not just from a consumer perspective but from a technical and creative perspective. The flagship product of the Windows operating system is now having to share the spotlight with Microsoft’s new line of hardware products. And while it’s great to see Microsoft getting that innovative edge again I don’t see it as a win only for Microsoft.

Their Surface products and open sourced software are now opening another front on the war between the tech giants. For too long it’s been a two-horse race between Apple and Google.

Apple’s line of hardware is different from Google’s and that’s where I find it hard to compare the two. Apple’s traditional line of computers, tablets and phones are certainly different from the Chromebook and Chromecast dongles that Google sell.

Microsoft are now creating a name for themselves as a serious contender for those looking to make a new hardware purchase. And with the hardware purchase, the software purchases will pretty much follow suit. It’s a model that Apple has run for years. Build great hardware and boost sales with software and service purchases. It’s now Microsoft’s turn to take a stab at it.

Microsoft have turned heads with their new products, but not just from a consumer angle but from a corporate angle. I wouldn’t be against the idea of a few people at Cupertino who weren’t quietly surprised by the new Surface Studio. Hell, they might even like it.

And that’s the win for Apple. They have a new competitor on the horizon. A new front to battle on. A new chance to innovate again.

For this week I’m going to focus on the different development tools I use and why I chose them. Today we’re going to look ay my hardware line up. It hasn’t changed since the last time I wrote about this in 2015.

MacBook Pro

I’m using the same MacBook Pro I bought in 2014. The only issue I’ve had in the last year is that I stupidly left it plugged in all the time. Over time the battery gradually degraded in performance and got to the point where I was only getting an hour or two out of it. An appointment at the Genius Bar and was able to get a replacement battery for my MacBook. Now my battery performance is back to a level where I can safely work away from my desk for longer.

The MacBook itself is still fast and responsive. The screen is probably the feature I like the most about it. The crystal-clear Retina screen is easy on the eye and makes reading articles and code easier with no blurring of pixels.

Dell U2414H Monitor

My Dell monitor is still clear and crisp and is my main screen for the day when I’m working. It’s not as clear as the Retina screen on my MacBook but it’s close enough that I can use it all day for coding.

Logitech K811

I love this keyboard. With it’s backlit keys and ability to switch to multiple devices I’m happy to keep this going for the foreseeable future.

If you’re thinking of buying one or are having problems with battery life then I suggest you turn off the backlit keys during the hours of the day where you can see the keys using natural light. I used to have the backlit keys on all day, and it drains the battery on the keyboard quickly.

I don’t see this version of the keyboard on the British Logitech website but it is still available on Amazon. There’s a new model, the K870 that has rounded keys. Not sure if it’s any better than the K811 but the multiple device support is there with a docking bay for your phone and tablet. Not sure I’m sold on the rounded keys though.

Mighty Mouse

Finally there’s the Mighty Mouse. I’ve persevered with this for over two years now and the problem of frequently disconnecting from my MacBook is still there. If anyone has any recommendations for alternatives to the Mighty Mouse then I would love to hear from you.

Seagate Backup Drive

I’m still using this Seagate drive for Time Machine backups. I haven’t had to do a restore from it for sometime so I think it might be due for replacement. I’m not sure on the lifespan of hard drives but I would like to move to something a little less bulky and faster. Perhaps an SSD drive would be a nice addition to my backup process.

Anymore Changes?

My hardware selection doesn’t get changed that often. I know developers that change their equipment on a yearly basis but if it works, why change it? I did consider the move to a MacBook Air in the past but the MacBook models have changed again and I don’t see me making the move to a MacBook or MacBook Air. It might be another year or two before I consider changing my laptop again for another MacBook Pro, but until that day I’m happy with what I have.

I love this view on how people are split when it comes to technology.

We can make lists about how “there’s two kinds of people in the world” and split them up into techie and non-techie, or computer literate or non-computer literate…but I’m thinking it’s simpler. There’s the curious and the not-curious.

— Is technology killing curiosity? by Scott Hanselman

I’ve tried a number of times to get Ethan interested in programming as I thought he would be curious about how his favourite console games are made. So far he’s definitely in the non-curious group. Maybe it will come in time.

There’s little doubt that the world wants free online services. Darren Rovell’s poll on Twitter might not be completely unbiased as it was conducted on Twitter, but the results of the poll are clear. People want free stuff.

When it comes to online services and apps, I tend to favour those that come with subscription plans or a one-off cost for a license. Why? Well, because I want to support the team behind the software and the money they get from me helps towards keeping that service alive and running.

The pitfall of a free service though is that once you’ve dug that pit and put a sign up saying it’s “It’s free!”, everyone wants to jump in. It then becomes hard to get those people back out and into paying for the service.

There are exceptions to this rule, such as companies that offered the right incentives to get customers to pay or services that rely on ads to subsidise the free service. These are the exceptions though and success in their service doesn’t means that others using the same method will be successful as well.

Traditional businesses (retail e.g.) never give anything away for free. You always pay for something. It’s simple numbers. If you want something you have to pay for it. More and more online services are realising this and bootstrapping their service from the beginning. It’s good to see. I just wish more of the services that I love to use online would have stayed clear of the “It’s free” pitfall from the beginning.

The recent release of the Raspberry Pi 3 and now Western Digital’s new dedicated PiDrive makes the argument for buying a couple of Pi 3s even more compelling.

The 314GB drive, which will normally cost $45.81 but is currently available for $31.42, is a 7mm-high drive based on the basic Western Digital Blue drives that still ship in many budget and mid-end laptops and PCs. The difference is the interface, which has been changed from SATA to USB and is designed to connect to the Pi directly without drastically increasing the footprint of the device. WD says it has customized the drive in order to “reduce the electrical power load of the hard drive on Raspberry Pi while still maintaining sufficient performance to deliver maximum USB data transfer rate.” It’s also a cheaper solution than the 1TB PiDrive kit the company already sells for $79.99.

— Western Digital makes a $46, 314GB hard drive just for the Raspberry Pi by arstechnica

I’ll be surprised if this is as big a thing as Facebook.

I can thing of a few things off the bat that I would take issue with:

• Does the app silence notifications when I’m not supposed to be working?
• Does it do something better than any other business communication platform?
• If the company I worked for did use it, do I get a company phone to install it on?

At DigitalBothy the choice of communication is primarily the phone, then email and finally Slack.

Facebook at Work? No thanks.

It’s been 4 days since our Amazon Fire 7 tablet arrived in the post. The idea behind buying the tablet was as a short term replacement for Ethan’s iPad which has really become temperamental. It’s three years old now and despite the good condition in which it is kept, we are looking to replace it soon. I also wanted to try out the Fire as a writing tool so that I could take my writing on the road and get away from the desk for a couple of hours a day.

The suggestion of the Amazon Fire tablet was by a friend of mine who bought one for his son. I looked at reviews of the tablet online and it appeared to be able to do everything that I wanted it to do. After a few days with it though, there are a few observations I’ve made that would make me question buying one of these again.

First the benefits. You can’t argue with a £50 tablet. Really you can’t. Looking at the price and who sells it, you would immediately think this is the right tablet for me. Well the tablet itself is sturdy enough. Obviously not as thin as a new iPad, but the added thickness was a slight reassurance the kids will be able to get a good grip of it and be less likely to drop it.

It has a non-HD display but the kids won’t really know the difference between that and the HD display and to be honest I’m not that fussed not the difference either. The display was good enough especially for such a cheap tablet. Lastly the Fire is able to expand it’s storage capacity with the the use of a micro SD card. So we’re covered for storage.

The tablet is fast and responsive enough that I couldn’t call it sluggish. There are a number of apps included in the tablet but none of these are on my requirements list with the exception of the Amazon Prime app and a few other apps I can download from the app store.

Now the drawbacks. If you’re hoping to do some work on the Amazon Fire tablet then I suggest you make sure that the apps you need to use are available on Amazon’s app store. Not having had an Amazon tablet before I wasn’t too sure what apps would be available to use. I did see the Trello app listed but that was all. There are no apps for Todoist, 1Password or Instapaper. Not that this is a reflection on the company that make these apps. The Amazon store is not as prolific as the Apple Store or Google Play, and so it means that the apps available on Amazon are limited. I had hoped that the tablet would serve as a writing tool. With a browser, Trello, Todoist, and a nice markdown editor, I thought I would have a portable writing tool that would allow me to move away from my desk. Not so. There just isn’t enough applications that would allow me to do this effectively using the Amazon Fire. The inclusion of a web browser on the device means that I can access things like Todoist, Trello and Draft but for such a device I would prefer to use a native app.

For me the Amazon Fire is more in the consumer target group than the creative target group. With Netflix, Spotify and of course Amazon Prime video available on the device, I see it now as nothing more than a portable entertainment center, which is a shame really as the tablet itself is quite neat and could really do well with those on a tighter budget or looking for something smaller than an iPad to carry about.

So a few days with the Amazon Fire and I’m less than impressed with it. The tablet itself is nice and compact but the availability of apps on the Amazon app store means that if you’re looking to do anything more than entertainment with this then I would suggest you keep you’re money for an iPad Mini 2 or an equally sized Android tablet. Both of these will have a greater range of apps to use on them, thereby increasing their usage over the Fire’s restricted consumer use.

Chris Gonzales has a review of the Kids version of the Amazon Fire 7 tablet at Tools & Toys.

Clay Bavor’s large scale digital canvas is a fantastic use of technology.

Even the frame is made to make it indistinguishable from other framed canvases in the room.

Next I turned to the frame material. I wanted something that looked totally unlike anything you’ve seen around a computer monitor or television – a sort of “anti black plastic”. And that led me to a handmade, gilded wood frame, with a classic profile and a good amount of patina.

A Canvas Made of Pixels by Clay Bavor

Making the screen blend in with it’s environment and adjusting to that environment is how technology should be used.

Makes you wonder why on Earth the US military has needed billions for more advanced bombers when this still works.

The B-52 is an Air Force plane that refuses to die. Originally slated for retirement generations ago, it continues to be deployed in conflict after conflict. It dropped the first hydrogen bomb in the Bikini Islands in 1956, and laser-guided bombs in Afghanistan in 2006. It has outlived its replacement. And its replacement’s replacement. And its replacement’s replacement’s replacement.

— After 60 Years, B-52s Still Dominate U.S. Fleet by The New York Times

In a shock turnaround, Marco Arment has pulled his ad blocking app, Peace, from the App Store. Later on Apple also started refunding everyone who bought it on the App Store.

Achieving this much success with Peace just doesn’t feel good, which I didn’t anticipate, but probably should have. Ad blockers come with an important asterisk: while they do benefit a ton of people in major ways, they also hurt some, including many who don’t deserve the hit.

— Just Doesn’t Feel Good by Marco Arment

I admire Marco’s decision to step back from the ad blocking market. I wonder how many others could turn their back on a successful app?

New technology doesn’t always qualify as modern.

I’ve become something of a Instagram fan over the last few months, so this was right up my street.

I’m generally not, but that’s okay.

If we didn’t have any early adopters ironing out the kinks, there’d never be a now-safe choice for the late majority. And if everyone always jumped on the latest thing on day one, society would waste needless cycles churning through the broken glass of beta software.

— The Stories We Tell Ourselves by Signal vs Noise

I now know that I bring scale to the products that I wait for.

Okay, maybe not NSA busting but definitely more secure than thinking up your own passphrase.

This planning deficit is nothing unusual. It would be a tribute to Boeing engineers’ advance planning that the BUFF (Big Ugly Fat, er, Fella) is due to keep flying until at least 2040, when the airplanes will be octogenarians…except that the longevity has been achieved despite the best that military planners could do.

— The B-52 Just Keeps on Flying by Air & Space Smithsonian

Amazing.

Paying for tools is a smart choice. If programs like Keynote and Mail.app were actually profit centers for Apple, I would imagine that we’d have far better support, fewer long-term bugs and and most of all, a vibrant, ongoing effort to make them better.

— Five Thoughts on Software by Seth Godin

I completely agree with this, after seeing Google eventually take down Reader, I’ve always swayed towards paying for tools and services when I can. They’re more likely to be still running in the long term, offer greater support and they are updated more frequently to ensure their customers are still getting value.

There are exceptions to this though, but this is a rare exception only made possible by exceptional companies.

While I do believe that killer apps have had their day for the foreseeable future, I can’t deny that the unbundling technique can be used to create some great apps.

Ed Rex reckons there are three reasons why unbundling works. Couldn’t agree more with his reason for simplicity.

When your app only needs to do one thing, it can do it really well. You can have big, clear buttons for the things people use it for — because there’s no need to clutter up the screen with all those other options you’ve got rid of. This makes your app unbelievably easy to use — and that’s what smartphone users want.

— The Formula For Creating The Next Killer App by Ed Rex

Read on for the full recipe.

Are killer apps a thing of the past?

I remember a few years back when Twitter was young and great, Facebook was viewed with more positive eyes than it is today and the mobile app stores were just starting out. Good times. It was also about this time that I heard the phrase killer app. For the uninitiated a killer app was often seen as an indispensible app that would help push the sales of the platform the app was run on. Simply put, people would buy the hardware needed to run the app in question. Back then, it seemed that every month there was a new app or service that would be tagged as the next killer app.

Fast forward to today and it’s not something I’ve heard often in the technology press. It’s still used to describe some apps but not as much. I still follow the same technology sites I did a few years ago, so what’s different?

The world has changed. There’s less of a technology barrier now than there’s ever been and that due to the small device that you’re probably reading this on. Over the last few years mobile apps and services have reduced, or in some cases removed, the complicated steps that would be required to carry out a specific task or action. Along with this simplification comes a growing market of companies and indie developers who all us to use their app. And the demand for apps shows no sign of slowing down. I was browsing through the productivity category of the App Store and there are hundreds of apps in this category. There are just so many choices.

Another factor in this is that the mobile market is not tied to one particular platform. In the past when mobile hardware platforms were getting past their first couple of release iterations, it was certainly clear that alot of people preferred the Apple platform and there were many apps that persuaded people to buy Apple’s hardware. Today though the market is more evenly divided. Apple and Google have their share along with others like Blackberry and Microsoft. I would be hard pressed to pick an app that certainly fits the name of killer app and that’s due to the fact that many apps are available on not just a single platform.

Which leads me to think that perhaps we’re past the stage of killer apps. With such a huge market for applications, there are dozens of apps that let you achieve the same result through different methods. Maybe now we’re not looking for killer apps, perhaps we’re looking for game changing apps. Not just new ways of doing things, but whole new markets of the mobile apps.

Wearable technology is still fairly new and with Apple’s new smartwatch due for release soon, there will be many tech pundits looking for the next killer app for wearable technology. Whether this becomes a market in mobile apps or a completely new market remains to be seen. Given the recent release of similar products by other technology firms though, I don’t think there will ever be a killer app for wearable tech.

Is the killer app dead? I would say yes for the foreseeable future but it certainly won’t stop business and developers using the title to promote their apps. I think it will take a whole new field of technology before we see true killer apps again. Apple Lense anyone?

Apple’s choice to remove the ability to upgrade the internals of their products has me asking decisions about my own preferred hardware setup for work purposes.

Our house is light when it comes to computing power. We have a handful of devices between the family and there’s a games console there for when I feel the need to be humiliated at Madden by my oldest son. As for actual computers though, with the keyboards, mice and monitors, we have a single laptop in the house. Mine.

My MacBook Pro has been my workstation for over a year now. Solidly built and still just as fast as the day that I bought it. It’s also the laptop the family use to sync their photos and music to external disks for long term storage. I’ve been careful about seperating content between work and family. I’ve got a couple of external hard disks for storing pictures and music as well as a third external hard disk for Time Machine backups. Anything work related stays on the laptop, while videos, movies, pictures and music are all located on external disks.

The setup we have is fine for our needs for the moment, but ideally I would like to have seperate computers for work and family. Keeping the two seperate would mean that if one was to go, then it wouldn’t be a major impact on me working. If my MBP was to pack in tomorrow then the home computer could serve for work purposes until I was back up and running with the hardware that I needed for work again.

After hearing the news of the updated Mac Minis in Apple’s product line up, I was excited. These little boxes of technological joy have been on my radar for a while. While the lovely iMac has been on the wishlist for a while, the cost of it is out of our budget for what would be a computer that would be used intermittently. The Mac Mini was the next sensible choice then. With a monitor already on my desk, it makes much more sense to just buy a computer than can plug into it and allow me to use my own keyboard and mouse.

However, joy quickly turned to dismay when I found out that as a consumer, I won’t be able to open up the Mac Mini and upgrade the parts that I need in the future. Like it’s MacBook and iMac cousins, the Mac Mini has it’s memory soldered onto the motherboard which makes upgrading in the future impossible. If you want something more powerful, you need to buy another Mac Mini with the specs you need. Hardly ideal given that in order to make these Mac Minis viable as long term computing products, the upgrades on the Apple website are higher than the market prices for similar upgrades you could do to a more open computer.

It’s sad to see that Apple’s products are going against this with memory now being soldered on to each of their product’s motherboards. It’s got me thinking again about how much do I want to invest in computing hardware in the home as I am clearly becoming more and more dependent on Apple’s products. As a technology platform for ordinary consumers, Apple’s products are hard to beat. They work well and the software that they provide for OSX and iOS is easy to use. I don’t think for everyday use I would switch to another platform such as Google or Microsoft. It just works, it always has.

The geek in me though has me looking at Linux barebones boxes and alternatives to traditional desktops such as these miniature Linux desktops as a replacement for my laptop. I definitely want something longer lasting but also upgradeable. I’m just not sure at the moment what that setup will be. Ideally a desktop running some Linux distribution as well as a small form laptop such as a Chromebook, without the Chrome OS, could serve me for my mobile needs which at the moment are rare. That could change though.

A few decisions to make here, but I think the first is whether I could use Linux as my work environment on a daily basis. I should probably decide on that first before making any decisions regarding my desktop hardware.

Apple’s addition of a smart watch to their product line is a sign that smart watches are definitely here for a while but is it too early to be calling time on watches?

A few people have mentioned that smart watches will kill the watch. I think it’s a little too early to be making that statement.

The smart watch is still new in terms of technology. We’ve had attempts at smart watches in the past, some good, some bad, and there will be a few more iterations on what makes a good smart watch. That is until companies all meet at that point where they all agree sub-consciously agree on the design template for a smart watch. There will be a few more years yet before we get to that stage where we know that the smart watch will just work for us.

Then there’s the technology aspect of the smart watch. It does so much more than a regular watch does, but do you want it to do that? Despite the fact I’ve had smart phones for over five years now and they’ve all been able to tell me the time, I still wear a watch. I like wearing a watch. It means I can keep my phone in my pocket when I need to know what time it is. If I didn’t wear a watch I would probably have my head buried in phone everywhere I went. As soon I would check the time on it, I would leave it out and read it until I got bored. Thankfully I don’t do this thanks to single purpose of the watch. It just tells the time.

I also don’t want another device in my house that requires charging on a daily basis. I wouldn’t say my house is brimming with technology but we have our fair share of gadgets in the house. A couple of smart phones, a tablet, a laptop, a Kindle, a games console and a couple of televisions. Maybe slightly less than most people but it’s something I’ve tried to keep a cap on. The Kindle is great as it only requires charging every two or three months and only needs an hour to be fully charged. Adding a smart watch to this mix is not something that appeals to my environmental side. I’d rather have a watch that required a single small battery every couple of years than having to charge my smart watch on a frequent basis.

We’ve seen these statements before about technology phasing out tried and tested ways of doing things in the past.

Remember when Amazon launched the Kindle? Lots of people made predictions that books would be phased out in favour the new digital books. As convenient as a Kindle is though, sometimes a book is definitely better. It requires no power to read the book, it’s just as portable and there’s that great feeling of scribbling notes in the sidelines. Thankfully today there are still a healthy number of book stores around and they’re filled with books. The death of the book? Not yet, which makes me wonder if making statements about the death of the watch is just technology fans getting ahead of themselves.

The smart watch does herald a change in the way we can carry technology about with us. We have another small window to look at when we’re out and about seeing the world, meeting people and making experiences. That can still be done with or without a smart watch. For me, I’ll be casting my eye towards the traditional mechanical watches for my next timepiece purchase. They’re less intrusive, more reliable and cheaper to run over time and besides, I can do everything I need with my smart phone, right?

Sicne I started using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine last year, I’ve had to content myself with what was an aging look and feel to their search results. While Google and Yahoo were charging ahead with redesigned search result listings, DuckDuckGo was falling behind. Thankfully though DuckDuckGo recently upgraded their search page.

The new user interface itself is a welcome upgrade to the old one interface. With tabs for images, videos and products, searches become much more useful depending on your search term and the search listings themselves are easy to scan. There is also a section with more details about your search term if it’s a person, company, product or brand name.

Not only does the new user interface work well on desktops and laptops, but it’s mobile friendly as well. I’ve frequently use it now on my iPhone rather than the suggested search engines that Apple includes. Without jailbreaking my phone though, there’s no way to make DuckDuckGo your default search engine on the iPhone. I’m hoping that this will be an option in the future.

The next step I hope is that DuckDuckGo updates their iOS app with ability to do searches there and pass the results into Safari. There might be restrictions on this, but it’s what I would like to see.

I’m glad to see that DuckDuckGo are keeping their search engine modern and relevant. It might just be a change of look to the search engine, but sometimes that’s all that is needed.

Software is a form of product that will deteriorate and expire with time. With this in mind, how easy would it be for you to switch software from your preferred tools set to a new one?

I try and not be too dependent on the software that I use on a daily basis. I do have a favourite set of tools that I use but I’m always conscious of the fact that whatever I’m using might not be around tomorrow.

Take for instance my to do list. I’ve been using Todoist for some time now. What would happen if Todoist stopped trading next month? Or even next week? Barring a natural disaster, I’m pretty confident that most services, including Todoist, will allow a small window of time for you to transfer your data across to another application of your choice before that company closes down.

The good thing about software as a product is that there’s plenty of it. We’re spoiled for choice when it comes to software and with the now common place app stores from various technology companies, there’s an app store for most major hardware platforms.

What happens though when software becomes a dependency?

I’ve heard many people say that their preferred software product for a particular task is ‘X’ and that they just couldn’t do their job without it. Perhaps that’s true if you’re in a specialist job working on the next wave of new technology and innovation, but for most of us this just shouldn’t be the case. We should not be dependent on just one particular brand of software to get the job done. If you’re so dependent on one particular software product then I’d say that you’re narrowing your choices down too much.

The text editor is my daily tool for writing and cutting code. My preferred text editor is Sublime Text, but for any reason that Sublime Text was to stop being supported or even cease to exist, then what’s my options?

We’ll I’ve played with Vim enough over the years to make the jump to that, and there’s a number of other text editors that I could pick up like Chocolat that would do the job just fine. Yes, I may have invested a considerable amount of time getting to know the shortcuts keys of Sublime Text but if I had to then I would comfortable picking up something else. We should always have options to fall back on for the selected tools that we use on a daily basis. In most cases this second set of software might be products we’ve tried in the past or something that we previously have experience with.

Investing time and effort into a particular software product is fine if it’s something that you will use on a daily basis for about 8 hours a day, but anything else is simply a product or tool that could be replaced with alternatives already on the market or a custom made option if needed. Software isn’t for life, it’s simply a temporary means to an end until we find something better that works for us. With this in mind, are you to dependent on the software you use?

The one question you must ask yourself when you let new technology into your life:

What problem does this solve?

At any one time there are usually three devices sitting on my desk. A laptop, a phone and a tablet. They all have different apps running on them but some of the apps they use are for the same service. So for App.net I have an app running on my laptop, but a different app running on my phone and tablet.

Here’s the problem. I haven’t really paid too much attention to configuring notifications for each of the apps so sometimes I end up getting multiple notifications going off on the different devices for the same event. For example, in App.net when I get a new follower, I get an email notification in my phone as well as a notification from Felix, and also a notification on Felix on my tablet. Just little bit overkill if you ask me.

So here’s my question to all of you. What’s your strategy for dealing with notifications on multiple devices?

I sit in front of my laptop for most of the day, so ideally most of my notifications should come through there, but then what notifications should I enable for my phone? Are there any type of apps that you recommend I should completely silence?

If you’ve got any thoughts on this then please reply back to my original post on App.net or drop me an email here. I’d be really interested to hear your views on this.

I wrote last week about finding purpose for my iPad, a tool that I feel was underused. Over the weekend I managed to sort out the various apps that I needed and re-arranged my screens so that the apps I use on a day to day basis are on my home screen and other apps are just a slide away.

In a departure from my iPhone, I have foregone the use of folders for grouping applications. I did this for two reasons. There’s more screen space on the iPad and I don’t need to use as many apps as I do on my iPhone.

Another change I made that is different from my iPhone setup is the number of apps on my home screen. I almost filled the screen with apps. Om my phone I just use the top two rows for apps on my home screen, but I don’t mind having so many apps on my iPad’s home screen,so I just fill the screen with the apps I need and pick a pleasing wallpaper.

One of the key decisions in picking apps for my iPad was whether to use the same apps on my iPhone for my iPad. The devices run on the same platform, but the bigger screen on the iPad means that I can afford to pick apps that offer more in terms of functionality, even if it does come at the cost of some screen estate. So I ditched PlainText for Editorial and of course there is no Reeder support on the iPad yet, so I have opted to use Mr Reader to read my RSS feeds.

So there we have it, my iPad setup. Simpler than I thought it was going to be, but it did require a different approach if I wanted to get the most from using it. And if you’re questioning whether it will work for me or not, I’m writing this on my iPad in a cafe. That’s got to count as a good start.

A while ago I wrote about my iPhone setup. I wanted to follow it up with a post on my iPad setup, but so far I’ve yet to find purpose for my iPad. I do most of my work at my desk on a laptop and I use my phone when I am out and about. So where does my iPad fit in?

What I initially wanted to do was to only have apps on my iPad that allow me to write. I mostly use it for reading and writing, but I haven’t had much of a chance to do either of these in the last month.

Now I think that I want my iPad to do everything that I can do on my laptop. I’d much rather be working on my iPad than my laptop if was away from the house. Some tasks are a lot easier to do than others though. Reading and writing are easy to do on the iPad, but tasks like programming are not so straight forward.

Over the weekend I’ll be tackling this and making sure that I can do most of what I want do from my iPad by installing any apps that I need. I’ll let you know how I get on next week.

Ever since the news that Google was sunsetting it’s Reader service, I’ve been looking at alternatives for the Google services I’m already using. I’ve started using Path as a replacement for Google Chat, and I’m using Apache OpenOffice instead of Google Drive. I’m not against Google as a service provider, but depending one company for a number of services is not a good move.

Two areas where I haven’t found alternatives though is email and calendar. The calendar functionality I’m not too bothered about as there are plenty of options for scheduling apps and services.

The big decision I need to make is whether to move my email from Google to anything else. Gmail remains one of Google’s key products that continues to work well. I’m looking at a couple of services for email, but the switch and migration of data will be a key consideration.

For the moment the cull of Google services will continue.

I made a small purchase last week at the Apple store. A new MacBook Pro to replace my very old Macbook. with. It’s only my second laptop in 5 years yet I know of developers that change their equipment yearly.

In fact all my technology purchases are extremely sporadic for a software developer. I haven’t had a new laptop since 2008 and my first iPad was a third generation iPad. It has taken me until the iPhone 5 to own an actual iPhone. Needless to say I like to wait until technology pans out before I decide to make a purchase. I’m always late to the party.

Being late in adopting technology is no bad thing though. The first version of any new piece of technology is never the finished design. It’s always the second generation version that is a more complete and feature rich product. The initial bugs and chinks have been ironed out and there’s always some slight improvements elsewhere in the product.

Being a late adopter means that while I might not have the latest cutting edge equipment, I am banking on getting more value for my money with a second or even third generation product. Sometimes it pays to wait a bit.

I was a fan of Microsoft when I first started out in my career. It was everywhere. Jobs local to me were all about Microsoft technology and stacks. So I started working with Microsoft’s development tools and languages more out of it being so popular than by personal choice. In those days Microsoft was a key player in technology.

Looking at Microsoft now and it’s hard to believe that it’s the same company that was set to take over the world.Yes they have the same set of development tools and updates languages for developers, and the market for developers using these languages is still strong. However there’s other areas where they appear to be losing out.

The PC is dying. The Windows driven one that is. Tablets are the new home computer, and while Microsoft have released their own tablet, the Surface, they do have a mountain to climb in terms of opposition. Apple and Amazon both have had tablets out well before Microsoft and they both have their own apps market place to sell from. Apple’s iPad is extremely popular and I’ve started to notice that more and more people are jumping on board with Amazon’s Kindle tablets.

The PC might still be a success in the office, but I think time will reveal a new success in the workplace. As tablets become more powerful and better apps and services are written, I think they maybe the new success story in the workplace. As I said though, time will tell on that one.The other area Microsoft are fighting is open source software, which is now a serious consideration for business. It maybe wasn’t so much 20 years ago, but now you can comfortably run your own e-commerce site with a suite of support applications to run the business without paying a single penny in licensing costs for the software or the operating systems it runs on.

Open source software has become so popular that there are even open source ERP systems that can help you run and manage your business. Having previously worked for a Microsoft partner, I know the licensing costs involved in such systems and they can easily run into tens of thousands for even an ERP backed e-commerce site.Microsoft was a great company back in the day, but today it seems that there isn’t much to get excited about from it. Not only that, they are playing a game of catchup in other markets like tablets, software and of course the cloud.

I’m not writing off Microsoft and I know they have successes in other areas but looking at them now and you can’t help but wonder where it all went wrong.

A single device that can be used on the go as well as having the same functionality as a desktop computer when you dock it!

The Ubuntu phone marks a significant milestone that nobody else in the mobile business has managed to nail yet. It runs the same codebase as the rest of the Ubuntu family, meaning it can be docked and used as a real computer or synchronized with a slab and turned into a tablet.

— Convergence is key by Owened

Nothing like an Apple product launch to get a hacker debate going. Me, I can take it or leave it. I’ve grown increasingly immune to these product launches over the years. And I’m glad I have. I’ve come to realise that it’s not the tools (computers, netbooks, tablets etc.) that are the most interesting thing here, but the end product that you have made with those tools. That’s a much more interesting story.

So, far its been good; most apps I use are web apps. I spend 70% of my time in a terminal, and 30% of my time in a web browser. Honestly its the perfect computer for me right now. So, I’m waving goodbye to the ecosystem Mr. Jobs built, and moving to the world of linux full time.

— Thanks Mr Jobs, but it seems I can use my Linux laptop now by Hyper Geometric

It’s hard not to argue that Apple products are great. I particularly like my iPad and tomorrow I’ll pick up my new iPhone. As for my main development machine at home though, I’ve started looking at using Ubuntu on an old PC. So far, I’ve only installed the minimum development tools I’ll need. I’ll be able to give a more fuller review on using Linux. Stay tuned!

Might have to make a wee visit to the store when we visit the in-laws next year.

via The Verge

The Kindle Fire is on trial for a number of different patent violations including one for having icons lead to an action on the screen, for instance opening an application. Others include patents from Palm for the ability to run more than one calendar at a time.

via venturebeat.com

Seriously, having an icon lead to an action on the screen has been around for decades. Patent trolls in the true sense of the word.