Only a so-called "gender critical" could turn the sex of a cartoon intended to get kids reading into a debate about whether an alien has a penis. This is a canonical example of why some people shouldn't use social media.
Meanwhile, Putin's conscription efforts are going exactly as you would expect from a country mired in corruption.
I have pre-ordered a Kindle Scribe because it sounds like the kind of technology I love. I have a similar Remarkable 2, and while it's a great note-taking device in many ways, it's a poor e-reader. The Scribe looks like it's probably the other way round, and that's fine with me. It's due to arrive at some point in December -- I'm hoping before I head off to a week-long residential writing course I'm doing.
Tangentially related: you can now easily send ePubs to Kindle, which means that the DRM-free books I've bought elsewhere can work on my favourite e-reading hardware.
Dan Moren has a good piece on the conundrum, which is the iPad. I must admit that the iPadOS 16 betas have made me fall in love with my iPad Pro a little bit. However, after the initial rush of excitement that I might be able to replace my Mac with the iPad Pro and a big monitor, external monitor support in Stage Manager has proved to be so rough that Apple has pulled it, and who knows when it will return. Something is wrong internally at Apple to get to this point and still be this much of a mess, which goes beyond just QA or the difficulties of grafting this kind of function onto a device that comes from a completely different paradigm.
Via Om comes this Christian Heilmann piece on the sorry state of the web. Christian is absolutely right: the social web is a mess, and there's no coherent archiving apart from the incredible work of Archive.org. I would add that the web has become the equivalent of television for my generation: something that just soaks up your attention rather than being a place to go to learn something or be entertained intentionally.
I immensely enjoyed Russell's latest email in which he ruminates on blogging for writing vs banging out link posts. I, too, wonder about this, but that's partly because I look at my ideas bucket for longer posts and find about 20 things, all of which I don't think I'll ever want to write about. So, for example, that post about how shareholder value isn't the best thing for directors of companies to focus on is great, but it just doesn't feel like something I want to write now…
There's a new Linux kernel out! I'm not sure when I will become a Linux user (is there a badge?), but I've been mainly working on my ThinkPad running Zorin OS for several weeks, and it's starting to feel like home. I'll probably write some more about this at some point -- it took me a while to settle on the right distro and get the right tools in the right places -- and although I still use my other laptops (both Mac and Windows), this is where I prefer to work.
One of the reasons that I started investigating Linux was an increasing wariness about Apple's future direction. Om has a good piece in The Spectator about why the company is pushing more into services and advertising. In short: there's no growth in hardware, and app store revenue is flatlining and is likely to decline.
Our wonderful government has decided to do away with GDPR and have some kind of "British Data Protection System". This is almost the perfect Tory policy: it will have little impact on businesses (which will have to continue to follow GDPR if they so much as sniff at an EU customer) while adding most cost because there's yet another system to support and deliver little if any real-world benefit. Bravo!
