Life
Weeknote, Sunday 21st April 2024
This has been a week of feeling my age – but also wondering exactly what that means.
I'm currently working with a small editorial team who are, pre-dominantly, quite young. Like “born this century” young. That in itself is a strange feeling because knowing people who were born in the previous century has never been part of my experience. The oldest person I remember when growing up is my grandmother, who was born in 1910: although I'm sure I met people born in the 1800s, it never really registered.
It shouldn't make a difference. And yet, there is something about the turn of the century that marks a change, so working with people for whom the 20th century is nothing more than history feels strange. Particularly when someone refers to “vintage music” and they mean “stuff from 2005”, as happened to me this week.
I read Simon Kruger's excellent piece on finding yourself in the home stretch of a career race, and it has prompted more thoughts than I care to have about my life. I am at the very stage that Kruger describes, “the antechamber between work and pension” where your world starts to change whether you like it or not.
Your network of work contacts declines as people either retire, die, or just check out of the industry you're part of. For me, this is exacerbated by the decline of publishing as a business: most of the people I know who are around my age are gone from it because when an industry contracts it loses its most experienced people first.
I didn't really even choose journalism as a career. In a sense, it picked me. When wrapping up my PhD, I knew what I didn't want – to be an academic – but had no idea what I did. When the opportunity to join MacUser magazine appeared in Media Guardian (essential Thursday reading for the humanities student) it seemed like someone had created a bespoke job for me. Writing, technology, and – as I swiftly found out – daytime drinking were all interests, ones which were well served by technology publishing at the time.
Finding out I was good at it was a surprise. Finding out that I was also good at leading people was another one. But at no point at all did I think about whether that was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
I suspect that's in part because “the rest of your life” is too hazy a concept when you're in your 20s and 30s to make any logical sense. For me, it didn't really appear as a concept until I was in my 50s, when “the rest of your life” became an alarmingly short amount of time. “Slowly, and then all at once”.
Things I have been writing
A busy week for non-fiction, and a slow one for fiction. I wrote a very short piece which was basically me rolling my eyes at people who should know better. There was a Ten Blue Links post – and I think my link blog is getting well into its stride. And more substantive, I wrote about John Gruber's approach to privacy and antitrust.
Fiction-wise, I wrote a small piece of micro-fiction about death, and that I liked enough to think about expanding into a proper short story. I like writing micro-fiction, but ultimately, I think they are the equivalent of a yawn and a stretch when you wake up. And exercise, valuable, but not substantive.
Things I have been reading
For the past few weeks, my reading has been all over the place: some days pass without a book being opened, some are nothing but a book. I have been dipping into Julian Barnes' Through the window quite a bit, though. I love Barnes' non-fiction more than his fiction. He's a stupidly clever writer.
Some stuff which caught my eyes this week
Oof. Apparently, Windows 11 is installed on just 3% of existing PCs, which is less than Windows 7. That is truly pitiful, but not surprising: there are remarkably few good reasons to update from Windows 10. There are things to like about it but they really are few and far between, and not sufficiently obvious. What will also be worrying for Microsoft and its partners is without compelling software, there's not much reason to buy a new PC either.
Related: Fedora 37 and Ubuntu 22.10 are out soon, with the rather nice Gnome 43 interface. Just saying.
Hey Apple nerds -- or just computer history nerds -- you will like this. Someone has digitised their collection of Apple VHS tapes from the 1980s and 1990s and put them on YouTube. Apple did a lot of video content at the time for training and communications, and I remember seeing some of these when they first appeared. The hour-long video on using OpenStep's cross-platform development tools plus the Rhapsody Blue Box for running classic Mac programmes is well worth a watch. Different era.
Meanwhile, the Tories want to water down your privacy rights online. For a good example of what happens when the rights of businesses to abuse your details become more important than your right to control your data, look no further than India, where commercial spam from legitimate companies has become enough of a problem to make WhatsApp barely usable.
Nick Heer makes a great case for why Apple is completely wrong in opposing charging being standardised around USB-C. It really is, in part, Apple's own fault: you can't stick with a standard which only supports USB 2 speeds for ten years and then credibly claim to move to something better is "stifling innovation".
Gabriele Svelto found a great way to improve performance on Firefox. Also worth noting: if Firefox was distributed in the Mac App Store, it would be banned. It really isn't great that there are public APIs which don't work well and private ones which do.
Obviously, this is complete asshattery from Apple.
Chuck Jordan wrote the best view on She-Hulk I've seen. I greatly enjoyed it for all the reasons that Chuck did.
This article sums up some of the problems with Microsoft's Surface Headphones. I have the first-generation ones, and I like them a lot, but it's a mark of what a market failure they have been that when I went into the Microsoft Store ones wearing them, the security guards stopped me on the way out because they thought I had stolen them from the store. They had never seen an actual person in the real world wearing them.
Paul Thurrott writes about his experience using Microsoft Edge, and he is exactly right. Edge started out as a good alternative to Chrome. It was clean, modern and not burdened with useless features or (importantly) Google's tracking. As Microsoft has added feature after feature, it has become a bloated, confusing mess. You can almost see how every team in Microsoft has wanted a piece of it. And, of course, its "tracking protection" is poor: you will want to add proper tracking protection extensions to it.
Some good news - We Hunted The Mammoth achieved its pledge goal!
Does my alien have a penis and other interesting things for today
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!
Adam
I almost didn’t answer the message. When Chris popped up asking if he could call, I was just pondering going to bed and wondered if it wasn’t something that could wait until the morning. Something, though, told me I should answer.
Chris wanted to pass on the news: our friend and former colleague Adam Banks had died the previous day, after suffering a sudden heart attack.
Adam was the second MacUser editor I worked under, after Stuart Price had recruited me out of college and straight into the basement of the MacUser labs. He had more influence, though, over the course that magazine was to take and more widely too: it’s fair to say that Banksy did more to move the design of technology magazines out of the dark ages of a PC on every cover than anyone else. But the design work he fostered pushed forward not just tech but all magazines, something that’s almost lost to memory today. When The Guardian made a MacUser cover one of its covers of the century in 2013, it wasn’t just about one cover: it was saluting 20 years of amazing and award-winning work.
The design culture Adam built, alongside creative director Paul Kurzeja, launched the careers of a bunch of fantastic young designers. How many computer magazines would have their staff profile pics by Rankin or Steve Double?
And that design-led ethos lasted for years, first under Karen Harvey, then me. I don’t think I was good at it, but even under me the impetus was strong enough for us to win a PPA Cover of the Year. I made our art editor, the brilliant Aston Leach, go up and collect it because it was far more his award than mine.
There’s a million stories about that era of MacUser. The time that our big boss Felix Dennis rang up the office to complain about a particularly abstract cover, while Adam was in San Francisco for a Macworld show, for example. Paul Price took the call and thought it was a prank, as it was his birthday. We wore the phrase that Felix had used to describe the cover — “Art Wank Shit” — with pride, and of course Adam laughed as much as the rest of us. I think he saw Art Wank Shit as what he was trying to achieve.
None of this really captures what a nice man Adam was, too. No matter what the level of stress — and magazine editing can be super-stressful — he still didn’t end up losing his temper or raising his voice about anything. I can’t tell you how rare that is in publishing.
I’m also not going to tell you the story of his stag night. Of course, Adam being Adam, this involved absolutely no unacceptable behaviour on his part (and the funniest part also needs mime actions to truly bring it to life).
He’ll be sadly, sadly missed by everyone that knew him.
Note: There won’t be a weeknote this week.
A letter to my 23-year-old self
Dear Ian,
Congratulations on leaving Hatfield and getting a pretty good degree! I’d like to say that you worked hard for it, and you certainly put the effort in over that last semester. You’re a bright lad and you have come a long way. You didn’t have many expectations of yourself when you started this journey but I hope you have come to realise that you’re cleverer than you thought you were.
Thirty years later, I think that I’ve learned quite a bit more about life. I know you’re not good at taking advice, but I thought that I would put this letter in a time bottle and throw it overboard. Perhaps by some kind of temporal miracle it will reach you and change how you think about a few things. But I guess that I know already that it didn’t. Unless that many worlds interpretation of quantum theory is correct, in which case this is another future you who never existed typing this, and there’s a different future me trying to whisper to another me in not-his past.
This whole time stuff is confusing.
Anyway, this is as much about me as it is you which means I’ll write it anyway. That’s the first lesson by the way: it’s never always about you.
When we look back at our past selves it’s easy to become either condemnatory or nostalgic. What a prat I was. Or on the other hand how full of youthful energy, how lacking in fear!
Like most views of the past, no one can never really know which is more true, but I suspect that actually neither is all that accurate. So, I’m not going to judge you and find you wanting, or lionise you and wish I was you, again.
Instead, I’m going to write about a few things that I’ve learned more about since I was you, and hope you can consider them. Feel free to reject them — I probably would, and I was you once — but also think about them often.
The first thing I would say is to care less about what people think and more about what people feel. When I was you, I was obsessed with reason and thinking. I was very much a rationalist, even though I thought of myself as a renaissance man. Spending your time obsessing about what people think about you is less important than making them feel good about themselves. People are always more insecure than that look. You can capitalise on that, but to be honest that makes you a bit of a bastard. Lift people up. Make them feel like they are the most important person in the world.
Remember too that love is something that requires nurturing, and expect it to change. You don’t love people in the same way all the time. Love ages, and like all things that age that can either mean it withers and dies or it becomes deeper and more seasoned. But it never stays the same, and harking back to how a love was is to choke it with the thorns of your memories.
Take some risks. You have time on your side here, but no matter what age you are you can always shake things up a little. Don’t do it for the sake of it, but remember that life is change: the more you hold on to it the more quickly it will slip away from you.
Grasp opportunities — but only if they are something you want to do. Just because someone else presents with you with a chance to do something doesn’t mean you have to take that chance. Of course, that depends on you knowing what you want…
To understand what you want, you need to be more reflective. I know it feels like navel-gazing, but without understanding what you want you can never have it. It’s only recently that I’ve understood that failing to think about what you want is really all about being afraid: afraid that if you find what you want, you might not be able to have it.
Academic philosophy is not for you. You’ll find this out of your own accord, of course, and it all turns out absolutely fine. But I think you probably know this already.
Remember that friends are not hot-swappable. Moving away doesn’t have to mean moving on. It will take you a long time to realise how much you miss people but you’ll get there in the end. Getting to it earlier will save you a bit of anguish.
Do more art! Don’t be afraid to call yourself an artist. You can write and you’re a good communicator, but keep practicing. Art is a practice, but that means you have to keep flexing those muscles. Put the words out daily, and never be afraid to show your work in progress.
You’re a good lad, and you are still such a lad in so many ways. Not a boy, not really yet a man, but very definitely a lad.
I would say all the best at this point, but I know that you don’t get all the best. No one does. But I still wish it for you.
So, all the best,
You + 30.
Ambitions
When I left school in 1983 my ambitions boiled down to owning a van and being in a band. The two things were not unconnected: I was a terrible keyboard player (punk, yo) but if I owned a van the band would still need me to cart the equipment around from gig to gig, free festival to free festival.
I never bought a van – in fact, I never learned to drive – but neither did I replace that ambition with another. Leaving school at the age of 16, with four CSEs at the height of Thatcher’s era of mass unemployment basically meant I had no expectation of ever even working. And if I did, it would be a shitty job, probably in a shitty shop. When a local Wickes store opened, I applied and didn’t even get a reply, let alone an interview.
The trajectory of my escape from that world is long and complex and deserves its own piece of writing, but the important point is this: I had no ambitions. Ambitions were something that other people had, but not working class kids from Derby. I had dreams, sure. But there was no possible path from here to there.
Since then, though, ambitions have become the playground of the young, and there’s been an expectation actually rooted in reality that a young person’s ambitions can be fulfilled. You could travel and work in Europe. You could go to university. You could get a job, buy a house, something that so so few of your parents were able to do. Some of these simple things moved from ambitious dreams to expectations.
The past ten years have chipped away at this. A house has become something no one can afford unless they can rely on the bank of mum and dad, while the media bombards you with messages about how it’s your own fault you can’t save a hundred thousand pounds. Jobs which offer long-term careers and progression have been eroded, to the point of destruction. There is no such thing as job security if you are young.
Brexit and COVID, though, have been the twin hammer blows which have destroyed the opportunities of the young. Brexit’s retreat to cosy little Englander fantasies of an idealised 1950s Britain mean putting up borders and robbing the young of a core part of their identity, while reducing the ability of the poorest to up sticks and work wherever they can across the continent. Looking abroad for work was one of the few routes out of Thatcher’s newly-impoverished Britain when I left school, and that option just won’t exist the young poor in a few months time.
But it is probably COVID which will have a longer term impact, and which will break the back of ambition, particularly for those reaching maturity now. In a long and brilliant Twitter thread, David Hayward wrote that “a pandemic is a killer of the dreams of the young” and nothing could be closer to the truth. I have been lucky to live for 53 years in a bubble of safety, with the freedom to roam and to dream. Until we find a vaccine, that freedom is basically gone. Who can have ambitions, who can have dreams, when the next person you meet might be the one that passes on a deadly virus rather than the person who changes your life for the better?