Weeknote, 18th September 2022

This has been a week of tech-futzing and annoyances. I converted my ThinkPad back to running Windows because I was desperate to use Aeon Timeline for part of my writing project. That was a big mistake for two reasons. First, I could have just used my Mac to run it. I have no idea why I didn't just do that. Second, I have really grown to dislike Windows.

Not, I should say, because of the interface. Windows has never looked and worked better overall. Microsoft took the opportunity with Windows 11 to get rid of some of the crufty old settings which hadn't been updated since the Windows 7 era (and in some cases, Windows XP). It's just a lot nicer to use.

However, they are also determined to lock in – sorry, "integrate" – more of their services and software into the operating system. That nifty little widgets panel offers you your task list, in Microsoft To Do. You can see news and weather, but only Microsoft News and Weather. And if you click on a link, it's opening in Edge not your browser of choice.

It's clear that, like Apple, Microsoft sees services as the way to go to build revenue. Making Windows free to update probably still rankles, and they would like some revenue back, please. But that kind of stuff is not for me.

The Mac, too, is frustrating me for a few reasons. Don't get me wrong: there is so much to love about the Mac, and my M1 Mac mini continues to be a delight. But again, it feels like a system that is becoming something Apple controls rather than me controlling it, and when things go wrong they often take far more futzing about to fix than they should.

Case in point: I'm currently sitting in a coffee shop using the very fast internet here to do some big downloads. Except that my Mac won't properly connect to the WiFi. Apple uses its own system process to handle connecting to wireless networks which require authentication, showing you a little mini-window for you to login.

Except that it doesn't always appear. Sometimes, when you have connected using another device, it connects, but doesn't bring up the window – and because the network sees the Mac as another device it doesn't properly connect. It claims to have connected, but it doesn't log in, so you have no connectivity.

Sometimes all you need to do is turn WiFi on and off and it will work properly. Sometimes that doesn't work, and you need to restart. And sometimes, like today, it just will not connect no matter what you do. I have even tried invoking the system application which does the captive WiFi connection, with no result.

There is probably a preference somewhere which will fix this. Maybe there is some cache that needs clearing. But whatever it is, nothing on the internet helps.

That's very different to the world of Linux, where almost every problem you will ever encounter has been solved by someone and documented. The only problem I've ever found which doesn't have a fix is, ironically, running Aeon Timeline in Wine. But to be fair, I never really tried particularly hard – and if I find a solution, you can bet that I'm going to document it.

And I still hate the MacBook Pro keyboard. Yes, I know that new MacBooks have reverted to sane key switches, but when I have tried them they still feel crap to me. Not as crap, but still crap. I'm now used to a mechanical keyboard, and only something as good as the ThinkPad's keyboard suffices on a laptop. I have turned to the dark side.

There is a more serious and less grumpy point to all this. I'm growing increasingly uncomfortable with the integration which Apple and Microsoft are focusing on. It's not that the services are bad – in Apple's case, at least, they are excellent – it's that putting your entire computing life in the hands a single supplier seems like a bad idea. You only need to look at what happened to the man who Google believed had abused his children to see how bad it can get.

And I'm less happy too to have all my documents stored in the cloud. It is hugely convenient. It means that for about a decade I haven't had to think about backing up, as everything is in iCloud or OneDrive and easily accessible. But it also feels like I am putting too much in the hands of companies which I don't really trust.

Thankfully, at some point I have connected my phone to this WiFi and it is happily reconnecting, because the network recognises it. So I downloaded a nearly 6Gb file on my iPhone, and had to transfer it to the Mac later. Thankfully AirDrop did the job well.

So I lost a day to reinstalling Linux. I know. I know. This time, rather than Ubuntu, I went for the Ubuntu-derived Zorin OS. It's designed to be as simple as possible to pick up for Linux novices and I think it hits that mark well. It includes nice little features like making using Windows applications easier by letting you just double-click on an installer while it adds Wine in the background.

This weekend is when the first tranche of new students arrives at the University, so the coffee shop I was writing in is full of parents taking their children for a coffee before they head back to whatever corner of the country they have come from. Outside the window there's the constant bustle of wheeled bags going past, and our close will have more than one car load of people circle round it, with a parent saying "I don't think this is the university…" before going back and finding the real thing. We should put up a sign.

It's fun listening to the guy who works here ask each parent in turn if they have had far to come, telling them there's more seating downstairs, pointing them in the direction of the shop or the library or Sainsbury or wherever they are off to next. Then there are the small groups of students who are obviously new, meeting for the first time and going for a coffee to chat. Or to sit awkwardly in semi-silence.

It brings back memories of my own first trip to college when my dad drove me down to Hatfield. Unlike many families I see, my mother didn't make the journey: she was upset that the last of her babies was leaving home, and didn't want me to see her cry. She also gave my dad strict instructions that he was not to use the M1 and to use the A1 instead, because motorway drivers were madmen and she didn't want him to drive at the crazy speed of 70 miles an hour.

Writing

This has been a terrible writing week. I have struggled to get my head down and write. I don't have any excuses: I have a good idea where the story is going and I have had the time available to keep writing, but I just… haven't.

Reading and watching

Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is actually very good. The characters and (especially) plot are better than Tolkien, who I tried to reread a while ago and found dreadful. Like a lot of people I read Lord of the Rings young, and raced through all three books in a week or two. I vividly remember staying up late and reading it in bed, gripped by it.

Sadly I haven't retained that love – or perhaps I have just grown into better writing.

On Michael Moorcock

I once wrote a letter to Michael Moorcock. I have no idea how I found some kind of address for him -- possibly via the Hawkwind fan club I was a member of -- but found it I did. And sometime later, he was kind enough to write back.

I have almost no recollection of what I asked him (probably something trivial about Elric), but I recall that I had asked him if he would read a story I had written. He politely declined, explaining that not reading other writers' unpublished work was his number one rule. I think he said something encouraging about continuing to write.

There was, of course, a certain element of teenage braggadocio involved in this. I had not written a story at all. In fact, I had never written a story, not a word of fiction. But I reckoned that if Moorcock did want to have a read of something, I could probably rattle something out fairly sharpish and get it back to him. How hard could it be?

Moorcock has remained one of the touchstone writers of my life, and his Dancers at the End of Time trilogy (and associated short stories) remains a sequence of books that I return to repeatedly. His association with New Worlds also connected me to Ballard, M John Harrison, Samuel Delaney and many others I have read throughout my life.

There are three lessons that I learned from Moorcock.

Don't let the confines of genre bind you

Moorcock is a genre writer, with much of his output coming from fantasy and science fiction's weirder end. However, he hasn't let himself be limited to this, playing with the forms of the modern novel and writing things which have as much in common with Iain Sinclair as Edgar Rice-Burroughs. His real theme isn't fantasy, but the fantastical, something which can be found in everyday life.

Tolkien was the worst thing to happen to fantasy

I might be exaggerating: I am sure that even Moorcock would say that other writers (cough Hubbard, Lovecraft cough) were worse people and worse writers. But, while acknowledging Tolkien was a pleasant enough man and very welcoming towards him when they met, he certainly had no time for Tolkien's fiction:

"It would be the same if we were talking about Warwick Deeping or RC Sherriff. It's the British character sentimentalised, the illusion of decency, that whole nonsense of 'no British boy would do this sort of thing'. It was also the tone of the BBC when I was growing up. I hated it.

Middle Earth is a place which celebrates the pre-industrial hobbits while the rabble -- the orcs -- are notable only for their brutality. When Saruman's orcs are creating machinery, they are a pretty thinly disguised analogue of the industrial working class. But they are regarded as brutes, and their enslavement by Saruman is barely acknowledged.

It took me a long time to realise how odious Lord of the Rings was: Moorcock led the way.

Write, write and keep writing - but plan first

In his early years, Moorcock was capable of writing 15,000 words in a day , an insane amount of words unless you're writing something that is unpublishable. Not only was his writing publishable, but it was also published.

How did he maintain that pace? As he told Hari Kunzru, mostly, it was all in the planning:

"It's all planning. I'd have been in bed for three days, during which I've had time to sketch out the story. Then I spring out of bed and I've got a straight nine to five – or nine to six or seven – regime, which frequently includes taking the kids to school, then I just sit down and go through with an hour break for lunch. When you write that fast the book really does start to write you, you get high on the book. It's partly lack of sleep, it's partly the sugar – in my case I only had strong black coffee because it kept me going."

Leaving Ulysses?

I wrote a little about this in my weeknote but I thought it was worth expanding a little on why I'm looking at Obsidian as a potential replacement for Ulysses.

I've used Ulysses since it first came out, and it is my favourite writing tool. I love the way it lets you break down writing into smaller more manageable chunks, as well as its focus and typewriter modes and its ability to tag and organise your work. It can also publish straight to a WordPress blog or export into virtually any format you want, which is the icing on the cake.

The part that I don't like is the way Ulysses stores your work. Yes, underneath everything, it's Markdown. But it's stored in iCloud, and the files aren't exposed -- they're hidden inside a library. I have enough experience trying to get large amounts of content out of cryptic file stores to be wary of anything which complicates the file structure.

Case in point: Apple's Photos app. The photos themselves are hidden inside a library. You can export them from Photos -- Apple makes this commendably easy -- but in practice, for a library of any size this kind of export is impossible. I tried exporting around 10,000 images, and after a while, Photos just crapped out. Perhaps that was unsurprising, given it had started to use around 80Gb of virtual memory (it's a testament to Apple's system design that it had gotten that far).

The last thing I want is my writing to suffer the same fate. My writing is probably even more important to me than my photos. I have often found inspiration in going back and finding old writing, reworking and polishing it, and publishing. I also use Ulysses for storing notes and what I call "fragments" -- little notes usually from real life about places, people and things I see. Often these will end up in later work, which is really important. I don't want to lose them to weird data corruption affecting an undocumented and obscure library.

Coupled with this, Ulysses is an Apple platform-only application. That's fine if you want to use Mac, iPad and iPhone all the time, but that's not how I tend to work. Since I bought my ThinkPad X1 Carbon last year, it has been my preferred laptop, running either Windows or Linux, because it combines good (matte) 14in screen, performance and battery life, and its fantastic keyboard. Going back to using my 16-in MacBook Pro after working on the ThinkPad is torture for my poor fingers.

I really want Ulysses, but working on any platform and using just plain Markdown files in a folder structure. The good thing is there is something which comes close to being exactly that: Obsidian.

Obsidian is best known for being part of the wave of personal knowledge management applications that allow you to use two-way linking between documents to create a knowledge graph based on what you read and write. However, it's also possible to use it to create a simple but powerful writing environment.

Setting up for writing

Obsidian isn't known for being a writing environment. It's designed as a notetaking application, and out of the box that's what it's set up to do: text notes linked together with two-way links. Turning it into a replacement for Ulysses takes some setup.

The good news is that several people have gone down this path already. Curtis McHale has written and created YouTube videos on all the things you need to do to get Obsidian into shape as a writing environment, and the folks at The Sweet Setup have also trod this path.

You will want to install a few add-ons to make it work. I won't go into how you enable third-party add-ons, as there are plenty of guides to doing this, but here are all the ones that I have found useful.

Longform

This is a great addon, still very much in beta, which recreates Scrivener and Ulysses' ability to let you re-order scenes and then export them into a single draft. I'm sure there's more to come from this plugin, but it's already a lifesaver that makes it possible to use Obsidian for long-form writing.

Pandoc

Pandoc lets you export into various formats, including Word, PDF, and much more. You will need this if you send your work off to publishers or editors. You will need to install Pandoc on your computer first (sadly, it won't work with mobile devices).

Templater

Templater lets you create templates which include variables. I use it to make templates for regular posts, such as the one for my weeknote, which includes the date in its title.

Typewriter Scroll

I love typewriter scrolling -- it's one of my favourite features of Ulysses. This keeps the line you're typing in the middle of the screen rather than gradually moving down towards the bottom. This plugin also has a neat focus mode which greys out paragraphs you're not working on, allowing you better focus.

Word sprint

This plug adds a sidebar which gives you a Pomodoro timer for your work and prompts you to keep writing. It's a little bit annoying, but if you're the kind of person (like me) who occasionally stops writing to stare into space, it will keep you on the right path.

Readwise integration

One plugin I thought deeply about using was the one that offers integration with Readwise. I've been a Readwise user for quite a while, with all of my annotations, highlights and comments from applications like Kindle, Matter, Pocket and more going into it. It's a great tool for storing all that kind of information. The plugin downloads all your notes in a handy format into a folder in your Obsidian vault.

Having all my highlights and notes from Readwise integrated into the application I write in is incredibly powerful. It means that all the quotes which I might refer to are easily found and linked to, and because Obsidian allows you to split the screen and use two documents at the same time you can easily refer to a note about a source while you are writing.

Overall…

Can Obsidian really replace Ulysses? The initial signs are promising. Today, I have written over two thousand words and published a blog post which isn't bad going. I'll probably save this to publish another time, which means I will have another post in the bag.

The real test for me will be when I start writing fiction with it. So far, I have used Scrivener or Ulysses for my fiction: Obsidian could, in theory, replace both. It can also become where I put all those fragments of writing I mentioned. I'm certainly going to give it a go and see if it really works for me.

Google isn't bored of Android

John Gruber, writing about Counterpoint Research's note that iPhone has overtake Android in US usage share:

I also continue to think Google is bored with Android. Two years ago I wrote: Do you get the sense that Google, company-wide, is all that interested in Android? I don’t. Both as the steward of the software platform and as the maker of Pixel hardware, it seems like Google is losing interest in Android. Flagship Android hardware makers sure are interested in Android, but they can’t move the Android developer ecosystem — only Google can. Apple, institutionally, is as attentive to the iPhone and iOS as it has ever been. I think Google, institutionally, is bored with Android. Nothing in the last two years has changed my mind on that. Android is certainly still a thing for Google. It’s a priority. But it’s nowhere near the top of Google’s priorities. Nothing ranks higher amongst Apple’s priorities than the iPhone and iOS. Year after year, that difference in prioritization adds up.

There's clearly a difference in importance between Apple and Google. Google created Android initially because it feared a Microsoft-dominated mobile world where the big beast of Redmond could lock them out of the nascent smartphone ads market. Apple created the iPhone to be the next big thing, something they could charge their usual margins of 30%+ on hardware.

But saying Google is "bored" of Android is wide of the mark. Both Android 13 and the forthcoming iOS 16 are similar in the way they fill in the gaps. Neither offers anything radical. Apple is revamping the lock screen, which is nice but overdue. Google extends its nice "Material You" tricks, which balance the interface's colours with the wallpaper.

Both operating systems have really reached what you might call the Windows 7 era: users don't particularly want radical change because they like the way things work now. And neither Apple nor Google is inclined to make their own Windows 8…

Weeknote, Sunday 4th September 2022

I spent yesterday at Interesting 2022, organised by the redoubtable Russell (Not T) Davies. Of course, the talks were all great, but it was also nice to bump into friends I hadn't seen for a while, including Phil Gyford, Nick Ludlam, Zelda Rhiando, Matt Jones, John Willshire and many others. And it was great to finally meet Purplesime too.

This was the first time I've been out to any conference-style event since before the pandemic started, and it was a reminder of all the things that COVID robbed us of. Seeing friends, listening to talks, having fun -- all the kinds of social stuff that previously were part of everyday life just vanished for a while. And, worse: it takes time to get used to doing them again. It's not just a case of returning to normal, as the "new normal" was something we all got used to.

Afterwards, we took a long stroll down to the South Bank and went for a drink in the Royal Festival Hall. It wasn't the first time I've been to the RFH since the "official" end of the pandemic, but it was great to go up to the member's bar and look out over the Thames, something I used to do a lot when I worked just across the river.

I've been trying out Obsidian for my writing. My favourite writing app is Ulysses, but it has two issues: it's only available on Apple devices and stores its files in an opaque way on iCloud. I would like something that's cross-platform and which uses plain simple files in a regular directory -- and Obsidian fits the bill for this. I tried it out a couple of years ago and didn't like it because of its lack of a proper live preview as you write (unlike my friend Jason Snell I don't want to see the Markdown all the time).

The way I tend to work involves a lot of quick note-taking. I have always been a jotter, writing down descriptions of people, places and events and quickly putting down any ideas I have. This is mostly out of necessity: I have a terrible memory. I always have thought it's one of the reasons I made a good news writer because my bad memory meant I had to quickly get into the habit of writing everything down.

This means a good mobile client is essential, and Obsidian has one. It lacks Ulysses' integration with the share sheet, but I have other tools I can use to save items, which means they end up in Obsidian.

Out of the box, though, Obsidian is a pretty poor writing environment. It lacks things I have come to rely on, like focus and typewriter writing modes, the ability to export as Word documents, and even the ability to break down a piece of writing into sections, dragging and dropping them into the right order. This last one is absolutely essential for fiction, where I tend to write in small discreet scenes.

The good news is that Obsidian is infinitely extensible using plugins and has a great community behind it who have built almost everything you could want. There's a Longform plugin which lets you write and reorder scenes. There are typewriter scrolling and focus modes and Pandoc for exporting in virtually any format you could want. There are even plugins for footnotes and activity trackers so you can keep an eye on writing progress.

One thing I definitely like is the way you can use templates in Obsidian. It's a very powerful system that, with the addition of the Templater add-on, lets us use things like variables in a template.

If you are considering using Obsidian for more than just note-taking, I recommend Curtis McHale's site. Curtis has done a huge amount of work digging through the plugins and has many videos recommending the best stuff for writers, whether you're creating long or short form, fiction or non-fiction.

Writing

  • About 750 words on a short story which has been newly renamed Abigail Harvey returns home. It's a short story about a woman's relationship with her mother. It's been fun writing fiction!

Reading and watching

We finally got around to watching the new Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power series on Amazon last night and you can see where the money is going. It was, in almost every sense, epic. And that might be why I found it a little hard to engage with: it's all a little overwhelming at this point.

I'm still reading Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, a wonderful exposition on writing and life that I would highly recommend.

Please won't someone stop the bullshit about RCS?

I am so tired of how tech sites preach the gospel of RCS as the "solution" to interoperability between messaging on Android and iOS, based on nothing more than parroting Google's "talking points".

Android Police:

Google is also calling attention to the fact that SMS and MMS are older and less secure than the RCS standard that's now common on Android phones: While one-on-one RCS conversations are encrypted, SMS and MMS conversations aren't.

The RCS standard- which Apple could adopt as an additional layer of fallback for messages- does not include support for end-to-end encryption in single or group chats. Instead, Google has built its own proprietary encryption extensions on RCS. Unfortunately, they only work if you use Google servers for messaging and with Google's Messages app. Although Google has published top-level technical papers, there is no way that open clients, or Apple, can support Google's proprietary encryption at this point.

The comments on that Android Police article prove just how well Google's PR campaign is landing with some -- and how important it is for tech sites to start getting this right. The comments are full of people talking about how Apple is stopping messages from being secure by not adopting RCS as if it was part of the open standard that Apple could adopt.

Now, of course, I am sure Google would be "happy to work with" Apple to support its proprietary encryption. But that would mean Apple effectively handing over control over messaging standards not to a standards body but to Google. Anyone who thinks that is likely to happen doesn't know Apple. And anyone who says it should happen doesn't don't know Google.

Google wants to encourage the adoption of RCS because it offers another platform for advertising. And although messages sent between Android users (using Google's app) are encrypted, and Google can't read the content, it can track who you are messaging, which gives it a significant data point about who your social circle is. In addition, that gives it data about the strength of relationships in your social graph, which it hasn't had much insight into since the decline of email as a personal communication method.

Adopting RCS, of course, also counters the real target of Google's strategy here: Meta. WhatsApp is wildly popular, particularly outside the US, and Meta bought it in the first place to get access to that social graph data about who you message most often. So Google needs a counter, and RCS adoption -- with its proprietary extensions -- is what it is pinning its hopes on.

Miscellany, 6th August

Web3 provides both anonymity and accountability, they said. It has its own built-in protections against bad actors, they said. Oops.


It's usually worth watching Windows Weekly, but this week included a long section on how Microsoft just can't get Windows releases right -- the cadence, how it communicates, everything. It's well worth a look.


Speaking of classic Microsoft idiocy, its (very nice) little video editor Clipchamp used to have three paid tiers plus a limited free version. That was too complex; rightly, it has hacked that back to a single subscription price.

Unfortunately, that price is $11.99 a month, and you will need to link your account to a Microsoft account. It's a nice product. But it's not a $143.88 per year product.

Meanwhile, iMovie continues to be completely free on Mac, iPadOS and iOS. Clips is completely free on iOS and iPadOS. Clips even uses Lidar to let you put 3D objects in your videos.

That $148 a year probably adds up to the difference in price between a Mac and a PC over three years, too.

Microsoft really is clueless sometimes.


But don't leap too quickly into AppleWorld. Here's Apple again putting ordinary people's rights in fifth place behind its need to placate the PRC, its need to make 40%+ margins on everything, freedom of speech and human rights in general. Privacy is guaranteed -- as long as you're not Chinese. Remember when they hid the Taiwan flag from customers in Hong Kong?

Miscellany, August 3rd 2022

Apple is delaying the launch of iPadOS 16 until October, a month after the launch of iOS 16. If you have used the beta this might not surprise you: Stage Manager, particularly when used with an external display, is an absolute buggy mess. Ex-Microsoft Windows head Steven Sinofsky thinks this isn't down to a single feature, because you don't delay a whole release for just one thing, but I disagree: get Stage Manager right, and it's a huge step forward in using an iPad as your only device. Get it wrong, and it would be a big step backwards.


I genuinely thought that Microsoft Teams was already optimised for Apple Silicon, so it's a bit of a surprise that it is only just releasing a native binary. It's also a testament to how well Rosetta 2 performs.


Alex Jones had a very bad day.


Academic publisher Pearson has a plan to somehow use NFTs to remove students' right to resell their books without giving them more money. This sounds like absolute hogwash to me, but I'm sure the markets like it.

A collection of miscellany - 2nd August 2022

You know how websites want you to use their app instead? There's a good reason for that: apps can often collect more data about you, and are more difficult to block. Banish is a Safari extension which stops this happening. Neat.


Outlook: an app so bad that Uber receipts can crash it. Microsoft is apparently working on a fix.


Not content with having a webcam that looks like ass, it sounds (sic) like the audio on the £1600 Apple Studio Display has issues too. Glad I didn't buy one.


Google has a habit of introducing stuff and then quietly forgetting about it -- and its hardware is no exception. My personal favourite was Soli, which I thought was genuinely useful but was dead in a year.


Paul Carr -- who knew the man well -- has an interesting review of a new book on Tony Hsieh, the troubled founder of Zappos. Incidentally, The Upgrade is one of my favourite books and I'm long overdue for a reread.

Stuff I’ve been reading today: 29th May 2022 edition

Google has delayed its third party cookie ban till 2024. Of course, all this is doing is just giving browser makers even more reason to work preventing third party cookies from working at all.


Meanwhile, Intel has seen its revenues fall by 22% year on year. It is blaming a 10% drop in PC sales, although it’s also worth remembering that the PC had a big boom over the past couple of years as people moved to working from home and companies raced to equip previously office-bound employees with laptops. Apple stopping using their chips won’t have helped either — by any measure, Apple is a top-five PC maker.


Apple now has 860m subscribers across its services. This is an insane number of people for a company which isn’t really a cloud provider except to people owning its devices.


And another NFT scam turns to be, well, a scam. This time it’s some bros claiming to save the rainforest using the power of the blockchain:

According to the MPF, members of Indigenous groups in the area reported the company had violated their rights. They also explained that Nemus had expressed to them their plans to use heavy machinery to open an airstrip and build a road in order to access Brazil nut groves in the area.


One of the most hilarious moments of Web3 insanity is winding down, as the nerds who bought a book for $3m have finally admitted to themselves what everyone else knew: just because you own a book doesn’t mean you own the copyright.


In another “let’s get our priorities right” moment, demand for electricity for data centres is now so high that no new houses can be built in parts of London. I mean, it’s only people, right? Who cares if they want somewhere to live?


I had forgotten that Amazon Drive existed, so it shutting down isn’t exactly a loss.


I am really not sure that a 41.5% margin is something that’s good for society.


Twitter Blue – which isn’t even launched in the UK yet – is raising its price in the US from $2.99 a month to $4.99. There is nothing in the product at this point which is even remotely worth $4.99.


Meanwhile I’m reading Ruthanna Emrys’ A Half-built Garden and after a slightly slow start it’s really drawing me in. I’m not going to write too much about it till it’s finished, but Cory’s review is here if you want some persuading.

What I’ve been reading today: Firefox, Spotify sucks, spoken word recording and combat drones

The latest version of Firefox includes better support for ProMotion displays, for those lucky lucky people who have a new 14- or 16-in MacBook Pro.

You’ve probably heard about Amazon’s Ring handing over video doorbell footage to police without a warrant. Turns out that the terms of service for Google Nest allows them to do the same thing. Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video on the other hand is end-to-end encrypted so Apple can’t do this, even if it wanted to.

Spotify Car Thing, a product which should never have crawled out of a company brainstorming session, has been unceremoniously dumped after just five months on sale. I avoid Spotify like the plague because I don’t want a penny of my money to the odious Joe Rogan.

I asked the wonderful Mr Christopher Phin for some advice on an audio setup for recording books (not for me, I should add). Needless to say, he massively overdelivered and wrote the definitive post on what you need to record spoken word.

Remember the Bayraktar TB2 combat drone which Ukraine used to such good effect in the early stages of their war against Russia? Russia wants to buy them. It will be interesting to see if Turkey – a NATO country – sell them (or more likely, find a third party country to ship them to or manufacture them under license, which then sells them to Russia).

Boris Johnson is an evasive weasel. Nothing more needs to be said on that score.

Some people really do want their Instagram back

Taylor Lorenz has written a piece on why you don’t want the old Instagram back and I couldn’t disagree more with it.

No really, a lot of people do want the old Instagram. Insta became a great space for visual artists who adopted the platform as the de facto place where they show their work and build community it.

People think that bringing back the "old" Instagram design, or a chronological feed will somehow recapture the magic of using Instagram in 2014. It won't. That time is gone and the internet and culture have irrevocably changed. Most importantly, how and what we want to share on the internet has changed.

What Taylor is missing here is that Instagram was always a place for discovery in a way which was controlled by the user. TikTok gives you little control over what you see: the algorithm decides that for you in a way which is much more opaque than even Facebook’s much-maligned news feed. Facebook at least has a notion of what kinds of content is important to you: birthdays, babies, weddings, and all the major events of life. TikTok? Not so much

These days, intimacy is fostered through features like DMs, group chats, or ephemeral posts to Close Friends.

Except that intimacy needs to start somewhere. And that somewhere can’t, by definition, be a DM.

Spaces which are private like the ones Taylor is describing have only two kinds of relationship in them: the already-established relationship between people who already know each other from elsewhere, or the relationship between an advertiser who has paid to be in that space and the people in it.

People think that bringing back the "old" Instagram design, or a chronological feed will somehow recapture the magic of using Instagram in 2014. It won't. That time is gone and the internet and culture have irrevocably changed.

Culture is not monolithic: platforms have many forms of users, and users find the use for platforms – not the other way round.

This piece is a great example of the tech journalism communities obsession with the newest latest smartest thing, with destroying the old no matter what the cost. And it’s just wrong.

Weeknote Sunday 24th July

“The hottest day of my life so far” is an event which should cluster in your childhood. I suspect that for the next few years we will see quite a cluster for most older people too. The long stretches of time when the weather stayed about the same and very hot days were exceptional look like they’re over.

It’s really been a week where, if you’re paying attention, you’re likely to get quite depressed about the state of the world. Climate fucked, politics fucked, climate even more fucked because the politics is fucked. War in Europe… Roe vs Wade in the US. You name it, it looks like humanity is in a bad shape.

Normally the best advice for the kind of depression all this engenders is to get into the outdoors and enjoy the sunshine. But when one of the reasons for your depression is the parlous state of the climate, even that advice is hollow.

It’s tough. The only thing to do is look after those close to you and do what you want you can for the world.

This week though we have at least had the pleasure of a dog’s company. Laika, who has now become a regular house guest when her owner is away, is a two year old spaniel, which is quite a contrast from our old dog Zoey, who was a sedate 16 year old rescue dog. There is much more licking of feet and (if she can get to them) noses.

Yesterday we went down to Folkestone to see a friend’s gallery exhibition. I like Folkestone: it has the same feel as Brighton had when I first started going there in the early 90s, and when I moved to it in 1998. Empty buildings, ripe for use for culture. Art thrives in the liminal spaces at the edges of things, which is why towns on the physical periphery of the island often end up full of art. Artists are the flotsam that the land washes up on the borders of the sea.

Meanwhile I have been transferring documents from the cloud on to the local drive of my ThinkPad. I have mixed feelings now about cloud services. It’s not that I don’t trust them, but when your documents exist only on a hard drive elsewhere in the internet they cease to be yours in some intangible but undoubtedly real way. I should write something about it: this is part philosophical, part political and part purely practical.

Weeknote, Sunday 3 July 2022

Some weeks fly by and leave you feeling that nothing has been done. Unfortunately, this is one of those weeks. While I'm sure that if I looked back through my calendar and plotted the meetings I've had and the places I've been, I would feel like the days had been packed, without doing that, I'm left with the thought that nothing much happened.

Work-wise, that's not true: I spent two days this week in extensive workshops on a couple of projects. The travel involved (both were early starts up in Peterborough, a two-and-a-half-hour journey from home) also knocked out a lot of my spare time. Even if you're getting home on time and the travelling is easy (it is), it's wearing. Even quiet reading becomes a chore if you're mentally exhausted.

June and July always feel like the sluggish months of the year for me, when the heat of the day saps my energy. Unfortunately, my Indian DNA doesn't give me the gift of coping well in hot weather: instead, my father's midlands genes kick in, and I feel like I'm wading through treacle. And apart from the absolute soaking I got cycling down to the station on Thursday morning, the warm weather doesn't offer much relief.

Writing has been minimal, reading also, but we finished watching Danny Boyle's Pistol. Unfortunately, the last couple of episodes lost their way a bit. Having focused on humour and fun in the first few, it was hard to turn it around when things got darker later. The murder of Nancy by Sid and Sid's subsequent death just don't lend themselves to lightness. Looking at the series as a whole, the episode which focuses on the back story to the song "Bodies" is the pivot: things got a bit scary for the Pistols, and the series reflects that. All that said, the performances are great: no one looks like their character physically, but absolutely nails the characteristics.

Weeknote, Sunday 26th June 2022

This has not been much of a week. I missed last week's week note because I was sick: I had been coughing for a few days and generally felt tired and run down. I managed to work through it from Monday to Wednesday, but Thursday decided that I had to take a day off work in the hope that a bit of rest would set me back on my feet. In fact, Friday was worse. The cough continued and I felt absolutely exhausted.

This has been affecting Kim too and at one point on Friday we had decided that this might be something which only antibiotics were going to clear, and so we would call the doctor today (our doctor doesn't work weekends, but there are emergency services in place). I even looked up what the symptoms were of TB. That's how bad I felt.

On Friday night I had a terrible night's sleep, unable to sleep until about 2am, but on Saturday morning I woke up and for the first time in a week felt vaguely human. I am still not entirely well, but I don't feel the kind of levels of awful that I didn't. I am still coughing, but instead of being a long, hacking thing it's now, as the doctors say, "productive" – a sign, I'm told, of being on the mend.

And that meant that finally – after what seems like but probably wasn’t a whole week of being cooped up – I got to go out, down to Whitstable for a couple of hours. First coffee in Blueprint, which has both good coffee and the kind of tiny collection of well-curated books which makes me whimper with delight, and then to Harbour Books.

Harbour is probably my favourite bookshop in the world. Its collection is incredibly well pieced together, with particular prominence to women writers of all kinds. It’s the first general bookshop I’ve seen where there are more women authors on display than men, and that’s incredibly gratifying. What I love about it is that I’m absolutely certain to find a book in there I have not heard of but instantly want to read, often from a new author.

All this lead to a couple of hours of pleasure: sitting in the garden on a bright evening, with a cup of tea and a book to read.

My view from a garden chair (book missing)

Reading

Buyer Beware by Sian Conway-Wood. There are lots of slightly hokey books that I’ve read about consuming less. This is the first one which I’ve seen which not only tackles how to consume less, but looks at both the psychological tricks which manufacturers and retailers used to get you to consume more and takes a view on the way that capitalism itself is structured.

Next in the never-ending book stack is Julian Barnes’ Elizabeth Finch, which I’m actively having to stop myself from diving into instantly (“finish the book you’re reading first, Betteridge!”). You probably already know Barnes is a great writer, but if you don’t, then you really need to know it. There’s an old phrase from Clive James who wrote “all I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light”, and although James was writing about himself (writing about himself was really most of what he did) it could have been about Barnes.

Writing…

Very much curtailed this week. Writing is one of the things which suffers badly when I’m ill, particularly when I’m trying to fight through it and work. If I work when I’m ill, which I did for the first three days of the week, then I don’t have any energy at all to write in the evening.

What I did manage to write on Saturday was a small wall of angry social media posts. The demise of Roe vs Wade in the US affects many friends and hundreds of millions of women, and it fills my heart with anger and sadness. It put me in mind of Peggy Seeger’s Song of Choice:

In January you've still got the choice

You can cut the weeds before they start to bud

If you leave them to grow high they'll silence your voice

And in December you may pay with your blood…

The weeds are all around us and they're growing

It'll soon be too late for the knife

If you leave them on the wind that around the world is blowing

You may pay for your silence with your life

We – I – believed for far too long that the progress we had made on women’s rights, gay rights, trans rights, the rights of minorities was part of a forward march of progress which could never be revoked. Roe vs Wade is the first large-scale unwinding of that, the literal cancelling of a fundamental right for women. We didn’t cut the weeds of fascism early enough, and now we have to work harder to clear them before, as Peggy wrote, it’s too late for the knife.

Watching…

Pistol, Danny Boyle’s utterly brilliant and completely batshit story of the Sex Pistols. What Boyle has done is great: taken fragments of Steve Jones’ book Lonely Boy and turned them into poignant little moments in motion.

Weeknote, Sunday 12th June 2022

One of the many useful things about writing a week note is it give you a regular reminder that life is as much about doing as thinking about doing. But this week has been a lot of watching and tinkering: with WWDC happening and new releases of iOS, iPadOS and macOS, my inner nerd has emerged like a raging hulk.

Every year I tell myself I won’t race to install the first developer releases of all the new operating systems. Every year, within 24 hours, I’ve become too excited to wait until the public betas. This year was no exception, particularly because the new version of iPadOS offers the feature which I have been wanting for years: proper support for second monitors.

And Stage Manager for iPadOS really will be that most clichéd of things: a game changer, at least for me. I have preferred using the iPad as a device over the Mac for years. However, I haven’t been able to do use it as my main machine because it doesn’t work on a screen size that I’m comfortable using for a long time.

I’m not going to write in detail about iPadOS 16 just yet — I think it deserves a post of its own — but this year might be the one where I finally give up on having a Mac laptop and just use the iPad as my portable Apple device. There are drawbacks, even though the software is almost in the right place, but the advantages now eclipse those drawbacks.

Reading

I’ve gone back to one of my most annoying reading habits: being unable to settle on what book I want to read next, so bouncing from book to book without really feeling I’m achieving much reading. So this week I’m going to settle on A. L. Kennedy’s On Writing, which I have been flirting with for a while.

Writing

In a massively mediated society, understanding how media works is incredibly important if people are to avoid being controlled by what they read, see and hear. I have worked in publishing now for 27 years, which always feels weird when I say it, so I have picked up a lot about how media works.

This is why I’m on a bit of a mission to educate people more about publishing in general and reporting and editing in particular. It struck me when reading Twitter that most people don’t understand what an “editorial line” is and how it interacts with what you see and hear. So I wrote something on what an editorial line is, to hopefully help people understand it a bit more.

Watching

If you haven’t watched the first episode of Ms Marvel, you are missing out on a treat. I think of it and Wandavision as the opposite ends of the scale for how Marvel treats its TV shows. Wandavision was incredibly clever and genuinely frightening, with an impact across the whole of the MCU. Ms Marvel is funny, smart, and endearing. After the mess that was Moon Knight, it’s a great comeback.

Meanwhile, on the internet…

The situation at the Washington Post with reporters attacking each other on social media sounds like an absolute mess. I have an elementary rule about work and social media: I don’t talk about work on social media. I don’t even mention the business I work for on social media. Same rules here: I’ll never talk about my work.

Occasionally, that makes writing these week notes challenging! I spend 37.5 hours of every week working, none of which I will talk about here. That, at least, means I have to push myself to talk about the more personal side of my life.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Londoners don’t particularly want to return to the office. I’m not surprised at all — the notion of going to a place to work is weird unless your work physical requires you to be there. For any kind of what we used to call “knowledge worker”, who spends their life on a computer all day, the internet makes that pointless. Rethinking the role of the office is vital, but the government can also play a part by improving and cutting the cost of public transport.

What is an "editorial line"?

Journalism isn't the most transparent of trades. And a trade it is -- despite the best efforts of all involved in my working education, I'll never think of journalism as a profession. But like all trades, it has its methods and modes of action, and people who aren't journalists often don't know what they are. One of the elements we don't talk about is the editorial line, what it is, and how it manifests itself in publications.

An editorial line is a set of beliefs about what is essential to your audience and desires to make that audience understand that certain things are important. Good journalism is balancing the two. Journalism which is only about what the audience cares about, is really just entertainment. Journalism which is only about what you believe is vital for the audience to start thinking about, is really just propaganda.

Editorial lines have an impact in two places. First, there's the selection of stories you choose to publish. "Magazine" comes from the Middle French word "magasin", which means a warehouse or store, and like a warehouse, it's a collection of disparate things chosen by humans. And, also like a warehouse, it's not finite: you can't publish every possible story. So instead, you must decide what stories to put together in your collection. So you are always choosing which stories to publish based on that balance of what the audience wants and what you believe is important for the audience to know or believe.

The second place the editorial line manifests is in the angle of the story. Every story has an angle, a direction which the writer wishes to take the reader along. Although the first duty of any reporter is to report the facts, you can't write all the facts: facts are interlinked and often rely on more facts to prove they are true. So you have to choose what facts to report.

And, of course, you have to interest the reader, which means moving them along in the story, keeping them engaged with it as you go. This is why salaciously-written stories are often so successful: salacious comes from the word salire, which means to leap on something with lust. Salire is also the root of salient, as in "the salient point" -- something all good reporters get to as quickly as possible to draw the reader into the story.

How you draw people into a story -- how you choose which points are salient, whether something needs to be salacious, and so on -- depends on the editorial line. But, of course, you might not have an explicit editorial line on every topic. Still, you have a good idea of what the audience is interested in, which is how the audience feels about the world and what things your publication believes they need to care about more (or less). Based on that, you can understand what points are salient to them in a story.

Are editorial lines set by the politics of the owner and editor? Partly: but more important in any publication is the politics of the intended audience. Remember, you're not trying to brainwash them: if you are, then you are propagandists, not journalists.

Weeknote, Sunday 5th June 2022

This might be abbreviated as we have just returned from spending a long weekend camping with some lovely friends. Memo to self: take more pillows. And a titanium back. Oh, and of course, it rained, because this is England in June. I am fond of camping, though, at least the whole sitting outside with a campfire reading a book bit.

Apparently, there was some kind of jubilee celebration too? Must have missed it.

After much fooling around, I managed to get Scrivener 3 working on Linux via Wine. In theory, this should be easy, but there are a lot of configuration bits and pieces to go through to make it work, and annoyingly the articles which tell you how to do it have some minor errors in the options they suggest. Now I've got it done, though. I have been able to completely nuke the Windows partition from my ThinkPad, as there are no other Windows applications I need to use on it.

Watching

Episode three -- sorry, "Part III" -- of Obi-Wan Kenobi was OK. I'm not really getting drawn into it, which has been true of quite a few of the Netflix/Disney+/Amazon Prime series. I haven't even really got into the second series of Russian Doll. Maybe it's me?

Reading

While spending time stuck in a tent, I finished Neal Asher's Weaponized. Asher's speciality is space opera on the cusp of horror, with a different take on what a post-scarcity society run by AIs would look like compared with Banks' Culture. In this one, Asher comes back to a theme that he used in his first novel, Gridlinked -- that of what it might be like to be so altered by technology that you start to lose your humanity. Where Gridlinked looked at this from the perspective of computing tech, this time around, it's about genetic engineering of a sort.

If you've read and liked Asher before, you'll enjoy this one, but parts of it definitely felt like Asher-by-numbers, and I'd like to see him abandon the Polity Universe -- although he would probably end up suffering the same experience as Gary Gibson, dropped by his publisher after he started writing novels which weren't like his Shoal sequence:

The thing I learned writing for Pan Mac was that publishers expect you to write books as much like each other as possible. In many ways, this actually makes sound business sense. It means readers come to you seeking the specific type of experience you can provide them with, and it also makes it easier to market you. You always knew with an Iain M. Banks Culture novel what you were going to get. Ditto with an Peter F. Hamilton book, or even a Clive Cussler book, and so on and so on.

My problem was that no one fucking told me this, so I had to figure it out largely for myself. Unfortunately, I had a problem: I get bored easily. Worse, while I have no trouble generating story ideas, they aren't automatically ideas that fit in the context of starship+aliens+space travel. Or rather, I had plenty of mediocre ideas for space operas, but brilliant ideas for entirely different kinds of books.

Having read that and Alistair Reynolds' Eversion in a row, it's time for a change of tack, and I'm not sure what I'll read next. I might finish off D. B. C. Pierre's Release the bats, which is about as far away as you can get from space and aliens.

Weeknote, Sunday 29th May

Three days in the office this week! THREE WHOLE DAYS. Commuting is such an odd thing: spending an hour on a train to get to a place where you do the work that — mostly — you could also do at home.

One positive thing is that it means I get to cycle down to the station, which is both physical and mental exercise for me. The physical bit is when I come back –– uphill all the way –– and the mental part is mainly on the way down.

I changed the setup for my desk (again). Having a monitor in front of the windows on my desk is efficient, but it feels like I’m blocking out the view. And what is the point of having a window if you don’t enjoy the view?

Next weekend we are off camping with friends so obviously we had to go out today and buy about £200’s worth of camping equipment to replace the things we have either lost or broken since the last time we camped. That was for a festival… four years ago. FOUR WHOLE YEARS.

Reading

I finished Tripp Mickle’s After Steve,and I have a lot of thoughts about it which I’ll save for a longer post. It’s slightly strange reading history that you were there for.

Next is a change of pace: Eversion by Alastair Reynolds. Reynolds has been one of my favourite SF authors for a while, but the last couple of his books were a little disappointing, so I’m hoping this gets him back on track.

Writing

Mostly just journaling this week. Of course, I say “just journaling”, but it’s probably the most essential writing. So I’m happy with that.

Watching

The first whole week of no Sky TV meant that we watched a lot less TV, perhaps predictably.

We waited until today to watch the first episode of Obi-Wan Kenobiand it was a treat — I’m already looking forward to the next episode, which we can watch in a couple of hours.

Apple's "repairwashing"

Cory Doctorow on Apple’s cement overshoes:

"In fact, nearly every part of Apple’s official repair process was worse than the iFixit equivalent. The useless battery-seating press kept knocking the battery out of alignment, and the fancy torx drivers were choresome to use. All of this compounded Apple’s repair-hostile design: swapping the battery requires three different screwdriver bits, removing the speaker, and managing a cluster of hidden fasteners that hold down the fiddly ribbon cables. Apple’s official tools don’t have (industry standard) magnetic tips, so Hollister spent a lot of time chasing minuscule pieces of metal around his workbench."

It’s tough to see Apple’s self-repair programme as anything but, as Cory puts it, “repairwashing”. What Apple should be doing is building phones and computers which are easy to repair. The company has the best industrial designers in the world. If any business can make things that are upgradeable and serviceable without thousands of pounds of equipment, it’s Apple.