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Web App Barbarians

This article was originally written for the April 2022 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus. I love to use native software but it feels like I’m the last of the troops that has been put on the final line of defence, guarding against the marauding ‘web apps’. It appears that most users are more than happy to load a copy of Google Chrome and run a bunch of web apps in fullscreen mode.

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I'm Out on Twitter đŸ«Ą

“The standard you walk past, is the standard you accept.” — Lieutenant General David Lindsay Morrison AO Upon reflection, I have determined that my values are inconsistent with those of Twitter’s post-acquisition by Elon Musk. Rather than continue to use the service - even within my safe #NBL23 bubble - I believe the correct and appropriate action is to cease use of the platform. I am available on Mastodon @canion@social.

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Shooting Hoops

Recently we have installed a cool basketball hoop in our front yard, ostensibly for our kids to play as they grow into their teenage and teenage years. An unexpected benefit has been for me – Dad. I used to play basketball. You may be aware that I now host NBL Pocket Podcast, have media accreditation for NBL, and commentate games for NBL1. When I was younger, I was an athletic guy who could slam dunk and knock down 3s.

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The Twitter News Cycle Moves Fast

Not even a day, and there’s a new item of craziness I can add to my earlier list. Elon Musk's First Email to Twitter Staff Ends Work from Home - Bloomberg: The new rules, which kick in immediately, will expect employees to be in the office for at least 40 hours per week
 At least 40 hours per week? The standard working week in Australia is 38 hours. So if Twitter were an Australian firm (or perhaps for the remaining Australian Twitter staff), Musk is asking them to work in the office for more than the typical working week.

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Fun and Games at Twitter

Update 10 November: Now Elon is requiring employees to work at least 40 hours per week in the office. Twitter is a clown show. But I have an irrational fear of clowns, and not Twitter, so maybe it’s better described as a dumpster fire. Anyway, let’s see if I can get this straight. In a few short days, Elon has: Fired half the company, including ones who knew what they were doing.

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The Great Correction?

Are we now experiencing “the great correction” in the tech world? Meta has announced layoffs of 11,000, we just had now privately-owned Twitter reduce headcount by 7,500. Stripe let go of 14% of its people, and Sketch had to let a bunch of it’s employees go recently as well. These are just the ones I recall off the top of my head - I’m sure there are others. Higher interest rates reduce the availability of cheap venture capital; leading to increasing pressure to run a business to deliver profit and return to shareholders; and a number of these firms are behemoths that may have reached the end of their natural growth potential.

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I Hate Entropy

This article was originally written for the March 2022 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus Things break down and that causes me stress. I know that everything in the world is gradually corroding, eroding and disintegrating but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. The root cause of my problem is that I don’t like fixing things. I have zero interest in hardware, maintenance and DIY projects.

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NBL Blitz Day 1

I am in Darwin this week as the National Basketball League is holding its pre-season Blitz tournament. All 10 teams competing to win the Loggins-Bruton Cup. I am attending all the games as accredited media, representing the NBL Pocket Podcast. These are my brief notes from Day 1. A venue where the first NBL volunteer I meet is a friendly Darwin lawyer by day, basketball fan by night. Plenty of NBL staff scurrying around 90 minutes before tip-off, getting score benches ready.

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Professional Realism - I'm Not Who I Was

Tonight I have been noodling around on LinkedIn. It’s the curse of working in our current world, that I must maintain a LinkedIn account. The whole site feels incredibly superficial — a ‘social network’ devoid of true humanity, but full of humblebrag posts and small talk comments in something which amounts to little more than a business-suited circle jerk. Yet there I must be. Truth be told, for the last few years I’ve mostly used it as an avenue for promoting Hemispheric Views because if there is a podcast that deserves more listeners, it is that.

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Choosing a Twitter Client

This article was originally written for the February 2022 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus Update as of August 2022: I have basically settled on Twitterrific on iOS/iPadOS and Twitter on macOS. I don’t love Twitter, but I use the heck out of it for one reason only: following the Australian National Basketball League (@NBL) and the community of passionate fans around it.

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Adventures in SoftRAID

I’ve had an adventure with my OWC Thunderbay 4-disk drive array this week. I’ve emerged the other side, ultimately unscathed, but the journey certainly could have been easier. Let’s take a look. It all started when I reached the capacity of my RAID-5 formatted array of 4 x 2TB drives. The 6TB of storage this provided me was almost full. This array sits in a cupboard connected to a headless M1 mac mini, so all operations need to be managed through screen sharing with Screens or SSH.

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Me in 1 Chart

After listening to myself interviewed by Martin Feld on Really Specific Stories I started thinking about the strange mixture of interests I have. For fun, I thought I’d grab the main categories and represent them in graphical form. Basketball is predominantly represented by NBL and NBL1 - not NBA. Podcasting incorporates listening, and producing NBL Pocket Podcast and Hemispheric Views. Productivity and IT & Tech almost bleed into one another to an extent.

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Meeting Australia’s New Prime Minister

Yesterday we attended an event in South Perth with Australia’s new Prime Minister, The Hon Anthony Albanese MP. It was an opportunity for him to introduce the newly elected Labor Members of Parliament from WA, and thank the volunteers that worked as part of the campaign. My wife is a State Member of Parliament, representing Labor in the Seat of Victoria Park. In 2019 she ran for the Federal Seat of Swan.

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Rebuilding Drafts

I’ve been a long-time user of Drafts, but my subscription is due to expire next month and I have been thinking that I’d let it go. I’ve been using Tot more these days, and Drafts had become an intimidating mess that I didn’t enjoy using. However, after listening to a Mac Power Users podcast featuring the Drafts app and an interview with its developer, and then reading a blog post by Jason Burk about his Drafts setup (plus a personal conversation with him), I realised that it wasn’t necessarily Drafts that was the problem - it was what I had done to it.

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Homebrew

This article was originally written for the December 2021 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus Are you a Terminal wizard? A command line guru? A shell superstar? No, neither am I. From time to time I attempt to teach myself. It never sticks. As a result I know just enough about the macOS (and Linux, I suppose) terminal (bash/zsh) as the faded memory of a series of beginner courses permit.

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Knowledge Management: A Fool’s Errand?

CJ Eller – @cjeller on micro.blog – had a take on Personal Knowledge Management that resonated with me, in his articleGarbage Heap: I’ve bounced off of personal knowledge management tools like crazy. Wikis? Digital gardens? Zettelkasten systems? Nothing sticks. I’m a nerd, and I love the idea of capturing all the things I read, the information I learn, and being able to harvest it later for some great good.

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Is Discord the New Online Meeting Place?

With the probable demise of Twitter, it will join other social networks that have already met their demise (MySpace, Facebook, Instagram) with me, I am not that worried. Micro.blog will remain my generalised blogging location, allowing me to post whatever I like (and optionally cross-post to Twitter if I feel I must). What I’ve also found more recently is that Discord has become an unexpected surprise hit for focused communities. I only participate in four, and I wouldn’t want it to grow much beyond this, but they have each delivered an excellent place for virtual gathering, without anybody portraying negative behaviours, trying to sell NFTs, or undertake any other annoying actions that one sees elsewhere online.

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The Profit Paradox at play with the iPhone mini 14

The Looming Demise of the iPhone mini - MacSparky: The part that gets me is that they really shouldn’t be forced to make a decision. Isn’t Apple selling enough iPhones that they could afford to sell small, medium, and large versions of the pro and non-pro phones? You’d think they could make that work, but, for whatever reason, they are choosing not to. David Sparks take the customer-centric Apple question, but the answer is business-centric.

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Severance Unboxing

It was a lot of fun to host another Hemispheric Views live event this morning. This time, Jason was unboxing an official AppleTV+ Severance gift box he had acquired. The event featured Severance talk, Severance sound clips and music from the show - even some Defiant Jazz. There were many amazing goodies in the box. You can see some photos of the items at the Hemispheric Views photo album.

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What Am I Nostalgic For?

This article was originally written for the November 2021 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus Since it’s Nostalgic November, I figured I should write something that fits the theme for the November issue of Hemispheric News. What is nostalgia, however? According to Apple’s dictionary, nostalgia is defined as: a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past.

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Australian Consumer Law

This article was originally written for the October 2021 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus The Australian Consumer Law (ACL) is an unsung hero for the everyday Australian citizen. In 2011 it was introduced and replaced a bunch of outdated legislation, notably the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth). That piece of 1974 legislation was a foundation block of my university degree and I think s.

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I’m a Blogger? I’m a Blogger.

I don’t consider myself to be a ‘blogger’. Yet if I think about it, I’ve had some kind of blog actively running for large portions of my life. Just off the top of my head, I’ve had Blogger, Movable Type, Wordpress, Blot and Micro.blog. On the private side of the equation I’ve also got years worth of entries stored away in Day One. Unfortunately some of those posts are lost to the annals of time - which I am sad about.

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Self-Reflection

Today has been one of thought and self-reflection. There are many parts of my self that I’m not entirely happy with. Are we ever happy with ourselves? Probably not. Nevertheless, making an effort to do better must be a form of self-improvement in its own right. My effort ties in neatly with a new year, but this hasn’t anything to do with New Year’s Resolutions. This is more about me trying to become a better version of myself, irrespective of the time of year.

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Configuring my Stream Deck

This post was originally written in August 2021 for Hemispheric News; subscribe at the Patreon site One Prime Plus to receive this monthly newsletter and other benefits that are linked to the Hemispheric Views podcast. Sitting in my OmniFocus task list, and my SkedPal task list, both for two long, has been one item: I have been intending to give myself two hours to do some new stuff with my Stream Deck that has been sitting in front of me for about a year.

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Hottest Christmas Ever

These last two days in Perth have broken records for heat. Both Christmas Day and Boxing Day were several degrees over 40ÂșC. I am immensely thankful that this year, for the first time in my home ownership history, we have a swimming pool. With weather like this, it’s a complete game changer. A benefit of the heat is that upon emerging from the pool, it takes only minutes to be completely dry from the hot air.

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