Riccardo Mori really nailed it with his latest post, Raw power alone is not enough where he talks about how Apple has left its software to wither, while it has been busy beefing up its hardware offering. The article is full of juicy content, but I’ve pulled out the parts that resonated with me:
Without innovation in software, all we’re doing with these new powerful machines is essentially the same we were doing 20 years ago on PowerPC G4 and G5 computers, but faster and more conveniently.
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 In 2011 it was introduced and replaced a bunch of outdated legislation, notably the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth).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.
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.
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.
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.
These last two days in Perth have broken records for heat. Both Christmas Day and Boxing Day were several degrees over 40ºC. 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.
For the end of 2020 I wrote a retrospective looking at the main events and happenings of the year, broken down by month.
I figured it would fun to do the same thing again for 2021. I didn’t take copious notes over the course of the year, so I’m piecing this list together from calendar notes.
Year Notes Throughout the year I worked on two podcasts, NBL Pocket Podcast and Hemispheric Views.
This post was originally written in July 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.
I am a father of two boys. One is 9 (almost 10!) and the other is 5 ½. I work in a fairly flexible capacity whereas my wife has a highly demanding job that has significant variability.
Either I’m an old man who is shaking his fist at the clouds, or I’m a rational person that isn’t easily bedazzled and deluded by the madness of crowds. I prefer to think I’m the latter. Crypto has captivated the masses, and delivered opportunity to the financial grifters who portray themselves as disciples of a new financial world order.
I may be missing out on ‘easy wins’, trading cryptocurrencies - buying low, selling high.
Last night our family and and some friends attended Explosive Pro Wrestling’s Reawakening XX show. This is EPW’s showcase annual event. Their Wrestlemania, if you are searching for a comparator.
At a sold-out theatre the company put on an amazing show.
I’ve always enjoyed wrestling and nothing beats being in a venue where everybody who is there “gets it”. No need to put up with the naysayers who talk about wrestling being fake, or silly, or whatever other negative comment they want to throw at it for some reason.
This post originally appeared on the Hemispheric Views blog for the month of Nostalgic November. You can also read the accompanying posts by Martin Feld and Jason Burk.
I was in Year 5 at a new school. I didn’t know anybody. My previous school didn’t have a formal uniform and I’d worn velcro shoes everyday. Now at this new school I had to wear leather lace-ups, and I didn’t know how to tie laces.
This post was originally written in June 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.
On 28 May, I posted to my micro.blog:
My kingdom for a good mouse that works with macOS. Logitech MX Master 3 - garbage drivers cause lag all over the place. Razer Viper Ultimate - doesn’t work with macOS.
Today has been a great day.
It started with an outdoor walk on a beautiful Perth day. I could walk all day with Stephen Fry talking to me. This was the most enjoyable “Time to Walk” episode I’ve listened to.
Then I made some new connections with people, which might have some awesome ramifications for @HemisphericViews episodes in the future.
My new Eero Pro 6 wifi units arrived, so I suffer the ignominy of the D-Link wifi no more.
Facebook is a terrible company and I’ve felt much better about myself since deleting their products: notably Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. When ditching use of the apps, there is a withdrawal period of 5-8 days, then after that, it’s fine. Life goes on. Time is returned to your life. You miss nothing of import. I’m still waiting for my “Facebook friends” to check in and see how I’m doing and note they miss my absence…
It seems there are an explosion of book tracking platforms all of a sudden, after years of it being a Goodreads monoculture.
This is good, because competition.
This is bad, because now I’m having to update my reading stats on a bunch of sites as I try to figure out which is the ‘good’ one.
By my account, there is:
Goodreads - nice because it automatically syncs with Kindle, but bad because the website is an early 2000’s horror show.
Some weeks ago I bought a wireless CarPlay adaptor for my new 2021 Toyota Camry. The Camry support CarPlay but only when connected with a lightning cable.
My experience with it to date has been mostly positive, with some caveats. The largest issue I have is its “Chinese knock-off” software interface. I don’t quite know how they are making this whole thing work, and not having had CarPlay before I don’t know what earlier generations of the software were like.
Today I pulled my old cameras out from storage.
This was prompted by my trial of Glass, and the reminder that my Flickr account still exists.
I haven’t had much time to do anything with them, except charge the battery and try to reset them back to a state where they were taking jpegs and letting the camera intelligence do the work.
In a sign of how long they’ve been sitting around for, every camera needed its clock reset.
I despise Electron apps. What is the point of having a superior operating system (macOS) if every app that resides on it is nobbled by not supporting basic elements of the underpinning system?
I see the short-term reason that developers must use: standardised code, cheaper for development, most users don’t know/care.
I also caution about the long-term losses: the damage to brand reputation, the disappointment of ‘power users’ and the risks that can occur from alienating this group.
This is what Damian Lillard said after the USA lost to France in their first 🏀 game of the Tokyo Olympics:
“I think that’s why a lot of people will make it seem like the end of the world, but our job as professionals and this team and representing our country at the Olympics, we’ve got to do what’s necessary and we still can accomplish what we came here to accomplish.
This article originally appeared in the May 2021 Hemispheric News as part of One Prime Plus for the Hemispheric Views podcast. Become a member today!
What is there to manage about a wardrobe, I hear you say.
“A lot”, I respond.
You’ve got your hanging section, drawers and maybe some open shelving. What goes where, and how do you manage this space effectively and efficiently?
When I was younger, jocks and socks were thrown relatively haphazardly into the top drawer.
Recently David Sparks has posted a number of blog entries about his status board creation1. This takes the form of a kanban board of significant projects that he manually updates, providing a graphical overview of his work and life.
I’m a big fan of tools based around the lean methodologies, so I was immediately taken by his idea. I’ve done similar things in the past, but David inspired me to build one with a new approach.
I am immensely proud of my wife, Hannah Beazley, who has been duly elected as a Member of the Western Australian Legislative Assembly, representing the District of Victoria Park. As the WA Labor Party won the State Election, she is now a member of our State Government.
While the result was known on the evening of the official polling day on 13 March 2021, the WA Electoral Commission cannot formally declare a result until it has done a full count and exhausted all the preferences of those candidates who did not win.
In the most recent episode of my podcast Hemispheric Views I mentioned the time I was featured in the Workbench section of Amiga Format magazine.
I loved the Amiga, and I subscribed to Amiga Format in addition to a few other British and Australian Amiga magazines. The highlight of my month was riding my bike to the newsagent to collect my reserved copy.
I always liked the productivity and system utility applications more than gaming.
I’ve been considering whether my current DEVONthink daily note is the best system for rapid note taking. Of course there’s nothing wrong with it, other than it being super-basic.
DEVONthink Pros Wikilinking (automatic and manual) to other notes. Integrated into broader DEVONthink Search/See Also system. No-nonsense, no futzing with formatting. DEVONthink Cons No genuine Markdown editing support. No outlining support Just a plain text document. I’ve been looking at Dynalist and Workflowy.
Over the past two years my wife has been working at Containers for Change. This is a not-for-profit organisation enabled by the Western Australian Government and funded by the private sector.
When she started it was a start-up organisation working out of a tiny shared office with big plans to get a container deposit scheme (i.e. return drink bottles and cans for cash) up and running across our State.
A week ago, the scheme launched.
Recently I came across an annoying calendaring problem. I have a number of domain names, with associated email aliases. These all reconcile via my Fastmail account.
I noticed the other day that calendar invitations created in my calendar app of choice, BusyCal, were defaulting to being sent from one of my non-default email addresses.
There was no obvious setting for this in BusyCal and it was an issue that I hadn’t noticed at all over previous years so I assumed there was some problem at the server end.
I’ve been a subscriber to Setapp since it launched. In fact, I participated in a pre-launch user interview to help the MacPaw team develop the offering.
I’ve been a happy customer, and I believe I may be grandfathered into an older plan because I am permitted two seats. This has traditionally been for two Macs, but with Setapp now commencing a formalised iOS offering, I suppose this now makes more sense as a Mac + iPad combination.
Today marks the end of a personal era for me; it is the last day of my employment with the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Western Australia. I’ve worked at CCI for 3 months short of 13 years.
When I arrived, my plan was to stay for no more than 2. This speaks to the opportunities I have enjoyed while with the organisation. Over the time I have worked in Policy, Economics, Membership and the Entrepreneurs' Programme, plus other temporary assignments.
I’ve been trawling through some old text files of mine. I came across a note from 2012 that I initially thought was my own, but now recognise it as the work of Shawn Blanc.
Shawn’s post highlights issues relating to working from home. He references a podcast that I used to enjoy listening to — the Home Work podcast, hosted by Aaron Mahnke and Dave Caolo1 . I can’t find an active link for the podcast.
Day 24 of Blogvember. A full list of prompts for the month is available.
Many years ago I was employed as an Advisor to our State Government’s Minister for Planning and Infrastructure. This followed previous work in the State Department of Transport and for a large grains cooperative which built, managed and utilised transport and logistics infrastructure.
Infrastructure is often taken for granted It’s reasonable to suggest that’s when infrastructure is working at its best.