Blog
“Ireland is Apple's second home” - Tim Cook
VIa Apple Insider.
When mere mortals have homes, they pay taxes.
Pay your taxes, Tim.
17 March 2025 — French West Indies
In defence of Stage Manager
Judging by public reactions, this is not a popular perspective, but I, for one, am grateful that Stage Manager exists, and I use it almost exclusively. To be clear, I only use it on macOS and don’t go near it on an iPad as it is not fit for purpose on that platform, sadly.
On the Mac, it is a tool that I use to help me with distractions, helping me concentrate on the task at hand and avoiding the distractions of the constantly updating timelines, documents open that require edits, or the myriad of other distractions presented by modern computer interfaces.
With ADHD, it is a constant battle to stay on track and to keep enough focus on the current task alone, that any assistance is helpful. For me at least.
It is not without its problems, however. Some applications don’t behave well. Excel is a good example. If you have two workbooks open in two different Stages, operations like undo jarringly flip you to the other stage and the undo is ignored completely. I’m sure that Microsoft are totally on top of this, and it’ll get fixed in about ten to twenty… years!
For now, I’m sticking with it and I turn it off now and again when I don’t have the need to focus as much.
While I think of it, one good example of this is when I present. Presentations don’t sit well with Stage Manager and simply and quickly turning it off makes the presentation work fine.
There are other improvements that could be made, like remembering groups of apps between sessions and reboots. I’d like to be able to designate what goes with what in which Stage to always open the apps concerned like that.
As I said, in defence of Stage Manager.
17 March 2025 — French West Indies
Until I can switch off Apple Intelligence Smart Replies, this setting is going to remain off.
I’d be happy to give it a go on a couple of things —mostly writing tools— but the fact that it suggests replies for my personal text messages to friends and family and that I can’t turn it off is a line I will not cross.
They are so incredibly poor in quality that it is laughable and something that Apple should be ashamed of, rather than promoting and forcing upon its users.
It is such a lack of respect for its user base and something that hints at the start of its demise as one of the world’s leading computing platforms.
One year check in on Apple Vision Pro.
Incredible technology still looking for a problem to solve.
Something the AI boosters are ignoring and working hard to ignore, is that humas intrinsically don’t like liars.
When they have an interaction with a genai chatbot that patently lies to them because “hallucination”, it deeply degrades their experience and devalues your company, product, or service.
The problem is that there is no fix for this. Telling the model not to lie is useless.
28 January 2025 — French West Indies
You’re standing in line.
Believing the lies.
Bowing down to the flag.
You’ve got a bullet in your head.
Apple users, if you haven’t already done so, you should seriously consider turning on iCloud Advanced Data Protection.
You cannot trust Apple to be good custodians currently.
Share your private key (encrypted and password protected) with a friend, or store in a couple of physical secure locations.
/ #technology #tech #privacy #BigTech #surveillancecapitalism
Mark Zuckerberg has recently said that he’s taking Meta back to its roots.
As one commentator pointed out, presumably that means a platform for rating the fuckability of college girls? Or, perhaps it means how he calls everyone “dumb fucks”.
18 January 2025 — French West Indies
I hear all the time about how Meta’s products allow millions of micro and small businesses develop around the world.
If this is true, then that alone should be reason for this platform not to exist in its current form, given that one man has the power to determine who can and who cannot exist.
He is currently showing that if your business is not ‘with us’ then it’s ‘against us’.
18 January 2025 — French West Indies
I remember when the Internet was good. No. It was amazing.
The first time I used the Internet, we could count the number of nodes on the network as less than a 100 000. The web hadn’t been invented yet and as soon as I experienced it myself, through some scrappy tools running on a university Unix box, I was hooked.
I knew it would change our lives. And it did.
I didn’t anticipate it becoming what it is today.
We’ve got all the stuff we dared to dream about, but naively, we believed it would come with none of the mess that humans seem to bring to the party.
I’m not sure how I feel about the Internet today.
I sometimes think that we should switch it off now and again to reset it.
We can’t, of course. And we won’t.
The Internet might switch us off, however.
16 January 2025 — French West Indies