Lenovo have announced that they are releasing a new phone, the ThinkPhone, which will be made by Motorola.

From the official announcement, it seems as if this will be aimed more at the enterprise market, and especially at users of ThinkPad laptops. Users of a ThinkPad look to gain the bigger advantage of the ThinkPhone, as there various integrations, similar to what you would find in the Apple ecosystem, which they call "Think 2 Think". Here are a few that interested me:

• Unified clipboard between devices
• Unified notifications.
• File sharing between devices, similar to AirDrop.
• Stream Android apps from the phone to a PC.
• Using your phone camera as a webcam on a PC.

Not a bad list! And being a fan of the ThinkPad myself, I certainly appreciate the design of the ThinkPhone. Although, even though I am starting to appreciate more Android phones, such as the Pixel and the Nothing Phone, I can't say I have any intention of trying this one out. Although, like I said about the Nothing Phone, I still hope this does well.

When I first saw the headline about Lenovo releasing a ThinkPhone, I was partially hoping that it was based on a new OS, not iOS or Android, just to offer another competitor to the market. I guess the wait for that continues.

Matt Birchler, defending like buttons:

I think of likes on social media kind of like non-verbal responses in the real world. When I say something clever and someone around me smiles, they don't have to think of something thoughtful to say as a response, I know they liked what I said, and that makes me happy.

Totally agree. I think it's a trendy trap to fall into, to dislike the like button_._ Because it may seem as you're replacing real human communication with a digital thumbs up. But similar to Matt, I think a like is more of a subtle affirmation.

If someone wanted to reply in writing, but they saw a like button and decided that clicking the button was a suitable alternative, then it probably is. Otherwise they would have taken the effort to write something.

Marques Brownlee has made a great video about the iPhone camera, how it's evolved over the years, and it's position in the current landscape of software-based photography advancements.

9to5Mac also published a piece based on the video, around the subject of the exaggeration of the iPhone's post-processing techniques.

I don't feel like I have a particularly strong opinion on the iPhone camera, or even more specifically, it's post-processing. However, I do think it would be a good idea if there was a bit more control around this sort of stuff. I've had a few occasions where photos looked a bit odd, usually a sky being strangely blue (for Britain), or a sunset/golden hour scene missing the orange glow. So it would be nice to be able to at least see if turning off the various software tricks would improve that.

Xcode is a great IDE, but after using many other IDEs and text editors, I've noticed that it's missing quite a lot of common functionality. This page will serve as a growing list of features that I find useful in other applications, that Xcode does not have.

If you do find something here that has a solution, or has been addressed in an update, please let me know.

File Operations

• You can't duplicate a file. There isn't an option when you right-click a file, and you can't use the copy/paste commands on a file either.

Project Navigation

• There isn't a UI option to open the current file in the project navigator. You can set up a manual keyboard shortcut, but that's it.

Code Style

Code style just isn't a thing in Xcode. Sure, there's SwiftLint and SwiftFormat, but both don't really work seamlessly with Xcode. Which means:

• You can't set a specific code style for a project to keep the code format consistent.
• You can't reformat a file or a selection of text to the "correct" format.
• You can't setup the code style to be applied on save.

Other Miscellaneous Annoyances

• Xcode seems to think it's a suitable default application for practically any text file.

Ryan Holiday:

The solution to my writer’s block that day was not to write at all. It was to stop for the day and go research the topic more. It was to go for a run and a walk. It was to do the prep work.Success as a lagging indicator is a phenomenon that holds true across most areas in life.When I look in the mirror and I’m a little flabby, that is a lagging indicator that, for weeks and months, I’ve slacked on eating healthy and exercising.

This is something that I think I need to keep reminding myself of. It's obvious once explained, but also, for me, something I tend to forget quite quickly.

In the book Atomic Habits, James Clear explains why being goal-oriented is not the best way to progress in the long term. And instead of having an outcome-driven process, it's much more effective for your actions to be identity-based.

By basing your actions on an identity, it can be easier to do the right things. Since you aren't chasing a singular goal, you are aiming to be the kind of person that would achieve that goal. For example, instead of having a goal to write a book, work on becoming a book writer. Focussing on a goal can mean you forget about the process. As he writes in the book, "winners and losers can have the same goal".

However, if you let a desired identity become the core of your habits, the processes will fall into place, and eventually will the outcomes. Put simply, if you keep putting in the work, success will be something that just happens as a result of your actions.

Quite some years ago, I used to have an Apple blog called AppRecap. It contained a bunch of Apple-related news, but I also reviewed a load of iOS and macOS apps.

Well, today I realised that I had a backup of the website stored in Digital Ocean, and wanted to do some digging to see what was actually backed up. I did a small tweet thread on my initial findings, but I wanted to put something here on my blog so I have at least some reference to my old blog. Mainly because I plan on deleting the backup as it's costing me money.

Some general things I noticed:

• I loved apps with dark mode. And if an app added one, that usually granted a blog post.
• My most used Mac apps were either super minimal or lived entirely in the menu bar.
• I thought the iPad Air 2 was "powerful".
• I really would link to any Apple-related news.

I thought about migrating the entire collection of posts to my personal blog. But that was pretty much stopped when I realised I didn't have the admin password anymore. I then thought that I should at least go through all the posts and add anything that was still useful. Well, I did that. And, well, I won't be migrating anything.

Turns out, what I wrote about for AppRecap was very much only relevant in the moment. That's pretty obvious for news-related posts, but also my experiences with software aren't that valuable to read now, and most of the apps I covered are either substantially different or just plainly not available anymore. Weirdly, I recently wrote about blog posts having an expiry date, and turns out these definitely did.

However, I will share a few snippets, just because they're pretty funny to read again in 2022:

Here is what I wrote about the Single Sign-On feature that was announced for tvOS at WWDC 2016:

It’s a pain to authenticate services on things like the Apple TV, especially when you have to find the app, go to a browser, enter a code, etc.But now with Single Sign-On, you just need to authenticate to a service once, and then apps that require the same authentication, can just access it themselves.I guess this will only be useful for people who use apps from the same company, maybe as part of a television subscription. But if you use individual apps from multiple networks, I can’t see this helping. Maybe it’s different in the US

Not sure about anyone else, but I can't remember actually using this. And I'm not sure if it's still a thing.

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On Instagram's initial move to "optimised" feeds:

According to the post, the actual images that are in your feed won't change, however the order of them will be. I guess this is useful for people who follow a stupid amount of accounts, and this could help them find the best posts, but isn't this just a reason to not follow too many people?I'm not a fan of non-chronological feeds for social networks, it's one of the flaws in Facebook, and maybe soon, Instagram. When I use a service like Instagram, all I want to do is to be able to follow accounts that I like, and then see their posts in a chronological order.We should see this new "experience" in the coming months, I certainly hope we don't.

I still feel the same way about this one.

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Another on Instagram, this time on a new design and icon (the purple/pink/yellow gradient with the white symbol):

The changes they've made to the actual app are really nice, and I much prefer the new black and white interface.But I do not like the new icon.

Yep, the original icon is still the best in my opinion.

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On Siri being added to the Mac in OS X 10.12:

I’ve been anticipating this feature for ages, it makes sense to bring it to the Mac when other companies such as Microsoft have done the same.I’m not sure how much functionality it will have compared to the iOS version, but I would personally think it should do more. However you could say that Siri is more beneficial for handheld devices, as it lets you perform more complicated functions easily. But with a Mac everything is pretty easy anyway, it’s just cool!

I was apparently very optimistic about Siri back then. It's certainly gotten better since then, and I use it semi-regularly on my iPhone and HomePod, but I only ever invoke it on the Mac by accident.

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On Twitter thinking about increasing the character limit from 140 to 10,000:

I’m not sure how I think about this at the minute, but my instant reaction was “this is a terrible idea”. I personally think the best thing about Twitter is the short statements, and a quick way of sharing with everyone.I also dislike the thought of scrolling endlessly through massive tweets, but I guess this could be fixed with an expand button for larger ones. This could also get annoying though, as you would be constantly be reading the headings and not real content.

They, obviously, only ended up increasing the limit to 280 characters, which turned out pretty well in my opinion. Although they did add a Twitter Write feature a while ago that added long-form text content, which for some reason, Elon wants to reinvent.

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If you've made it this far, then I want to share another little funny story about AppRecap that I've just rediscovered.

So, back when I was writing AppRecap, I was still at university, and not exactly making much money. And for some reason, I liked the idea that I could one day sell a domain name for a high amount of money. That led me to sign up for Sedo, and place the apprecap.net domain for sale.

Well, in March 2016, I got an email from Sedo saying that I had actually successfully sold a domain name. And going by my tweets at the time, this was a bit of a surprise:

I just got a email saying AppRecap has been sold :O. I made it available on Sedo ages ago when I didn’t want to continue with it anymore. Tweet

But then I changed my mind and kept working on it, but forgot to make it unavailable. Is there a way to reject it? Tweet

After digging through my Sedo account and some old emails, turns out I had sold the AppRecap domain name for a whopping £299. But at that time I wasn't ready to let it go.

So I talked with Sedo for a while, and eventually, they ended up cancelling the sale, luckily before the buyer made any payment.

That was around March 2016.

My last post for AppRecap, before starting a new blog called "Radical Thinker" (because I was cool and thought I knew some stuff), was about Tumblr adding live broadcasts, and that was on the 21st of June 2016.

I denied a sale of £299 so I could blog for another 3 months.

Eventually, I decided to stop renewing the domain, and some time since then, it was registered by someone else. Sadly, it's not being used though, as it's been set up to redirect to apprecap.io which doesn't seem to work at all for me.

Going back over this blog has made me remember how much I enjoyed reviewing apps and covering Apple news. Maybe I'd enjoy writing about similar things again. But I have a feeling that it would end up being a lot of effort, and probably not provide enough value.

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Finally, so I have at least some visual memories of the website, here are a few screenshots of it's final form.

The first blog post (that was available in this backup, I'm pretty sure older ones have been lose):

The last blog post:

And a small glimpse into the sort of content I thought was relevant:

(It wasn't.)

I've seen quite a few articles recently that claim that due to worrying sales of the iPhone 14 models, the price of next year's models will likely be lower. While that may seem rather simple to understand, and probably not even require a "leak" to back it up, I'd like to offer two (also obvious) reasons why the 14 may be selling a little less than expected:

1. The price was increased at a time when a lot of people have less money.
2. It's pretty much the same phone as the 13.

I'd argue that even if the 15 models go back to the "normal" (still hugely expensive) prices, it still won't be worth the upgrade if the phones are not substantially better than their predecessors.

I still own a 13 Pro, and I honestly can't think of any reason why I'd want to upgrade to a "better" iPhone. At least going by the improvements that were added in last-year models.

Now, if the next iPhone models are affected by the various E.U. rules that mean it needs to be USB C, have an easily (not sure what that even means) replaceable battery, and a few other improvements like that, then I'd probably be a bit more optimistic. But if it's the usual list of changes like a brighter screen, longer battery, faster chip, and some new cinema-grade camera certification, then I think I'll likely skip another generation. Or perhaps, even switch to a more interesting phone like the Google Pixel.

Fabian Sanglard wrote a blog post about one of those "Linux evenings" where you spend hours trying to fix something that clearly wouldn't be an issue on any other OS. But you go through it anyway, because, you know, Linux is cool.

The problem is that he is trying to use an external SSD. And it works on every computer, except one specific laptop running Ubuntu. (Note: It works with the same laptop when running Windows)

It's an interesting story, and he takes you through the various stages of the debugging process. But I had to share the part where he eventually discovered the fix on an online forum:

I google it and end up here. I don't understand any of the described solution. It looks like the kernel needs a parameter to set the bus size for a pci channel. After several hours in, I'll try anything.

[...]

The machine reboots. And to my amazement, it works.

I pause and wonder how many hours one must have invested to become so highly skilled on such an esoteric topic. I find comfort in user zxmth's question, asserting I was not alone left in awe.

Out of curiosity, how did you come up with this solution? - zxmth

The author, dkozel, never came back to answer. I imagine they typed the solution on a 40% keyboard featuring unmarked keys and then rolled into the sunset on a Segway for which they had compiled the kernel themselves. Completely oblivious of their awesomeness and of how many people would later find solace in their prose.

If you haven't used Linux before, then this type of experience might put you off forever.

But if you do use it, and you persevere through these long nights of random issues, you tend to bump into these Linux wizards that drop by to offer some magical advice to fix your specific problem, and then vanish to never be heard from again.

Sometimes using Linux can be as easy as any other OS. Then again, a simple interaction can transform into a fever dream.

Weirdly, it's those fever dream moments that keep Linux interesting for me.

I think a lot of internet writers go through a stage where they focus more on refining their workflow than they do than actually writing. What I've noticed is that for me, this can be represented as a sine wave. In that I go through phases of really wanting to nail a perfect workflow for every situation, then periods of time where I just don't care about how I write, I just get on with putting words somewhere and then publishing it to my blog.

Right now, I'm at a stage where I feel like I can write a blog post in any application that can handle plain text. In the past few weeks, that's mainly been Obsidian, but I've also used TextEdit recently, and even the Ghost web interface for my blog.

That may sound rather boastful, but I say that while thoughts about refining my workflow start to creep back into my head.

I already know now, that at some point in the very near future, I'm going to be spending more than necessary trying out new writing apps, working out more efficient ways to publish to my blog, and generally focussing on my writing process.

That's not necessarily a bad thing though. While it may seem like misplaced effort, a moment of introspection can be very valuable. Because it can make you think about not only the process of how you write, and how you publish, but also what you write about and who you're writing for.

The next stage I usually go through, after a short period of refinement, is that I usually write about what I've learned, and what my new writing workflows are. Essentially, I start to write about writing. At times that can be seen to be a tad too meta, but I've found that process useful to get myself back into the habit of writing regularly. Once you've built up that habit, you can start to relax back into the flow of writing more, and focus on the actual content. And with that, the cycle starts to repeat.

As you may expect, this will probably mean that I will no doubt be doing the above very soon. I'm sort of looking forward to it. Once I've improved my writing workflows, the tools I use, and also spend time deciding what I want to write about, I know I'll then be able to spend more time writing. Which hopefully means I can continue to improve.

As someone that tends to both subscribe to a lot of websites via RSS, and likes to sometimes quote what I've read on my blog, I sometimes worry if that piece of writing is too old. If maybe the post has had it's time.

This is mainly caused by my regularly high unread count, meaning if I always read the newest posts first, it can potentially months before I get to read something. Once in a while, I go through the entire list and clean out some posts that I know I won't read, and try to make it more manageable. But regularly, I find myself a few months in the past, with something interesting that I've read. And then I'll want to use a portion of the writing as a quote, and offer my thoughts/perspective. Except, I'll notice how old the post is, and wonder if it's worth bringing up again, or if it's moment has passed. Which means I refrain from writing. And I just move on to the next unread item in my list.

Maybe this is odd, but this is something that I've thought about quite a lot. And I've come to two conclusions. The first one being, yes, of course, you're "allowed" to quote a piece of writing many months after it has been written. And the second being that, if after a few months a piece of writing becomes "out of date", meaning the contend is no longer valid, the situation has changed, or it was only ever relevant in that hyper-specific moment of time, then has anything been lost? Because if I feel like the content I'm quoting was only ever relevant at that point in time, then anything I would have added, would have also become irrelevant as well.

This realisation has stemmed from thinking about my own writing, and that I don't always want my writing to be about current affairs, or reactions to immediate events. Because if that's the case, in a years time, nothing on my blog would be worth reading. I want to have pieces of writing that can stand at least some length of time. So with that personal goal in mind, if it's relevant, then I think quoting another piece of writing from months (or maybe years) ago, should be perfectly fine.