Vintage Hand-Drawn VHS Labels
I remember doing this, back in the 90s. More likely for TV shows we tapped rather than movies.
Curing Mac mini M4 fomo with 3D printing
Week 372: Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know
Hasan Minhaj is a fantastic stand up, one of a handful of Asian comedians who are doing great things on Netflix and on YouTube. If you watch nothing else, then check out Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know.
His recent stand up special, and previous ones, on Netflix are very good as his sit down chat/podcast with Mehdi Hasan for Zeteo.
I Tried to Teach My Son Soccer. Here's What He Taught Me.
I am on this particular journey with my son at the moment. He's graduated from doing the basics indoor with a club to playing outdoors. I'm less involved than I was with the indoor version where we had 15 minutes each week to tire each other out and it's more about him getting to grips with the elements, proper studded boots and using all of the skills he has.
In his previous club, or class, it was obvious the challenge was no longer there so we tried to create some. That meant me intervening, like Rory did, but now that he's somewhere new it's all up to him and the instructions he gets from the coaches. My interventions were more about bringing his team into it the game with him, and I get the sense that there's an aspect of that in the article. Keeping the ball in play is one thing, but you want it to go to a team mate so it stays alive.
Week 371: I'm building an iOS app
After starting with Swift Playgrounds on my iPad mini earlier this year, I've now graduated to working in Xcode and I am not enjoying it.
Nothing seems as straightforward as it should be. Google and ChatGPT both fail to bring the right answers. Stumbling across bugs all the time.
But I'm making progress! I need to bite the bullet and actually release the first app I'm building but that also requires me to just accept the back-end is where it is and to deal with a potential migration later...
So watch this space, there may be a native iOS app that I've built in the App Store soon enough!
Apple TV's Hardware Situation Is Fine
If Front Row was still a thing, then a Mac Mini as your media hub would actually make a lot of sense.
Week 370: Podcast Catch Up
My podcast backlog was getting out of control, my focus was on a select few podcasts and their latest posts. As I get through them, more come through meaning other podcasts get neglected and the backlog grew to over 12GB in size.
So a couple of months ago, I decided to start from the back and work my way back to the front. My catalog sits at about 9GB now, but I'm now in the summer of 2024 and catching up quick!
I've found some real gems, grown to love other podcasts and am eagerly awaiting the point at which I catch up with the latest episodes of Fake Doctors, Real Friends and Off Menu. The former, I haven't even gotten to their post-Scrubs rewatch episodes so it will be great to hear how that podcast has evolved.
Prompt: create an image of some flowers as a painting
Is the Love Song Dying?
Surreal Glitch Pulls
Week 369: My new MacBook Pro with the M4 Pro chip
After a long wait, I finally have myself a new MacBook Pro. Apple announced the M4 family of chips at the end of October bringing the series to the Mac lineup, after debuting in iPads, and expanded from the regular M4 to the M4 Pro and M4 Max.
While I'd have loved to have settled for a M4 or gone all out with the M4 Max, the M4 Pro sits perfectly in the middle and is the version I opted for.
Nano-texture display
I was in store around the time they announced it and saw that the Nano-texture display was coming to the MacBook for the first time. In store, it makes a huge difference to the glare and amount of reflections but it also makes the picture a little duller. I decided not to opt for the finish and having gone and seen the new display in store over the weekend, I am not regretting my decision. If anything, HDR content really pops and while the MacBook Pro means I'm not tied to a desk, I've used my previous laptop outside only a few times over the time I had it.
Upgrading from Intel
I was upgrading from an Intel MacBook Pro, so the jump feels huge in performance. Overall, it is very familiar which is a problem with devices that last for ages and get updates for years. Replacing them isn't as exciting as you think, but genuinely the jump is massive.
Having said that, I bought my last MacBook Pro in October 2013. 11 years is a long time and it's held up well but the battery was close to useless and the fans... the fans just never stop. To be honest, they were spinning from day one but it's only ever gotten worse. It was when I started 1 Thing A Week, back in 2017, when I first seriously thought about the need to upgrade but I've muddled along until now.
Apple Accused of Trapping 40 Million UK Customers Into iCloud Service
While I think this is a silly claim, it's not hard to move to Dropbox, Google Photos or Amazon Photos to back up your photos. It's also up to app developers if they adopt iCloud as the preferred storage method within an app. Plenty of apps I use give you the choice of other providers.
Is iCloud storage a rip off though? Probably. Storage continues to get cheaper if you're looking at your own solutions but cloud providers continue to charge us all high prices. I'm not looking for a discount myself, just give us a little more ever now and then.
Where is the original 'This Is Anfield' sign?
Week 368: Stuck between Twitter (or X) and Bluesky
As Twitter continues to burn to the ground, I look at Bluesky as the true successor to once great platform. The problem is, news and sports organisations haven't really adopted it well enough yet, if it all.
Twitter (X is a stupid name) continues to be a great place to follow sports, Bluesky is sorely lacking apart from a handful of fans. Twitter continues to have a community to enjoy events with, plus the addition of official accounts and reputable organisations sharing content.
From a tech, development and design point of view there are plenty of people to follow and converse with, it will just take time for us all to naturally, purposefully or subconsciously pick one over the other but I hope the momentum continues and we get there soon.
Verification is fantastic on Bluesky, no need for ticks (although verified accounts could easily be given an obvious marker), your online presence can be brought back to a domain that you own. You can even have subdomains so if you were a reporter for the BBC, you could have @yourname.bbc.co.uk as your handle. Almost as good as a public email address.
As these networks continue to build out ATProto and ActivityPub, you'll be able to find me @cchana if I get there early enough or @cchana.dev wherever that format is accepted.
When I remember, I'll cross post too. This past week, Bluesky announced that threading is now possible. One of the features I actually missed from Twitter.
2024 Presidential election results
This year, the UK finally voted for adults to be in charge. Not perfect by any stretch, but a damning victory for some sense over division. America, unfortunately, did not get the memo and decided that a criminal and rapist deserved another shot at running their country.
Visiting the US was something I was lucky enough to do many times from the late 90s up until 2010. I haven't been back and the appeal just isn't there anymore. I have a soft spot for Hawaii, so I'm pleased to see they voted for Harris.
Maybe not enough people voted, or maybe Americans don't understand their elevated position in the world?
When you think about social media, and the internet in general, you're most likely going to be thinking about an American company or product. One that the whole world benefits from and should have brought us together. News is global. And yet Trump, and America it seems, are only willing to look at themselves.
Immigration, for example, will not change during his term, just as it continues to be a topic in the UK. This is despite the need for legal routes for refugees so that you can at least have a sensible approach to immigration. It's a part of life. We bring in highly-skilled people to do the jobs we don't want to do or that we are failing to train the next generation to do.
I don't think immigration should be unlimited but it's terrible thing to hang your hat on when the demons that immigrants are portrayed to be are the ones fleeing for their lives. If you take an anti-immigration position, you look and ultimately become intolerable of others. We see this with every right-wing politician across the world. It's always them, those foreigners who are stealing jobs and causing problems when the reality is that most of these people are only looking for a better life. Just as your own parents, grand parents or ancestors did at some point in history.
I am gutted with the result. I wanted nothing more than for Trump to fade into obscurity and for any subsequent coverage to be of him being fully convicted for all of the terrible things he has done thanks to the privileges he's enjoyed because of his riches. Unfortunately, it looks like neither will happen.
From a UK perspective, I hope he is shunned in every way possible. America should no longer be considered a super power but a threat to world peace until we see action that leads to the end of wars in Ukraine and Gaza at the very least and I have no faith that will happen in the next 4 years now because of this election result.
Week 367: What's next for Good Gear Club?
I've been slowly chipping away at Good Gear Club over the past month or so to improve it's performance, usability and how it performs with search engines. A real mix of low hanging fruit and some tougher items but well worth it.
I have some ideas mapped out for the rest of the year. Top of the list is to get at least a couple of videos out on the YouTube channel followed by reaching 500 items shared.
One of the tougher things I need to investigate is replacing Font Awesome. Their Pro Subsetting tool was sunset recently and no longer functions which means I can't expand the set of assets without some effort at the moment.
I've started recording Bluesky links against records and will start to do the same for X and Instagram eventually. I have over 100 items to review and around 10 to re-review now that they're actually available or priced up.
I thought SiteJoy was going to be the site that really took up my time, but it requires a lot of effort so it's stagnated for a bit. I will revisit it eventually, but I really want to put some effort in to Good Gear Club to see where I can take it.
Update
The whole Christmas area has had a bit of an update and I've introduced a Black Friday page as the event is approaching fast. Not sure how best to populate it just yet, but it's there and a work in progress.
Week 366: 7 Years of 1 Thing A Week
Back in July I posted about taking a break but here I am in October celebrating the 7th anniversary of the site.
There's still plenty for me to write about but juggling work, Good Gear Club, app development and life in general is getting harder as I get older!
So my intention right now is to try and see the year out for a start. Beyond that, I do want to focus some more on app development rather than blogging. Right now I have 3 very simple ideas in mind that would be a good base to start with and then we'll see where we get to from there. Just one in the app store would be great to achieve.
Last week saw the 365th post on the site. As I probably say every year, that seemed unthinkable when I kicked this project off.
Week 365: Posting to Bluesky with PHP
I've created a Gist on Github for posting to Bluesky with PHP after a little bit of investigating.
It logs you in (using an app password) and saves the token so you can reuse it later if required. The script also posts 'Hello, world!' to the validated account so that you can see that it worked.
In fact, this post was posted by the script.
Now thinking about how to roll this into Good Gear Club as the site I'm most excited about working on right now.
Week 364: Smart Script on the iPad mini
When Smart Script was announced, I wasn't sure if it would be an Apple silicone exclusive but thankfully it hasn't been.
It has it's quirks on my iPad mini which has an A15 chip and not a desktop-class processor, but overall it's pretty good.
Week 363: The Aurora Borealis returned!
I posted about the Aurora Borealis being visible in the UK way back in May but we got a second viewing last night, much to my surprise.
I posted two photos on Instagram after spending some time in near 0° temperatures. My Canon DSLR managed to capture some great shots, one a 25 second exposure, but I couldn't get the HDR version I could see in Photometer to show in the Photos app.
View on Instagram
My third viewing of the phenomenon and I hope to catch it a few more times yet.
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