A great trip down memory lane for me, I had completely forgotten about the Nokia N-Gage!
The phone I coveted more than any other was the Nokia N90 which unfolded and twisted into a camcorder form-factor. I couldn't afford one at the time and settled on a Nokia 6600 Fold which was actually a great phone and had a satisfying opening and closing mechanism.
Since the iPhone, the market has been pretty stale though. Motorola had a decent effort with their updated Razr foldable. Samsung's compact folding phones have actually looked pretty interesting, but ultimately the flat slab looks like it's here to stay for a while.
We need some more early 2000s Nokia style phones in the world.
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It's very rare for me to find myself admiring a SUV or MPV. Sure, there are some nice ones on the roads these days but I've never coveted one. Big slabs of metal rolling down the street will never inspire me to drive in the way a well styled sedan (saloon) or hatchback does.
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Nick Heer:
I cannot believe Photos cannot even display Smart Albums
I'm with Nick on this one. I can somewhat understand the omission on an iPhone because photo management can be tough to do on a small screen, but on an iPad the Photos app should be so much more capable.
I ran into an issue this past weekend: I had created a 'Holidays' folder through the Photos app on my phone. The folder was created just fine, but there is no way to move albums into the folder on your phone. Or on your iPad. Why let you get half of the way? Omit the option to create if it can't be used.
Generally, the Photos app I found to be just fine. Paired with Photomator I can edit almost as powerfully as I used to on my Mac using Aperture. iPad OS though has a long way to go before it becomes a great OS.
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We went to Iceland in 2012 and while we did see the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis), we didn't get a clear picture. Seeing it in person, at 1am on a cold February night was fun. The coach we were on was chasing weather updates so that we could get a clear sky. It was dark and I couldn't focus my camera properly:
So it was a very nice surprise to see that the Aurora Borealis was lighting up the London sky this past weekend.
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Night Mode on the iPhone was taking 3s photos which massively enhanced what we were able to see with the naked eye but you could clearly see there was something in the sky.
While it does feel like a little bit of a cheat to see it this way, it's amazing that so many more people got to see themselves.
Read the post from week 342
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I've just shared a very small album on Flickr, some photos on Instagram and a compilation video on YouTube of our completely unexpected trip up to see a Liverpool match.
We found out we had 2 tickets to go on Friday, with the match on Sunday afternoon. Bit of a panic on deciding how and when to travel and then booking a hotel but we got it sorted and left early Sunday to make it with plenty of time to spare.
My first trip to Anfield to see Liverpool was fun but neglected is how I would sum up the Anfield area. So much has changed as the ground has been redeveloped which is great to see.
Liverpool won 4-2, and most importantly, my Son got to see his favourite player score. Harvey Elliott with an absolutely brilliant goal at the Kop end, right in front of where we were sitting in the Main Stand.
It's been tough trying to find tickets the past few months. I'd been wanting to go anyway to see one last game under Klopp but it felt impossible and then out of nowhere these came up so jumped at the chance. Cannot wait for the next game we get to go to now!
Read the post from week 341
Yeah, pretty sure my next laptop will be a MacBook Air. My current Intel MacBook Pro is ageing, but the Air appears to be more capable. When it happens for me, the jump is going to be massive.
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Following my post earlier this month on how my selvedge denim was dong after 23 weeks of wear, I had an opportunity to drop my jeans off at RE.UNIQLO at one of Uniqlo's Regent Street stores. I wasn't holding out a lot of hope, as I hadn't given the attention they need soon enough.
The last photo I shared on Twitter didn't provide a good enough look at how they had deteriorated around the crutch. Each leg now had a hold that I had badly stitched up. It was good enough for a while, but didn't last.
Read the post from week 340
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A couple of years ago I kicked off a project that had been sat swirling around in my head for about 10 years. Then last month I let the domain expire.
The real driver for inmyb.io was a service that anyone could use to really hone the SEO side of their online presence. Rather than just a single website, it was supposed to be a guided approach to how to define your various online personas. For a physical business (think local barbers or restaurants) you could also share opening and closing times and eventually things like price lists or menus.
Read the post from week 339
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John Gruber:
Nest is an obvious exception, but Tony Fadell had a very atypical career at Apple.
...
the Nest did exactly what it promised, very well... Most importantly, Nest's thermostat took aim at replacing existing dumb thermostats, which were terrible. Nest's product really was something like 10× better than what it aimed to disrupt.
We have a Nest thermostat, which we picked over the Hive. It is fantastic and at least 10x better than a dumb thermostat.
My only gripe is the learning aspect of the Nest never hits the sweet spot for us. Either it's on too much or not enough. Not sure it has the concept of 'feels like' rather than relying on the actual temperature. Then there's 'away' functionality which is pointless because I don't want to come home and have the heating turn on. I want it to shut off when noone is home but turn back on before I return.
But the reality is that even those gripes make it so much better than we had it before. I despised our dumb thermostat. Genuinely hated it. The Nest delights 9 times out of 10.
While I'm interested in Humane's AI Pin, I didn't see as a device I'd covet. It's in the same territory as Google Glass for me. Interesting, but not for me.
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For context, here's the first photo I took of a tulip back in 2016. The angle isn't great, but best I could do to avoid a terrible background. Composition is still something I need to work on a lot, but while it has lots of bokeh and a shallow depth of field, I wouldn't say it was the best photo of a tulip.
Read the post from week 338
Almost two years ago, I wrote about selvedge denim. At the time, I had just brought a fresh new pair of jeans that needed breaking in.
I didn't do anything extreme with them, just wore them quite a bit over the past two years. They've got great whiskers and signs of wear. Unfortunately the inner-thigh area has deteriorated to the point where they're in need of professional repair and I have just taken in a new pair.
I've settled on Uniqlo as the reasonably prices source and they hold up pretty well day to day. This is what they look like after 23 months of wear:
Read the post from week 337
I have a Canon SLR at home with a range of Canon and Sigma lenses and have been thinking about making use of it. There's a bit of film left in the camera, but not much, so naturally my first thought was to finish the film and get it developed.
It doesn't feel like I stopped using film all that long ago. In reality it's about 15 years since I had a roll of film developed. Back then, it was easy to find a roll of film in pound shops and super markets.
Read the post from week 336
I have had a bit of a tough week (I might write about it at some point) so posting this pretty late on to keep the streak going.
Quite a while ago I came across this video about a rubber stamp shop in NYC, which looks like it's still going and it's somewhere I would love to visit.
Read the post from week 335
Every now and then, a new web app in the vein of Wordle comes along. On and off for a while now I've been playing Football Grid, a game where you guess the 9 different players who have played for a combination of two clubs or a club and a specific country.
I wanted to tweet a suggestion, only to find out the account had an app in the app store and I went to take a look.
Momento is a sports scrapbook that helps you keep track of the various games you have attended as a fan.
Read the post from week 334
Something I had long planned to look into was cities of at a similar latitude because it always surprises me when I stumble across the fact that New York is closer in latitude to where the Mediterranean is rather than somewhere like London. Given New York gets snow I would have expected it to be higher than it is. This tweet made me want to finally take a look at it:
Read the post from week 333
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