I can’t say I’m one to write regularly about the various films and series that I watch, here on this blog. But I just finished watching a short series on BBC called The Secret She Keeps, and although it’s only 6 episodes long, I found it rather gripping, and intriguing.

I won’t spoil the plot, but the story is about two different pregnant women come together, while major secrets in their lives start to see the light and some that are quite shocking. At a few points, the storyline can be predictable, but there’s still enough plot twists to keep you on your toes.

So while I won’t say this is a masterpiece, it’s a gripping series, that will certainly keep you entertained.

You can watch it on BBC iPlayer.

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One reason I decided to write a short post about this series is the IMDB score, it’s got just a 6.8, and for some reason, people rate it pretty low. I’ve found that with a lot of films and series that I enjoy have rather low ratings, so maybe I should start writing more about them.

So Apple has finally announced the first Macs that will run on Apple Silicon. To be specific, there is a new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13", and a new Mac Mini. And they all have the new M1.

This is still early on, and there's bound to be more information as time goes on, and as people eventually receive their machines. But, it leaves me with some questions regarding the M1, Apple's idea behind the Mac lineup, and Apple Silicon in general.

Is an M1 always an M1?

With all three new Macs having the M1 chip, I assumed that the only difference in power would be related to how much power it uses, and the thermal capacity of the machine. As in the Mac Mini is plugged in constantly, so it can draw more power. And the MacBook Air doesn't have a fan, so it needs to maintain a lower temperature.

But while it appears that the M1 is the same across the models, there is one machine which has a slight variant. The cheapest MacBook Air for some reason has an M1 with a 7-core GPU. And all of the other machines have an 8-core GPU.

So are all M1 chips the same? Does the "7-core GPU" variant actually have 8-cores, but one's switched off? Or did they literally make two options of the same chip, with 1 GPU core being the difference? If they are physically different, is does M1 represent a chip family?

Is CPU configuration now dead?

With the new M1s being the same, apart from the weird MacBook Air situation, there is now one less thing you can configure when purchasing a Mac.

Sure, you have the option of a 7-core or 8-core GPU on your MacBook Air, but this is not configurable in the same way that memory and storage are.

Maybe from now on, the chip will determine the model. And if Apple does start to separate Mac models by chip variants, will we ever be told more about them apart from the number of cores and the iteration?

What chip will be in the next tier of Macs?

Even if we class the Mac mini, MacBook Air, and MacBook 13" models as being transitioned to Apple Silicon, there are still four more models that run exclusively on Intel chips, the MacBook Pro 16", iMac, iMac Pro, and the Mac Pro.

I think they will obviously feature higher performant chips than the current M1 chips that are available. But I wonder how far they will go, and at what rate. Because although the MacBook Pro 16" is a laptop, it's the high-end model, and will therefore need to be much more powerful than the 13".

But when it comes to the other three models, they all have one benefit over the laptops, in that they have a constant power source. And the Mac Pro can go even further due to it's larger size.

Apple said they wanted to transition the whole Mac platform to Apple Silicon in around 2 years. But I wonder if this means only having Apple Silicon Macs available, or just by having an Apple Silicon option of every Mac, while still selling various Intel variants.

How many chip variants will Apple sell at once?

This isn't exactly a major question, but it will be interesting to see how many Apple Silicon chips will be available to buy at a single time.

When the whole platform has transitioned, I wonder if at one point they will all run the same M class chip with variants on certain models. And at what rate are they upgraded?

The iPhone chips are updated every year, so it will be good to see the same behaviour for M chips. Although would that mean every Mac gets updated every year? Or just certain models?

Is the memory limit a problem?

The Macs that have the M1 chip are all limited to a maximum 16GB memory. That doesn't seem great to me, since the Intel MacBook Pro 13" supports up to 32GB memory, double its replacement.

Maybe this is a technical limitation? I thought initially that it was a limitation from the M1 chip, but I've also seen suggestions that it's due to the type of memory, or even due to the heat generated from larger amounts of memory. So it could even be a product decision.

And although the limit is pretty small, will it actually be a problem? iPhones have much less ram than Android phones, and they're by no means slow. So maybe the tight integration of Apple Silicon and macOS will create the same benefit, and memory will go further on Apple Silicon than an Intel equivalent.

These are the questions I have right now, and I bet there's a load more that others want to be answered too. We'll simply have to wait and see what happens.

I'm not sure what has gotten into Apple recently, but they seem to have developed an aversion for including power adapters with products that require power adapters.

The reason for not including it in the new iPhones is supposed to be environmental. I don't fully believe that, but I'll let that one slide for now.

The fact they remove the power adapter from already existing products, without altering the price, tells you that it's not fully environmental reasons.

But when you think that one of the biggest features of the new iPhones is MagSafe, you would expect that a lot of people will be purchasing a MagSafe cable. That MagSafe cable costs £39. It also doesn't come with the required 20W power adapter. That comes separately at a cost of £19. So, £58 for a cable and power adapter which is meant to be the new way of charging your phone.

When looking into the Watch charging options, I came across the Apple Watch Magnetic Charging Dock, which I had completely forgotten about. Released in 2015, it's essentially the charging disc of the Watch charger, but at a 90° angle, on top of a small circular base. And that will set you back £75. It requires the old 5W power adapter, and that will cost you another £19. So all together, it costs £94 for an Apple branded Apple Watch charging dock.

Coming soon is the MagSafe Duo charger, a small foldable case which contains a typical MagSafe wireless charger, and a magnetic Watch charger. To use this charger, you use a single Lightning to USB C cable, plugged into the 20W power adapter. Except again, the power adapter doesn't come in the box. Alongside the £129 it costs for the charger, you will again need to spend another £19 on the power adapter, bringing this solution to £148.

I'm not sure if Apple is trying to make this a new normal, where products that require power adapters simply do not come with them. But to me, it seems absolutely ridiculous.

In the past few weeks, two apps I use a lot on my phone have changed the layout of their tab bars. It sounds like something that you couldn't get annoyed about, but here I am. I'm sure this annoyance happens to other people, and to other apps that I don't use, but the two that are bugging me today are Instagram and YouTube.

Instagram

Okay, so putting aside the fact that Instagram seems to change their interface weekly, with the option to create a new post or story being moved all around the interface. They clearly do this only for a few users, as a lot of people I know haven't seen any kind of change. But at least for me, every week there's at least one thing that's moved.

For now, I'll focus on the tab bar. Although, who knows, it might even change tomorrow.

So what I have now is five items, Home, Discover, Reels, Shop, and Profile. I get that they want to push Reels as a feature (even though I think it's terrible), and yes you can buy things on Instagram now (I also think this is bad). But why do these items need to fill up 40% of the tab bar?

I liked having the Activity item in the tab bar before, but you could argue that regularly checking your likes, comments, and follows isn't that healthy. So moving that away from the tab bar, and adding just a tiny bit of friction may be helpful for some people.

But what about the most important part of Instagram, posting photos? Surely that deserves to be the most prominent action in the UI. Rather, it's (currently) in the top left, at least for me, and only when you are on the Home screen. Weirdly, if you are on your profile you also have a button in the same place, but this is just to open a list allowing you to create a post, story, highlight, IGTV video, or Reel. Why there needs to be 5 content options is beyond me.

YouTube

This change isn't as drastic as what Instagram is doing, but it still messes with my muscle memory a lot.

The change here is the addition of the Create button in the centre. Although pressing this doesn't actually take you to the upload interface. Instead, you get a boring list interface like the Create option on Instagram. But here you only have two options, to upload a video, or to start a live stream.^[1]

It's sort of the opposite of Instagram, where the changes there are to make you view Reels and use the shopping feature. But in the YouTube app, they seem to want you to create more.

I would argue that the opposite is how people use these platforms. Sure, a lot of people upload videos to YouTube, and maybe some people like to watch Reels and shop on Instagram. But at least in my mind, YouTube is the app where the majority of people would be consuming content, and Instagram is the place where you are more likely to be sharing content. Also seeing as the phone app is the only place where you can post images, since there is no iPad app (which I think is totally idiotic), and you can't upload anything on the web interface.

Most of the time when apps change their UI, the annoyance is purely down to muscle memory and having to readjust to a new layout. But these changes just seem to be stupid to me. They seem to be geared towards attracting desired behaviour like shopping or starting live streams, rather than showcasing features that users do more often.

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1. These two options are also totally pointless for me. Seeing as I don't upload videos, and if I try to start a live stream I get told I'm not actually eligible to stream from a mobile device. ↩︎

Cal Newport:

I don’t normally spend much time reading information online, so I definitely noticed this morning the unusual degree to which I was distracted by breaking election news. This points to an interesting question that I’ve seen discussed in some articles in recent days: what’s the best way to keep getting things done on truly distracting days?My answer: don’t.

Cal Newport is the author of many books relating to reducing distractions and focussing on deep work. So when the above question is posed to him. you may expect a very long and informational response. But instead, he has a very quick, and somewhat surprising answer.

But his short answer, along with his reasoning afterwards, resonate with me quite a lot. Mainly that not every day needs to be a day where you knock loads of things off your to-do list. Some times you need a rest, you need to focus your mind on something different, or maybe you just have something else you need to deal with.

Sometimes I go through patches where I want to be "productive" all through the day, every day of the week. But very soon, I realise that is just isn't sustainable. What is sustainable though, is allowing yourself to rest, have fun, and not feel like you always have to be achieving something. Because when you do choose to get to work, you go at it full of energy, and ready to really dive into your work.

Over on the Tifo Football channel on YouTube, Ben Jacobs investigated whether different football kits can have an affect on the game.

It's just a short video, at just over 7 minutes, but he certainly goes into a lot more detail than I imagined. I thought it would just be statistics from the top performing football teams over the years, and then trying to spot a pattern with the kit colours.

He does touch on stats like red being the best performing shirt colour in the Premier League, but that's most likely due to the fact that the three biggest clubs in the UK wear red (Manchester United, Liverpool, and Arsenal). But the section that interested me the most was the goalkeeper shirt colour, and that apparently red is also the best colour in that regard. But in that case it seems to be backed up information, rather than just consequential statistics.

From BBC News:

The dad spent multiple months putting this together. I can imagine it taking quite a lot of effort, with the planning and construction. And it looks like it's been done really well, the detail on the shop fronts are really good.

But as impressive as it is, it stil didn't stop me thinking that the child will probably get bored of it soon, or possibly even outgrow it, seeing as it looks like a tight space.

All I'm saying is, as much as this is a cool idea, I'm not doing it for any future kids I have!

I just spent a week in Lanzarote, and since I had just received my iPhone 12 before I left, I decided to leave my real camera at home and force myself to use the iPhone.

There were over 200 shots, and after reviewing them, checking the composotions, and giving them a little touch up in Lightroom, I was left with 24 photos that I was really happy with. I've uploaded them all to Flickr, so you can check out the full album.

Being in Lanzarote, the focus of my shots are all relating to water. Whether if it was the sea caves of Los Hervideros, the beaches around Playa Blanca, or the black sand of Playa de Janubio.

A lot of the time I was focussing on getting portrait-oriented shots that would be suitable for phone wallpapers. And a lot of the time this was caputring the transition of the waves hitting the sand, or the combination of the sand, rocks, sea, and then the blue sky. At the same time, there were some really nice landscapes that I tried to capture as well.

From the final 24 photos, I've picked out 9 that I'd like to feature here on the blog. I hope you like them. And if you want to see the other 15, you can view the full album on Flickr.

I came across an interesting blog post today, where Matt Brunt set up an integration between IFTTT and Monzo (a UK bank) to help save money. So that every single time he tweeted, 20p would be transferred into a separate pot on his Monzo account, which itself would be locked away until just before the PS5 release date.

As soon as I read the article, I was instantly struck with ideas on how I could make use of a similar integration.

My Situation

Personally, I don't have a big problem with being able to save money. I have a structure to my savings, and I'm very strict with myself to make sure I separate a portion of my wage every time I am paid.

What I do have a problem with is choosing when to spend money. I mean to say I have so much money I don't know what to do with it. I wish. But in general, I have a problem associating value to a purchase. For example, I purchased an iPhone 12 not long ago, but I probably wouldn't spend over £15 on a t-shirt, or even £60 on a pair of shoes. Whereas there are a lot of people that see enough value in a pair of shoes to spend quite a lot of money on them.

I tend to place a higher value on computers, whether it be a smartphone, tablet, or real computer. The main reason is that it's what I'm interested in. But I also use these products as tools in my life, and also to get work done. I use these products to develop apps, write for this blog, and the usual stuff like gaming and social media.

You'd think I'd be fine spending money on new iPhones, iPads, and Macs. But instead, the "normal" part of me usually decides that a new device probably isn't worth it, since a lot of times the current device can cope with what I'll end up doing on it. It's the reason why I own an iPad Pro 10.5", even though I've been wanting a 12.9" pro ever since they were available. I must admit, I was close to buying the model that came out earlier this year, but it didn't seem like a big enough update to force my hand.

But I still have that constant thought in my head that I need that 12.9" iPad Pro, and especially the new Magic Keyboard. Although to be fair, I don't need it, no-one needs an iPad. I want it, for quite a few reasons, but that's not relevant here (I've already dragged this out too far anyway). Let's now get to the point.

The Goal

There would be no point of all this fuss if I didn't have some kind of goal, or to be specific, an amount of money I want to save. So the goal I'm setting myself is enough to buy a 12.9" iPad Pro (I guess that should be obvious by now). The model I want will be around £1000 I reckon, so that will be my target.

Alongside the iPad, I will also want the Magic Keyboard to do my writing on. But I'll leave that as a secondary goal to do after if this one goes well.

My Theory

In the article by Matt Brunt, he set up an automation as a fun way to put some money away. But I've also seen other people in the past use it as a punishment, where they track some performance metric, and if they don't hit it then some money gets donated to charity (or somewhere else). Or others that use it for saving may use an environmental action to trigger the saving, something like every time it rains, a tiny bit of money is saved for a future holiday.

I have a theory that this automated saving technique could be used as an incentive, rather than something negative. Instead of punishing bad behaviour by putting money away, I plan on rewarding good behaviour by allocating money towards something I want to buy.

In this case, the reward will be buying an iPad Pro for myself, and the behaviour I want to use as the trigger will be publishing blog posts.

To me, this seems like a perfect fit. I want to get myself into a habit where I'm writing at a good pace, and regularly publishing to my blog. And I'd really love to eventually be doing that on the big iPad. So while I'm building up a habit, I'm also going to use this experiment as a way to prove to myself that I do actually want to write "long-term" and it's not just an occasional hobby.

The Automation

For the automation, I'll be using a combination of the blogs RSS feed, IFTTT, and a specific pot in Monzo with an associated goal (Which has a cool image that I built using Robb Knight's tool, and is the featured image of this post).

It's a pretty simple process. Whenever there's a new item in my blogs RSS feed, money will be transferred into my pot in Monzo. Eventually, I'll hit the target, I'll order the iPad, and all my life's worries will go away (I think this is how it works?).

I've chosen the amount to be £1 per blog post, so it's pretty easy to calculate how many I'll need to publish before hitting my goal. 1000.

I had an idea on somehow basing the amount on the length of the post, or if it's a simple link post, but I think if I add to complex I probably won't ever complete it.

Anyway, this post will serve as the first out of 1000, and will fortunately/unfortunately cost me £1. Which means I've now got to go and write and publish another 999! Wish me luck.

Greg Morris, writing about the Pixel 5:

Something changed with the Pixel 5. Amid a pandemic Google began to focus on what they could do to bring a device together, and perhaps what their customers wanted. So instead of weird and wonderful new developments they absolutely promise to develop, they took half a step back. Creating a device that leans on tried and tested hardware, not the bleeding edge. Just reliable specs, done well and priced at a point that Google felt it can complete.

What Greg does here in this review is what I think more reviewers should do. And that is to describe the device on a way that people can understand and relate to. For example, instead of simply pointing out the size of the battery, Greg noted that “8 hours screen on time is achievable, and some of my more leisurely days this week I got almost two days of use”. That’s the type of information that is helpful to people when researching what phone to buy.

I think too many times people (including myself) look at the raw technical specs of a phone and simply compare them like a game of Top Trumps, and forget the context around them, or even the usability of them.