On little YouTube adventure I had this afternoon, I came across a video of someone trying to guess all of the 151 original Pokémon. To be honest, the idea of watching someone do this themselves sounded absolutely boring. But I wanted to try and do it myself. It’s my favourite generation of Pokémon, so I thought I’d know it quite well, although I haven’t played it in quite some time (Even though I really should get back to playing Pokemon Sword).

Well, after the first twenty minutes, I’d guessed around 100 of them. I thought that was impressive, until it took about ten more minutes to guess the next twenty Pokémon. But by that point my mind went completely blank. So my progress so far is 120 Pokémon in 30 minutes, although I haven’t closed the tab, so I may try and complete it later.

If you want to try it yourself, you can find the quiz on Sporcle, which I think has a really good format for online quizzes. It’s just a single text field where you constantly type guesses, and if you get one correct, the text is cleared, and the relevant field is populated. It’s pretty fun.

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While I was on Sporcle, I found a few more quizzes to try. So here they are, along with my score:

• Name the countries of Europe – 34/47
• Name the all-time Premier League clubs from their logos as shown through a kaleidoscope? – 19/25
• Can you name (or deduce) the Harry Potter characters represented by the symbols on this ‘periodic table’ representation? – Around 60/132 (I’m going to try this again when I have more time).

Because of the current situation with COVID-19, I’ve been working from home. It’s been quite some time as well, I think about 9 weeks so far. Which is probably slightly longer than most, but that’s because my company enforced remote working (where possible), around 2 weeks before the UK went into lockdown. As you can imagine, I’ve found some things about remote work enjoyable, and also quite a few things that I actually prefer about a physical workplace.

But just for a bit of background information: I work as a software engineer, mainly as a mobile developer, but I’ve also built various REST APIs, and worked on SSO while I’ve been at my current job. Right now, I’ve actually been going through a lot of training, as we’ve been bought by a much larger company, so we’re adapting a lot of our software to their tech stack. But essentially, everything I’m doing is possible from home.

However, I’ve noticed that while the main chunks of my work are possible from home, there’s a lot of extra things that I do that just aren’t as easy. Or sometimes they’re not more difficult to do remotely, they just take some getting used to. For example, our standup¹ meetings are usually done in front of our whiteboard, which we use to track the progress of different pieces of work. This is quite good at helping the team visualise the overall progress, and keeps us aligned. It’s completely possible to do this meeting over a video call, but I don’t think it’s quite the same.

The small interactions that happen in a physical workplace are something that I miss as well. Because sometimes you just need to bounce ideas off someone, double check something, or just have a quick chat. Working remotely just makes this seem like more of a hassle.

What I’m discovering, is that my previous idea of remote work wasn’t necessary that accurate. In a normal situation, I would work from home occasionally, but only for one or two days at a time, so no real adjustment was needed. It was just a case of carrying on working on whatever you were previously, join a video call for standup, and possibly one for a meeting. But at least for me, it still felt like the “team” was operating out of a physical location, and I was temporarily separated. My expectations for this period of remote working was that it would be an extended version of my past experience, but now I realise I wasn’t truly “working remotely” before.

Obviously, my current experience of remote work is still not going to be a true representation either, as we are all dealing with the lockdown at the same time. Which I assume clouds my judgement about this quite a lot. So I can’t quite claim that my views now are absolute, and given a different scenario, I would probably have completely different opinions on it.

However, that doesn’t mean I’ve not noticed anything I like more about working in an office. A few probably apply to quite a lot of people: face-to-face conversations, small informal discussions, and an easier way to separate work from home.

One thing I miss that possibly is not that popular, is the commute to and from work. Mine is about an hour and a half in total, and involves walking to a train station, getting a train into London, two underground trains, and finally another walk to the office. To some that may seem tedious, but for me that’s time that can be spent listening to a podcast or music, watching a video, reading a book, etc. But I also enjoy walking, and my commute involves about 40 minutes of walking each way, and I find London to be a pretty good place to stroll around. Especially when I go in early at around 6/7.

There are, of course, quite a lot of things that I enjoy about working from home so much. There’s the time that I’ve gained by removing 3 hours of daily commute from my day, the money I’m disabling by not paying for the daily commute, and also the fact that I don’t have to wake up as early to start work. The extra time in the day means that I’ve got more time to do things like cooking dinner, having a proper lunch, and seeing my girlfriend more. We’ve gone from seeing each other in the evenings and the weekend, to practically every second of the day, apart from when she has to go to work (key worker).

All things considered, the hardest part of this situation is the lockdown, not working from home. And the fact that everything seems to have suddenly changed. We can’t just go outside anymore, see our family, or go out with our friends. One that’s especially difficult for us Brits, is the weather. We spend all of our life moaning about it, but right now we are having some pretty great weather. Lucky for us we have a garden, but I’m sure we’d all much prefer to enjoy it properly.
But for now that’s out of our control, and we’ll just have to get on with it.

Tim Bradshaw, Sarah Neville, and Helen Warrell, writing at Financial Times:

Health chiefs in the UK have tasked a team of software developers to “investigate” switching its unique contact-tracing app to the global standard proposed by Apple and Google, signalling a potential about-turn just days after the NHS launched its new coronavirus app.

Maybe they’re finally getting the message, that their custom solution will not work? Just like I mentioned before?

That’s not the only bit of news from this article though, with more details emerging on the app. That is it being developed by a Swiss IT development company named “Zuhlke Engineering”, with a 6-month contract worth £3.8m.

They’re said to be doing this as a two-week time boxed technical spike. Which is basically a period of time allocated to evaluate a new technology/implementation. Then after the spike (evaluation) is complete, more work can be planned, estimated, and carried out.

I’m just glad they’re open to switching to the more practical Apple/Google implementation.

Greg Morris:

I know Apple marketing is great but we need to have a little chat about the Magic Keyboard because I think they may have sold you a lie. You see, despite it being pretty great the keyboard Apple sold you isn’t really magic.

I am not sure what you expected to happen when you attached a keyboard complete with backlight keys and a trackpad to an iPad but it was never going to turn it into a Mac. The way that some people have spoken about the keyboard seems that they expected some kind of OTA update once you connected it, and that the iPad all of sudden wasn’t an iPad anymore.

Greg talks a lot of sense here about the situation with the iPad. Where a huge number of people use it, enjoy using it, and get a lot done on it. However, there are people that try to use it, discover it isn’t for them, then tell the rest of the world that it’s not good for anyone.

Another small update to Text Case is hitting the App Stores.

It comes with a few UI enhancements, notably to help show pointer location when hovering. And also a simple context menu that appears when you right click or long press on any formatted text, where you can choose to either copy or share the result.

Improvements were also made to the performance of the app, and a few miscellaneous bugs were also fixed.

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Links:

• iOS/iPadOS App Store
• Mac App Store
• Text Case Website

The NHS has come up with its own contact-tracing app, “NHS COVID-19”, and there are already plans for it to be trialled with key workers on the Isle of Wight.

However, it’s doesn’t use the more privacy focussed solution that Apple and Google have come up with, but rather a centralised one. Where the data about the tracked interactions will be sent. Although it doesn’t seem exactly clear what that data is. It could simply be a list of unique IDs that the device has come into contact with, along with your own ID. Or it could also include other sensitive information. Who knows? All I know is that, that question will always exist while it uses a custom solution.

Privacy is not only the potential issue with the app though. My concern mainly is with its effectiveness. This is how they claim it works:

• Once you’ve installed the app on your phone, it can detect (using Bluetooth) if other phones that are also running the app are nearby.
• Importantly, the app knows how close it has been to other phones running the app, and for how long. This allows the app to build up an idea of which of these phones owners are most at risk.
• If you then use the app to report that you’re experiencing coronavirus symptoms, all the phones that have been nearby will receive an alert from the app.
• Users reading the alert will now know they may have been near a person with coronavirus, and can then self-isolate.
• If the NHS later discovers that your diagnosis was wrong (and your reported symptoms are not coronavirus), the other users will receive another alert, letting them know if they can stop self-isolating.

My questions would be the following:

• How often can it run? If it’s just an app with no special entitlements, then surely it is bound my the background restrictions like most other apps.
• If it’s monitoring it relatively often, then surely even Bluetooth Low Energy will have an impact on the battery level?
• What happens if a device is put into low power mode? Is all tracing stopped? Because surely background tasks aren’t run as often then.
• Can you really trust it to trace every contact you’ve had? For example if you sit next to someone with COVID-19 for 10 minutes, but for some reason the background task to monitor Bluetooth doesn’t run, then does it really do it’s job?

And I’d just like to point out the PDF that NHS made to explain the differences between a decentralised and centralised model. The only difference I see, is that their centralised model also includes an “NHS clinical algorithm” to detect the risk posed from each of your interactions.

I for one, will not be using any contact-tracing app, that doesn’t follow the solution that Apple and Google have come up with. Because, apart from wanting to control the data yourself, and possibly even retrieve more data than necessary, there’s no real gain to use a centralised approach.

Another mystery has finally been uncovered, and that is the recipe to IKEA’s amazing meatballs, and the cream sauce that goes with them.

Since we can’t go to IKEA anymore to get hold of them, they shared the recipe on Twitter. And just in the style you would expect:

I’ll definitely be making these myself.

Matt Birchler:

I’m reminded of Dieter Rams’ 10th principle of good design: Good design is as little design as possible. The vibe I get from many tech YouTube videos, and this one in particular, is the exact opposite. Why is Android better? Because it has more X and the hardware comes in Y variants. So many arguments involve the word “more” but so few involve the word “better” which saddens me.

Precisely this. Too many times I hear Android being better than iOS because it has “more” of something. Sure, it’s bound to be better at certain things than iOS, but that’s not what typically gets talked about.

When writing about apps, it’s very common that you’ll need to combine screenshots together if you’re trying to capture a rather long page. One common case of this is when you’re trying to capture a screenshot of a Shortcut, which is why I looked for an app like Picsew, when I was getting screenshots for my recent article about how I’m using Data Jar to help writing link posts.

I’ve used apps like Tailor or LongScreen before, but I found LongScreen to be hard to deal with, and Tailor only support the iPhone. So I explored the App Store trying to find a solution for the iPad, and luckily I found Picsew.

Similar to the previously mentioned apps, Picsew has the ability to automatically combine multiple pictures together. But it didn’t seem to work well with the screenshots I took of some shortcuts. This is where the more “manual” option comes in. And I think that option is actually much more impressive than the automatic feature.

So after you select the photos you want to combine (in the correct order), and choose either vertical or horizontal, you use a pretty cool editor to adjust the position of each screenshot where you wish it to join the next one.

It’s quite intuitive actually, and was much easier than I thought it would be. You just tap on the join you wish to exit, and “push” the content towards the join until you’re happy.

Video: Picsew Edit Photo Join

You can also crop the entire photo inside the app as well, which is pretty handy as when you get a pretty large photo, it’s hard to do fine adjustments in the Photos app.

Video: Picsew Crop Photo

Anyway, I found it to be a very handy utility. So if you’re looking for an app that can join various photos together, or if you’ve used another one previously, I’d recommend checking out Picsew.

Download Picsew from the App Store

John Gruber:

Regular edition iPhones are numbered. Yes, that’s not quite true of the primordial models. The 2007 original iPhone was just “iPhone”, and the “3G” in the second and third models stood for the cellular networking technology. But starting with the iPhone 4, regular edition iPhones have all been numbered. Higher-numbered iPhones both look new on the outside and offer improved technology on the inside.

The iPhone SE’s are special editions because they fall outside this continuum. They look like phones from several years prior, and some of their technology is several years old as well. But other aspects of their technology are state of the art (e.g. chip systems) or nearly so (cameras).

I’ve read some takes on the new iPhone SE, and it’s clear that some people really have no clue what the device is, or who it’s for.

One of the few I’ve seen that make sense to me is John Gruber’s. What I like the most is that it’s not just a product review, he talks about the meaning behind the naming, what market it fits into, and some fascinating comparisons and observations regarding the SE line and the typical “main” iPhone line.

I’m not going to be buying an iPhone SE, but I would certainly say that if I didn’t upgrade from the 7 Plus to my current XS, then it would be a serious thought in my head.

However, in a similar way to how the iPhone XR was such a great deal, and offered the best iPhone for so many people, and at a much better price, this new iPhone SE takes over that role in my opinion. Although depending on wheat comes out later this year, that status may only last for 6 months or so. Then again, having such a capable iPhone SE in the lineup, allows Apple to push the rest of the phones even further.