If you’re looking for a comprehensive guide to pop music, from the 1950s to around 2010, Bob Stanley’s “Yeah Yeah Yeah” is it [affiliate link]. It’s roughly chronological and covers everything from the introduction of vinyl (the “official” start of pop music) to downloads (the end).

Every page leaves you with a list of songs you want to listen to. The volume is such that you’ll never get around to finding all of them but I did end up listening to a bunch of stuff that I wouldn’t ordinarily have thought to. Ironically, by being published in 2014 it misses the mainstreaming of the very streaming services that allowed me to do that!

“The Establishment” [affiliate link] by Owen Jones is another Brexit-inspired read, though it was actually written before the referendum and some of it has dated remarkably quickly because of that.

It reads like a long Guardian article. Or, maybe, as a collection of Guardian columns strung together, in the sense that some turns of phrase seem to repeat often. If they’d not been in one book it might have been less noticeable? And the politics are similarly left-leaning.

I don’t normally read “franchise” books. I’ve avoided Star Wars, Star Trek and Doctor Who spin-offs but thought I’d try “Solo” [affiliate link] featuring James Bond, mostly as as it was written by William Boyd who is one of my favourite authors.

It was a quick read, some nice twists. It has more gruesome violence than you get in the movies, which surprised me. Fleming purists may argue that it’s not the Bond of the books, but nothing offended me.

This is the time when people write lists about the past year and the year coming. Why have original content when you can have listicles? And why should I be the one to miss out? So here, just as I did last year, are a few notes about most of the books I read.

# Civil War¹

I’m a big fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and offshoots like their Netflix TV shows, but I’ve never really read the original comic books. I thought I should change that.

This was all set to be a story of how much the whole family were enjoying the Nintendo Switch¹. While that’s true, there’s another side. We’ll get to that but let’s start with the good stuff.

Long story short: after just over a week, we’re all getting a lot out of it. The games are fun, even my three year old gets a kick driving Princess Peach around what looks like Sugar Rush from Wreck-It Ralph.

I wasn’t sure that I wanted a “big” iPhone as I was perfectly happy with the 4” form-factor. But if I was going to get a new phone and the new ones are bigger, I reasoned, I may as well go really big and go for a 6s Plus. On paper it made perfect sense.

Then I played with one in an Apple Store and I laughed. In practice it was comically big. I really didn’t want a phone I could only realistically use with two hands.

Since I wrote about iTunes Match nearly eighteen months ago I thought it was worth revisiting and seeing how things have changed in that time.

Oddly, the short answer is “not very much.”

The problems that I identified last year are still very much present. Indeed there are some new examples. This is my favourite: when listening to “Man Machine” by Kraftwerk, iTunes Match seems to have decided that track four, which should be “The Model,” is really “Wouldn’t it be nice” by the Beach Boys. I don’t even own a copy of “Wouldn’t it be nice.”

It seems that there’s a large variation in people’s experience with iCloud and iTunes Match, Apple’s recently introduced service for making your entire music collection available across all your devices. At the risk of making things worse — since I have nothing conclusive to add — I thought that I’d add my anecdote to the collection.

Like most software — and especially Apples — it works best when you work in a particular way. It’s often difficult to tell how close your expectations are to the real thing until after you’ve handed over your credit card. But what I will say is that iTunes Match works pretty well if you want to do what I do. So if you read nothing else in this post, you should look at the next few paragraphs.

I’ve not been quite so active blogging this year due to a number of factors. A case in point: it wasn’t until December that I wrote about my holiday in July and a friends wedding in August!

This meant that the most popular articles were actually written in previous years:

1. Sophia Smith
2. Eight Best Computer Books
3. Installing Oracle 10g on CentOS4
4. Minolta Dual Scan II
5. iPhone Dev: Saving State

While I appreciate people visiting, I am continually surprised by the appeal of some of these. Oracle 10g and CentOS 4 are, in software terms, ancient! And the Dual Scan II is more than a decade old — I bought it with my iBook G3 in 2001!

• Average App Store Review Times – Displays the average app review time by pattern-matching tweets. Clever. (Currently around seven days, apparently.)
• Osborne! – Nice article about the Osborne-1 and the man behind it.