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.

As it’s the New Year and many people are thinking about reviewing their exercise regime, I thought this might be a good time to write about my experience with Couch to 5K (C25K), a well-known programme for training anyone to be able to run five kilometres.

I should point out that this isn’t a real-time diary. I started it late last year and, as I write this, I have not yet completed a full 5km run. But — spoiler alert — I’m still making progress. There have been a few bumps on the way which, I think, is what makes this worth writing about.

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.

So here’s the thing that drives me crazy.

Having had a hard disk die on me a few years ago, I’m a little paranoid about backups. I have three:

1. Time Machine, over WiFi to a Synology NAS
2. Backblaze, “cloud” backup over the internet
3. SuperDuper clone to an infrequently connected USB hard disk

Time Machine and Backblaze run all the time, nice, seamless and hopefully pretty complete. I do the SuperDuper clone occasionally and every few months I try to reboot and check that the clone actually works.

As I’ve done for the last few years, here are a few quick thoughts about today’s new iOS release, version 11.

I’ve been using the iPad version since the beginning of August and the iPhone version for only a couple of week but I think I have reasonable picture of what you’re going to see.

## Good

• Multi-app support on the iPad. Wow! It’s quite different. You might need to give it a while before you get used to it. I also found that I needed to rearrange my dock so that apps I use to multitask are quickly available
• “Swipe up on the iPad keyboard to get symbol characters.” Such a time saver
• The voice synthesis of Siri is way better. But I agree with Gruber, if I could have dedicated engineering resources to Siri that wouldn’t have been where I would put them
• iCloud sync for Photos. No more training each device to receognise each person!
• Lots of nice, minor changes. The “Now playing” lock screen widget, the “play” button at the top of playlists/albums in the music app
• Control Center is improved (but see first item in the “ugly” section below)

## Bad

• I’m guessing this has something to do with the iPhone X, but the one 3D Touch gesture I used all the time was the hard-press on the left side of the screen to trigger the app switcher. That’s gone in iOS 11. This is going to take a lot of getting used to
• It won’t work on older devices. I get the “why” but it always sucks when they get left behind

## Ugly

• Why did the WiFi button is Control Center change to be “disconnect” rather than “switch off”?!
• Not sure about some of the animations, especially on iPhone.

How do you interview people for developer and technical jobs? This is an enduring question, and one with many angry factions.

It’s too big a subject to tackle in its entirety and I have no intention of trying. Instead, I want to talk about one aspect: should you ask Computer Science questions or not?

In one corner are the people who argue that you never need to implement a linked list or write Quick Sort in real life, so asking you to do that in an interview is unreasonable and excludes good candidates. They argue that there are more important things to consider, such as the use of applications frameworks or design or working with other people.

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.

It’s a sad day when a web service that you use dies. It’s extra sad when a web service you made a (tiny) business on goes away. So I wrote a few words about the demise of Delicious over on the Wandle Software blog.

I thought I’d jot a few notes about next weeks WWDC, Apple’s major developer conference. Full disclosure: I’ve not been following the rumour sites very closely this year. I’ve not even done as much iOS development since WWDC 2016 as I have for the last few, so what follows is just a wish list. It’s based on neither leaks nor an in depth knowledge of failings of the current developer tools.

Earth Day bugs me.

Okay, not Earth Day itself. The idea of respecting and preserving the world is difficult to argue with. No, what annoys me is all the big corporates jumping on the bandwagon just to be seen to be there.

These companies do, effectively, nothing, or at least nothing actually useful, just to say that they’re supporting Earth Day. It’s worth talking about a couple of examples.

My employer had committed to turn off the lights that illuminate the logos on all its buildings for our lunch hour. They also suggest that we turn off unnecessary computers and other equipment for the same time. They generously suggest that home workers to do the same.