When I got my new MacBook it wasn’t complete. I sat it down on my desk and nothing would connect.
I tried to plug in my monitor, but I needed a dongle to connect to my DVI monitor. My FireWire external hard-drive needed an adapter. I had to get a card reader as my camera takes CompactFlash cards. Even my USB hub needed replacing because my new computer came with a newer, faster USB standard.
According to WordPress, this is my one thousandth post here. I’m not sure how (or whether) I should celebrate this occasion but thought it was worth noting.
ZX81.org.uk has been around in one form or another since 1999. It’s survived the dot com boom and bust, it made it through the financial crisis and austerity. It’s been my “home” for longer than any physical location. It’s outlasted six employers (excluding myself, when I was self-employed) and I’ve had it longer than I’ve known my wife or had children.
I’m sure that you’ve read Fast Company article about Apple playing the long game. It’s fascinating and, despite the deliberately click-bait title I’ve used here, I think it’s generally true for Apple.
However, there is one area where they don’t get things right. Here’s where I think Cook does it again:
“When you look at most of the solutions, whether it’s devices, or things coming up out of Big Pharma, first and foremost, they are done to get the reimbursement [from an insurance provider]. Not thinking about what helps the patient. So if you don’t care about reimbursement, which we have the privilege of doing, that may even make the smartphone market look small.”
As I wrote before, iOS 10 is an odd release to talk about before it’s generally available. Like iOS 8 — but unlike iOS 7 — almost all the good stuff is hidden in APIs, for use by developers. Which means that it’s probably going to be a nice update, but until apps are available it’s difficult to tell.
That’s not to say that there’s nothing interesting visible. Here are a few things that struck me.
There have been lots of articles like “iOS 10 chooses renovation over innovation” since Apple’s WWDC keynote in June.
I think they reflect the fact that when you download the first beta and put it on your old phone — because you’re too cowardly to put it on the handset you use every day — iOS 10 is slightly underwhelming. The first time you look at the home screen you see… pretty much no differences from iOS 9. So you launch Maps and see they moved the search bar to the bottom of the screen. You tap Messages and see some new icons at the bottom. But Mail looks the same. Safari seems to be unchanged.
I can’t make up my mind about “And Another Thing…,” Eoin Colfer’s book, which is the sixth Hitchhikers novel, the first not written by Douglas Adams.
On the one hand I wanted to give it a fair chance, try to judge it on its merits rather than simply as a H2G2 book not by Adams. On the other, it’s clearly not by Douglas Adams. It has the same characters. It’s clearly by someone who is a Hitchhiker fan and some things — like the names of places and things — feel spot on.
There are many ways that recruitment is broken for both candidates and potential employers, but this time I want to focus on one aspect that I experienced recently as a candidate: how companies and recruiters don’t treat prospective hires with respect. I’ve changed jobs a few times over the years and some of the ways that I’ve been (mis)treated in the last year surprised even me.
Let’s start with something that I’m sure we’ve all experienced: not getting a response back from an initial application.
Support can be a hard, unforgiving job. You get abuse and you feel the temptation to lash out. I saw this on Twitter this morning:
“I’m disgusted by what you do, but I respect you” pic.twitter.com/4QeUsfBlO2
— Federico Viticci (@viticci) March 18, 2016
Firstly, yes, the tone of both emails from the end user are unacceptable. The first one is a bit rude, the second a lot. Having been on the receiving end of similar messages in the past, both for my software company and in my day job, I feel for Federico.
Yes, I already wrote about the new Apple TV but I had a little more to say now that I’ve been using it a few months.
So far Siri has not been as useful as I thought it would be. The main failing is that we use Netflix profiles a lot and Siri doesn’t understand them. I might tell Siri that I want to watch, say, House of Cards but if it’s currently logged into the kids’ profile it either won’t let me watch it or wants to start it on the first episode. If you’re going to have to switch profiles with the remote anyway…
I needed a replacement for a failing Time Capsule, used to back up two MacBooks. The obvious solution would have been a new Time Capsule
The downside? It’s not plug and play in the same way that the Time Capsule is. I had to install the disk, download the operating system, set up the disks, create users… None of which were really hard but still need to be done.