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This is a long way of saying Thank You to F for the Olloclip, the ideal gadget for someone who loves both their iPhone and photography. Literally only available a couple of weeks before Christmas (for iPhone 5 at least), it still arrived before the 25th.

For those that don’t know, the Olloclip is an attachment for the iPhone’s camera. It looks like this:

It sits over the iPhone’s camera. It has three lenses on two sides. On one side there’s the fish-eye adapter, on the other is a wide-angle. If you unscrew the the wide-angle it becomes a macro adapter.

I don’t normally do this kind of thing but I’ve been blogging a little less than usual this year so I thought it might be worth jotting down a few notes about what I have been up to. With pictures, obviously, as I’m never far from my camera or iPhone.

The theme, in case you missed, it is my son who grew from a tiny, sleeping-eating… thing to a walking, playing and noisy toddler.

Is wasn’t really my idea. I saw it in the newsagents in Rhodes Town and laughed but I never really thought of actually buying it. The credit for that goes to my wife.

I’ve been posting pictures of each month entry on Twitter and Facebook but I thought it would be nice to group them all together in one post. That’s what you’ll find here.

Eric Schmidt says Google is the new Microsoft and it’s winning the war against Apple. I think he’s missing some perspective.

One of the key things that Steve Jobs realised when he returned to Apple in the late nineties was that the industry is not necessarily a zero sum game.

“We have to let go of a few things here. We have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.”

I barely recall any mention of Halloween when I was growing up. That’s changed in the last few years. It’s certainly being much more heavily promoted these days and I want to say — though I have no evidence to support it — that it’s at the expense of Bonfire Night. Presumably children asking strangers for sugary treats is safer than fireworks and piles of burning wood?

Like all the best upgrades, iOS 6 is almost entirely invisible. It works just like iOS 5 — which is to say, pretty well most of the time — but with some convenient new additions. Also, unlike version five, it’s been relatively stable throughout the beta process.

What’s new and what will you like? I’ve grown so accustomed to most of them that I had to look up the “What’s new” page on Apple’s website. Really, that’s a good thing. Invisibility is the fate of a feature that’s quickly integrated with how you use a device. (The thing that makes it tricky is that it’s also the fate of a completely useless feature that you never use.)

A couple of minor “admin” changes:

• If you want to get an email subscription, you can do so by using the “Subscribe to Blog via Email” option at the bottom of each page. Or, if you leave a comment, you can simply check the “Notify me of new posts by email” box. If you’re currently using the old system, please try to switch over to this new variant. Long story short: I can’t access the Feedburner service that I used to use
• For the same reason, I have switched the RSS feed. It should point to — indeed it may already do so — but please check and update if you use it
• I’ve added “Share” links on many of the pages. Some sites are a bit too in-your-face, practically demanding that you share posts. I’ve tried to add the functionality without being too obnoxious. Having said that, please do share my posts!

Today marks “Juniors” nine month “birthday,” so, unless you want to be pedantic and count the exact number of weeks, he’s been “out” for as long as he was in utero.

His progress has been well documented elsewhere so I won’t go into detail, but it’s fair to say that it’s been an eventful few months.

For most of the last year I have been in an office with no natural light. Well, I say office. It was really a conference room with a dozen of us crammed in, two to a desk in my case. Cables everywhere; at one point they almost shut the project room down for health and safety violations.

But — getting to the point — a couple of months ago we moved. And not only was there natural light but I got a window seat. And what a view.

This amused me but didn’t quite fit in with the “story” I was trying to tell in my blog about Oslo…