Barry Avatar
Barry
I live on the south coast of the UK with my wife, daughter, and a one eyed rescue cat. I’m making efforts to reclaim more time for personal and family activity, and to do the things that I’ve been putting off, in some cases for a very long time. My current personal focus is music – specifically learning to play guitar. #apple #android #mac #windows #guitar

@jasonekratz I'm good at breaking stuff. Seems like Lou is too.

@amerpie

@andyn Ouch! Maybe they're Apple fanboi wasps.

@andyn @mcn OneMark is awesome - plugins are a big benefit of using OneNote on Windows.

I've never been impressed with the standard web capture, but the Markdownload browser extension + OneMark works well for me.

@nf3xn my daughter loves Nando’s, so we go there more than we probably should! We also have many of their sauces at home (bought from the supermarket, not stolen from their restaurants 🙂 ).

@Cali @shanselman

@andyn @mcn And they’re often better than Apple on Apple’s platform.

We did an experiment with notes apps. We had five Apple devices and one shared note in the Notes app. I typed the note on my phone, and five minutes later it still hadn’t consistently synced with the other devices. We did the same thing with OneNote (and added my Surface laptop into the mix) and the note was updating in real time across all the devices.

@andyn @mcn we need more of us sharing how well this stuff works! Under Satya Nadella Microsoft have adopted an approach of making everything work everywhere, and in my experience they’re delivering on that.

@mcn We have a family account (me, wife, daughter) and between us we have a mix of iPhones, iPads, Android, Mac and Windows. It’s worked well for us, and most importantly I trust it to sync everything - which is not how I feel about iCloud Drive.

I also have OneDrive for business (which I think is actually a front end for SharePoint) and I’ve had equally good experience there.

@mcn I have it on my desktop PC purely for syncing files in iCloud Drive which work okay. The rest is rubbish.

I might remove it soon as we keep everything in OneDrive.

@jasonekratz Homebrew is one of those things that I stopped using because it was great when it worked, but became a massive time suck anything went wrong.

@amerpie

@philomath @amerpie Regrettably, I read it. It's his usual level of fuckwittery and not worthy of anyone's time.

@andyn I would most definitely be interested in reading this. Since shifting my business tech to Windows/Android and keeping Mac/iOS for home I have come to much prefer Windows.

I bought a MacBook Air earlier this year and now wish I'd waited for the ARM powered Surface.

@Brandon It's never to late to learn or improve. I say go for it.

@howdytom I don't know if you're still looking for a solution...

I used to have a rich text snippet set up in TextExpander that I would use to start every email.

That was just enough to get Apple mail to use formatted text.

Eventually I gave up on Apple Mail though.

@amerpie That US politicians refuse to address this issue is shameful and unforgivable.

@amerpie glad to hear you’re still in one piece. Still, that’s an exciting day at work!

@jasonekratz I have matching colours across Fastmail labels, calendars, and Todoist tags. It works well for me.

@andycarolan @philomath an AI generated narrative perhaps? 🙂

I'm not a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist, and I try not to have knee jerk reactions to things. But I cannot make sense of Microsoft Recall.

When I think about some of the NDAs and security questionnaires I have to complete for clients, I don't see any way that they would accept this.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/2/24233992/microsoft-recall-windows-11-uninstall-feature-bug

@andycarolan @philomath The thing that's on my mind is whether the “classist and ableist” is just marketing or of they actually believe. If it's really what they think then 🤯

Canva are increasing their prices by up to 300% to reflect the "added value" of their generative AI features.

And some people still think they aren't going to ruin Affinity?

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/3/24234698/canva-price-increase-300-percent-ai-features

Oh, this is fun! There are often debates between me, my daughter, and my wife abut whether something is blue or green. The three of us have just done this, and now we know why we disagree!

https://ismy.blue/

@andyn I love my Kobo Libra Colour. It replaced an ageing Kindle Paperwhite and the difference is night and day.

I sometimes wonder if people on Masto actively seek out things to complain about. Some folks seem to thrive on being miserable.

@andycarolan that gives while new meaning to the term “fancy pants”.

@amerpie Well actually… that’s all really good advice 😁

According to NaNoWriMo “the categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege.”

Nothing to do with being sponsored by an AI writing tool I’m sure.

https://nanowrimo.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/29933455931412-What-is-NaNoWriMo-s-position-on-Artificial-Intelligence-AI

A friend shared this with me, and I'm sharing it with you. The message is timeless, but how often do we take the time to do this?

Watty Thompson - The Beauty That Surrounds Ya

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLnNVFu941o&list=OLAK5uy_nt83Ej-l_Nta9iyDcMlysTh_HVQVLo6hg&index=2

Another lovely day. Just home from a family trip to see Oliver! at the Chichester Festival Theatre. A really terrific show.

Given that (a) much of the web is unusable without a decent adblocker and (b) this will impact all Chrome based browsers, it's probably time for me to give Firefox another go.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/chromes-manifest-v3-and-its-changes-for-ad-blocking-are-coming-real-soon/

One of the problems with having an elderly parent that I have to shop for, is that my Amazon recommendations are full of mobility aids and incontinence products.

May be useful in the future I guess 😬

It's too hot to be moving stuff around, but we're switching broadband providers this week so I'm taking the opportunity to re-route a bunch of cables. If I leave it until afterwards, I know I'll just get everything working and leave it part done!

Here's a tip from the "when life gives you lemons" idea.

I have a Facebook account for my daughter's school, clubs etc. On there I'm connected with a family member who reposts horrible right wing crap.

I used to mute this person so that I didn't see the reposts, but this morning I had a brainwave.

I clicked through to every one of the original posts and reported them for hate speech.

An interesting article, which I found particularly relevant as I've been thinking about what is (and isn't) valuable to post. The tricky thing is trying to predict what may be valuable to an unknown person reading something: https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/the-intellectual-obesity-crisis

Found via @koolinus Suggested Reads - https://nicolalosito.it/2024/07/28/suggested-reads-for-july-28-2024/

A Relaxing Week - Last week we had a family holiday in the wilds of west Wales. It might have been the best holiday we've had. https://barrysampson.net/blog/a-relaxing-week -

Inspired by the positive comments from @andyn I ordered a CMF Phone 1. It was a limited time deal on Amazon for £179.

It arrived this afternoon. I've been playing with it for a couple of hours and I'm blown away by how good it is. It's such good value (even without the deal).

https://cmf.tech/en-gb/pages/phone-1

I even managed to get an okay bee picture today.

cc @alexandra

A buff tailed bumble bee hanging from a plat while collecting nectar.

Our luck with nature is holding out. We went for a coastal walk today, hoping we would see some seals.

The head of an Atlantic Grey Seal showing above the water.

Oh man, sorry to hear that. Rest!

We went to a nature reserve today. My wife really wanted to see a Kingfisher as she's never seen one before. We were just walking back to the car park when we saw this little guy. A juvenile Kingfisher that we watched fishing for about half an hour.

A Kingfisher sitting on a bare branch, looking down at the water below.

I've been tidying up my Vimeo account, and realised that I've been hosting some videos for a client I haven't worked with since 2016.

I deleted them. I wonder if they'll notice.

Moving Away From WordPress - At the start of the year I was looking after 14 Wordpress sites - some were my own, some were for clients. I'm down to four now and with any luck they'll be gone by year end. https://barrysampson.net/blog/moving-away-from-wordpress - #100DaysToOffload

You can now get a free no-obligation SIX MONTH free trial of all three Affinity apps on Mac, Windows and iPad.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/trial/

Looks like Canva/Serif are taking the fight to Adobe.

#adobe #affinity

I’m not much of a car person - I tend to think of them purely functionally - but on my recent trip to Valencia this little thing was my hire car. So much fun to drive!

A metallic blue Fiat 500 parked in a sunny city street in Spain.

I'm in Valencia (the one in Spain) for a couple of days. Every time I come here I'm amazed by the Jardín del Turia - it\s such an incredible thing for a city to have done.

https://www.comunitatvalenciana.com/en/valencia/valencia/natural-landscapes/the-turia-river-gardens