Kevin Ford

I was reminded that I haven’t blogged for a while since starting up again by reading a blog post here: sixcolors.com/post/2023… where a chap called Jason Snell has given up trying to depend solely on the iPad when travelling.

I bought the original yuge 12.9" iPad Pro when it was first launched back in late 2015, and was always excited to read about what Apple might add to the OS to make it more of a laptop replacement. But after a while they just kept moving things about instead of making improvements. The multiple window management is now on its third or fourth iteration. It’s still nowhere near as useful as a desktop OS.

By the time it drops off the supported list (this year I believe) it will only have barely more functionality than when I bought it (two apps, side by side plus a floating video window). I can’t fault the longevity, but I’ve given up hoping the iPad will ever be a laptop killer. As I mentioned in a previous post, I gave up any consideration of directly replacing it and instead purchased a MacBook Pro M2.

As Jason rightly points out, the Arm-based Apple laptops have effectively neutralised any particular advantage that the iPad had in battery life or portability due to not needing elaborate cooling mechanisms due to components that absolutely sip power.

I guess there’s no getting around the significant extra cost of getting an M series laptop, but for my money, assuming you ultimately can’t do without one (I certainly can’t) then any money you’re thinking about spending on an iPad is definitely worth putting towards a better laptop instead. I can’t personally recall a single computer that’s been as fully satisfying to use as this one. I’ve ditched my Windows desktop too. It’s utterly redundant.

I’ve been enjoying “regressing” back to the tools we used before the Social Media giants came along and started ruining the Internet. As much as I’m enjoying the high signal to noise ratio on Mastodon, it’s still a bit early to get some of the live information feeds that I used to depend on twitter for. And the search is not so useful, at least on the instance that I’m on currently.

I’m not sure when I stopped blogging and using an rss reader. It was a long time ago (not counting a recent very short flirtation with feedly, I seem to remember not enjoying it the first time around, and it didn’t do anything for me this time either). Discovery took a lot longer back then, which was often compounded by the things you found and enjoyed suddenly stopping. The attraction of the self-curating feeds was obvious and easy.

But, we all know what eventually happened. There were too many eyeballs in one place having a good time for the darker sides of capitalism and politics to simply ignore. So began the enshittification.

After a while I started remembering life before these services. A post on Mastodon sparked an old memory about rss, and someone else commented that it never really went away… and they were right. Everywhere I look there’s still a perfectly valid rss feed going. Some of the feeds are just as useless as I remember them, insofar as they’re just a heading and a snippet of text, but those kinds of feed typically seem to be hosted on advert/paywalled sites.

So I grabbed a copy of NetNewsWire and started falling back in love with Web 2.0. Time and space to think. Low noise. No character limits, constant ads or overwhelming nonstop scrolling. Inevitable that lead to micro.blog as well.

Now that I write this first blog post for 10 years, I realise that I’ve been gravitating back towards this for months now. I changed my giant iPhone 11 Pro Max for an iPhone SE last year. In January, I decided that rather than replace my iPad I’d get a MacBook Pro instead - prior to this I had a reasonable but ultimately disappointing 13" Windows laptop, and a gaming PC, neither of which was particularly enjoyable to use.

The PC was good but in my office where I have to work. The laptop had a shit battery, not enough RAM for a modern browser, a weird bug that made it lock up (that now I think about it was probably related to something I read about the TPM in AMD chips in a kernel thing recently, if I find a link again I’ll post it).

So I find myself now with a similar set of tools to what I used before tablets and twitter and Facebook and Brexit and Trump and and and and… the last few years seem rather pointless, in hindsight.

So what else shall I write about now? Well, I suspect I’ll write a load of cobblers on the politics/economics front. I can’t imagine how I’ll be able to stop myself venting on some stuff, but I’ll try to keep it real.

But mostly I want to start putting some structure around some of the things I’d like to work on, and I think having a blog really helped the last time I tried some of this stuff, if only to keep me engaged after the initial focus started to drift a little.

So expect to see:

• Stuff about making music. I’ve been trying (sporadically) to learn Ableton Live (partly why I bought the Macbook Pro) and despite a recent lull (which I blame mainly on redecorating the whole house) I think it’s actually starting to sink in. I’ve also got three nice Elektron machines which I bought before I thought I’d get anywhere on a computer. I don’t really have any strong feelings on the in the box/out of the box stuff. The computer is obviously more powerful in every way, but the tactile nature of the focused hardware is also compelling in a different way.

• Stuff about learning to program. Despite being in IT for 25 years, the most I’ve ever really done creatively is shell scripting. Recently I’ve decided to try and teach myself something a bit more useful, so I decided upon Python, as I suspect that will be a lot more useful to me in my role than some of the other languages. I suspect I won’t have anything original to contribute on this front, but equally I found that one of the biggest consumers of my old techie blogs was me :)

• Random stuff. My cats (pics guaranteed). Getting back on a pushbike. Intermittent fasting. Planning the garden. Vitsoe shelving. Photography. My adventures in an EV.

Bye for now.