2020

A Weekend With Nokia 3 & Android Pie

On Friday I took my iPhone 8 in to an authorised repairer to get a new battery. I’ll get it back on Monday, but I’m spending the weekend with a Nokia 3 running Android Pie, or as it is known in our house, The Punishment Phone. This phone is very,...

2019

Washi Tape Photo Corners

I used to have a box of commercial photo corners, clear ones like these that I found somewhere in my parent’s stationery and, um, adopted. I use them in scrapbooking to hold down photos. I know I could just glue the photos in, or tape the photos down, and I...

Seven Mistakes Every Programmer Should Make

Lots of people are willing to tell you things you “have to learn” before you start seriously programming, but I find that I learn best by just making mistakes. So here’s seven mistakes you should make once you start programming. 1. (Gently) Abuse a Scripting Language Ever wondered what people...

2018

Two Cameras

I recently inherited two cameras from my maternal grandparents. One was my grandmother’s, the other my grandfather’s. Both of them are fascinating as objects in their own right, but I also find them interesting for what they say about my grandparents. You might be able to tell from the picture...

Crippled by Design

For two and a half years I’ve been gathering my thoughts about the iPad Pro. Through two major iOS versions, and even a refresh of the product line. This review has missed the news cycles by about 30 months minus 24 hours, but I think it’s now time to look...

State of the Art 2018

Changes I first looked at digital painting in 2015 (where I was largely disappointed). In 2017 I’d settled on Procreate on the iPad Pro 12.9” with the Apple Pencil. Since that review I’ve spent a lot more time painting—both on the iPad and with acrylics—and developers have spent time improving...

2017

State of the Art: iPad Pro + Pencil

I love the iPad Pro The iPad Pro first came out in late 2015 and I snatched one up, along with the hard-to-find Apple Pencil. At the time I’d been dithering between a Surface Pro and the new iPad, but once I’d heard the latency tests for the Pencil come...

2016

iPad Bibles - Study Time

It’s been over two years since I had a look at the iOS Bible landscape. Since an iPad is now my primary home computer, it seemed time to make a survey of the large-format Bibles. While there are hundreds of Bible apps for iPhone, the market for iPad is much...

2015

A User's Guide to OAuth 2.0

I’ve been using OAuth 2 for a while now, and it seems every few months there’s a big kerfuffle because some provider or app has done OAuth 2 wrong, and left themselves open to exploitation. For the most part, I think these are mistakes where people just didn’t think, and...

A (Baker's) Dozen Drawings

I’ve been trying to become a digital artist since I first had my own computer, banging around in Kid Pix. But since art has never been my profession (and to be honest I’m not good enough or dedicated enough) I’ve never been able to shell out for the pro tools:...

2014

Bibles on iPhone: Free 2 Pray Editions

There are a lot of Bible apps out there, and like the rest of the App Store, the majority are ugly garbage. But that doesn’t mean a kid on an iTouch needs to be stuck with a King James in Comic Sans. I’ve looked at 191 Bible apps, to try...

A Woman In Tech

I am a woman, and I work as a “software engineer”. I didn’t plan that, but looking back it should have been obvious that I’d really enjoy this. As far as I can remember I’ve always been interested in computers, as my parents were. But I had so many interests:...

Flying High

There’s been some recent brouhaha over how “air travel was exciting” and glamorous in the ’50s and ’60s. Which isn’t, of course, a new complaint. But it is rubbish. It was boring, smoky, dangerous, noisy, and drunken. But the legroom! The touch of class! Airport queues were not an ordeal....

Hello and Welcome

I plan to use this blog as an opportunity to explore some technical things. Things mostly related to programming, but also perhaps cooking, art, music, craft, politics, economics, religion, or whatever my current interest is. If you’re looking for my collection of cat pictures, quotations, and so on, please see...

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