Unordered: New year clear out

I'm not a big fan of email in general1, but when I realised that my email account seemed to have stopped receiving most (but not all) incoming mail and I had to figure out why, I was reminded why I don't want to work with computers in an IT-type role. Computer administration is hard, and annoying, and when you manage to fix something there is always the chance that someone is going to come along and break it.

So - if you've sent me an email and I've ignored it over the last couple of months - my apologies, its all my fault, its a technical thing because of my old-fashioned opinion that having an email address under my own domain name is a good idea.2 (If you've sent me email before then that I've ignored... well, there is every chance that was just me ignoring it, so sorry about that too.)

But, along with making my email actually work properly3, I've also had a bit of a tidy-up of my inbox, folders etc. etc. I find that when I can make Inbox Zero work, it works really well for me - I've been doing it with my work email, and I'm going to start doing it with my personal email as well. So wish me luck with that. (Speaking of which, Merlin Mann - the guy credited with inventing 'inbox zero' has an update on the general idea for 2020 in Wired.

Anyway - along with clearing out my email is a clear out of all the interesting links, ideas, drafts and news that I've been filing away. New year, New decade, fresh start and all of that...

Politics

So, apparently my pre-election blog post failed to go viral, ignite the world and shift public opinion, which was about as surprising as the election result. The British public seems to have collectively decided that we don't mind electing a liar- sure, Boris can bend the truth a little bit, which means that we can't really trust anything that he says- but we couldn't trust what any politician said anyway, and we liked his manifesto and promises...

To me, thats "wronger than wrong";

"When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
– Isaac Asimov, "The Relativity of Wrong" (source)

I suppose the bigger danger is that the wrong lizard might get in…

So, we have a leader with a huge majority in the Commons, Bre*it about to happen, an advisor with plans to overhaul the civil service and no particular reason to care about public opinion over the next couple of years...

Great.

Also, one of the continents is on fire, and war in the Middle East looks set to break out again, just as Trump starts warming up his election campaign- what a start to the year.

Anyway - after the EU Referendum, I decided to get more politically involved, joined the Labour party and have then been increasingly disillusioned with the politics of the Left, so my first New Years Resolution is to figure out another way to get involved so next time around, at least I can say that I did my best.

My one prediction for the year though - we will still be talking about Brexit this time next year, ie. 11 months after Boris promised that he would have 'got Brexit done'.

Not that it matters any more...

Wireless Charging

I got all excited about wireless charging when I got my iPhone 8, just over 2 years ago, and thought I would never have to plug my phone in again.

Then I realised how slowly they charge, so how unhepful they are when you're on low battery and want to not be on low battery (particularly while maybe also wanting to actually use your phone), and how easy it is for me to knock them off the charging pad on my bedside table in my sleep and wake up with a phone with a dead battery to start the day... So my exitement died down pretty quickly- classic Technology Hype Cycle stuff, from 'peak of inflated expectations' to 'trough of disillusionment' in the space of a few weeks.

Meanwhile, I've been a big fan of wireless headphones ever since I bought a cheap pair for running about 3 years ago and, even though the sound quality was pretty rubbish, I almost immediately stopped using my 'better' wired headphones. The hassle of having a cable between pocket and ears is something I don't think you really notice until it goes away, and I think was more than outweighed by the hassle of plugging them in to charge them up when I got home each day. But it was still deeply annoying when you forgot to charge and discovered your battery was about to run out.

Anyway, I've been happy for just over a year or so with my BeatsX headphones... or at least, I was until one of the ears stopped working. But I got a new pair of wireless earphones for Christmas from my sister, and they are great - similar to the Apple Earpods (no connecting wire, and come in a charging case), but not from Apple.

Now, I'm suddenly a big fan of wireless charging again. (Up in the 'Plateau of Productivity', for those who know their Gartner Hype Cycle). I have a charging pad that sits on my desk at work, and an Ikea one that I've fitted into my desk at home (sadly, they don't sell the 'fittable' ones any more, or I'd post a link), and the effort of charging my headphones has dropped down to basically nothing. The case has a 500mAH battery built in, and the earphones each have a 50mAH battery - I don't know how many charges that means the case will hold (because I don't know how much energy is lost in the charging process), but it should be at least a couple. And I can't really imagine a situation where, in my day-to-day routine, I won't be able to put the case onto a charging pad for a couple of hours. (And if that does happen, then I've usually got a USB battery pack in my bag for phone emergencies...)

So- I've been recommending wireless headphones to anyoen who will listen for about 2 years now, but I'm shifting that to a strong recommendation for wireless headphones that come with a self-charging, wirelessly-chargable case. If you really care about sound quality then get some big, wired headphones, but for me (particularly as I like to listen to podcasts a lot when I'm out and about), the convenience is the killer here. (But they do sound good as well.)

R

The big thing for me at the moment is R, as having thought about/talked about learning it for a good number of years (its been a new years resolution at least 3 times), I've started actually doing it. And I really like it.

In short - if you either spend a lot of time in Excel, or would like to be able to do 'data analysis' kind of work, or statistics, or use SPSS without having to pay a huge amount of money for an SPSS licence, or anything along those general lines, then you should probably take a look at R/RStudio as well.

What I really like about it - which is a common theme whenever I learn about something like a new language 4 is the broader 'culture' that comes along with it. (If you don't think computer languages have an associated culture, then you probably haven't tried to learn more than one computer language.) One of the fundamental changes in how you work with R is a total separation of 'data' and 'analysis'. In other words, while a piece of work in Excel might involve rows and columns (arranged either way round, because it doesn't really matter) of data, maybe some copies of that data, maybe some formulas, maybe some colour coding or formatting to make it more readable etc. etc., your data and what you do with the data in R are completely separate. Which could be a bit of a pain if you're thinking of the kind of spreadsheet that legibly fits onto a screen all at once, but if you're thinking of a 'spreadsheet' as something spanning several sheets that reference one another, some of which are backups because you were messing around with important data that you didn't want to mess up totally, maybe with some VBA code thrown in to move things around or get it into a more usable format, then you will be probably be able to see the benefits pretty quickly.

Hopefully I'll have some actual outputs that I will be able to share here over the next few weeks (as its 'work stuff', it might not be something I can put into the public domain though...)

Hobby Progress

At the moment, my miniature painting/Warhammer hobby hasn't really made it out to the public internet, but as its now been taking up a pretty decent chunk of my spare time/change for about two and a half years or so now, I think its fair to say its an ongoing 'hobby', rather than just a 'project'. The original idea was just to do something that doesn't involve screens for a bit (at a time when I was sitting in front of a screen all day at work, and a lot of my free time was spent either staring at a screen doing coding/web stuff, staring at a screen writing, staring at a screen playing computer games, or staring at a phone screen while also staring at a TV screen), but its now become one of those things that I look forward to being able to do when the stars align and I have an hour or two of free time, ideally at a time when I can also run an airbrush compressor without worrying too much about the noise disturbing whoever is watching TV/the neighbours/sleeping children.

So - New Years Resolution number two - this is my pledge to start posting some photos of my tiny soldiers this year, and some stuff that I've learnt about paints, painting and airbrushes over the last couple of years that I wish I'd known/understood when I started out.

Star Wars

So - the Star Wars saga is finished. And, as I'm enjoying telling everyone who will listen - in 1983 my parents took me to see the last Star Wars film, in 2005 my wife-to-be and I went to see the last Star Wars film, and in 2019 we took our children to see the last Star Wars film.

I don't think its a spoiler, as it was revealed in the trailer (and if you're staying that spoiler-free and still haven't seen the film then I don't know why you're reading this instead of going to the cinema right now), but the idea of the Emperor Palpatine coming back from the dead is still one that doesn't sit right with me. That said, I thought the execution was excellent, I really enjoyed the film and thought it was a good conclusion to the saga. I won't say anything else about it for now... but if anyone knows how I can get my old profile on TheForce.net back when I can't even remember what email address it was registered under (but I'm 99% sure I can't access it any more), then that would be greatly appreciated...

If you're into Star Wars stuff, I would recommend the Incomparable podcast - particularly the first of the three Rise of Skywalker panel discussions, but also the older run-through of the whole saga (start at the 'real' beginning...).

But of all the podcasts I've listened to and reviews I've read, this one on Amazon is my favourite...

PS5 logo 'draws jeers'

CES is going on, which means a bunch of people working in 'technology'5 need to have some 'content' to unveil to the world. For Sony, with the PlayStation 5 planned to launch in time for next Christmas, this meant revealing... the logo.

Which looks like the PS4 logo, but with a 5.

(The PS4 logo looked like the PS3 logo, but with a 4.)

The thing about logos is that everyone has a point of view about it, because everyone can say whether they like something or not. I get that there are a bunch of upset gamers who stayed up and watched a long, boring industry presentation hoping to see something interesting, but to be honest, I'm not sure what it was that got their expectations so high so I'm reserving judgment for now...

For me, the message here is "The same, but better." Sony have already said that the PS5 is intended to provide backwards-compatibility - good news for anyone like me, wondering if they should keep buying PS4 games this year if they are likely to be swapping out for a new console next Christmas. But the bigger issue is cross-platform games. While new, shiny hardware features sound good, the problem is that big games cost a lot of money to develop, which means you want to sell them to PlayStation and Xbox owners. And that means that if one console has some cool hardware feature that the other doesn't - like, say, a big button in the middle of the controller that also functions as a touchpad - then its either going to get taked on in a clumsy way (because you don't want Xbox owners thinking they are getting a bad version of a good PlayStation game) or left off completely. (Or just used as another button, which seems to work reasonably well. Better than the 'options' button, anyway.)

So long as the games are more important than the console (which, as long as the consoles themselves are sold as loss-leaders, with profits being made up in games sales and services/subscriptions, they are going to be), what interesting things can be done on a hardware level? For me, the opportunity is integration with phones and tablets. We've seen a bit of this so far - I quite enjoyed playing Red Dead Redemption 2 with my iPad set up in front of me showing the map. But what I'd really like to see is something that lets me do the 'admin' type stuff on my phone while playing the actual game when I can sit down and plug into my console.

For example;

  • If there's customisation of characters/vehicles etc., let me do that away from the game,
  • If there is a bunch of background/expositional text for me to read - letters or newspapers that you pick up, or the story stuff that I'm currently ignoring in Jedi: Fallen Order, I would much rather read them on my high-resolution phone screen than my lower-resolution-than-my-PC-monitor-but-twice-as-big TV screen.
  • If I want to look at how the controls are set up in a game with complicated controls - or even customise them - then I'd like to be able to do that away from the console.

Especially for games (like GTA) where your character has a phone that is part of the game mechanic/UI.

I also like the idea of 3D sound- I think more and more games are becoming multiplayer-focussed (although I presonally still tend to prefer the narrative of single player games...), and I think headsets are pretty much ubiquitous among gamers (even though I hate broadcasting every cough, sniff and background noise to whatever strangers were unlucky enough to have been allocated me as a squadmate...), so this feels like a genuine opportunity to improve immersion into game worlds that wasn't really possible in previous generations. (Also - ray-tracing technology should help with this, apparently.)

Usually, I would be waiting for at least 6 months or so after a new console launch before really considering buying one. But this time around, on one hand I have a Fortnite-obsessed 10 year old son, and on the other a console I bought when GTA V came out, which seems to be getting buggy (audio keeps lagging in single-player cutscenes and going out of sync with the graphics, and enemies are spawning in odd ways in the new Star Wars game) in ways that make me think I should be replacing my hard drive... or I could save the money and put it towards a PS5 with a super-fast SSD...

New Years Resolution

Finally, my last New Years Resolution is to write more.

The reason being simply that writing makes me think more, and I'm not sure that my brain is really a muscle that I'm exercising as much as I could/should.

Hopefully some of it will make it to a state that I feel I can publish here. (Maybe I'll even put some of it where people will see it.)

  1. I mean, I like it as an open standard. I just don't like the way most people tend to use it... ↩

  2. Even when that domain isn't my actual website domain any more... ↩

  3. At least, I hope its working properly... ↩

  4. Computer or Human... although to be honest, I don't spend much time learning new human languages... ↩

  5. Whatever that means... ↩

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Written by Scott Thompson On In