After burning the candle at both ends over the last few days, I pushed back a little today. Or rather I had all the good intentions of doing so, and then did nothing of the sort.
After standing up a number of programming tasks for the team around me to pick up at work this morning, I then found myself at a loose end, and with the opportunity to progress them - so ended up progressing most of it myself anyway.
I escaped at lunchtime and walked to the local supermarket - returning half an hour later with coffee and a ready-made pasta salad. It wasn’t really about getting food - it was just about escaping these four walls for a bit.
After work I (finally) cut the grass. I’ve been putting it off for weeks.
This evening I released a new version of a piece of software I wrote some time ago - to hopefully help a few people that have been having problems with it. It was one of those moments where you find yourself at a loose end, and a little voice in the back of your mind starts whispering “you remember that thing you said you would look at ?”
I’m terrible at switching off.
Right now - as the clock ticks towards 11pm - I’m writing this blog post, listening to music, and thinking about file storage. I think about the strangest things, but there’s method to the madness.
Since switching to Apple hardware at home, I’ve been playing around with iCloud - Apple’s cloud storage solution. I wondered if it might not be a good idea to move everything I have in Google Docs and OneDrive over. It sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it. Except it isn’t.
I don’t get it. If you buy an “Apple One” subscription, you get a bundle of Apple services - including a significant amount of file storage in iCloud. Here’s the thing - iCloud is not a cloud storage solution - it’s a cloud sync solution. So if you throw 100Gb of photos into iCloud, you’re also throwing 100Gb of photos onto your phone, laptop, and tablet - in other words, you can quite legitimately use iCloud to wreck your phone and tablet.
I thought I might be mis-understanding it, until I started asking friends, and they confirmed what I thought - they all use either Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox for long term storage - they only use iCloud as a sort of “grab bag”.
In other news, I spent half an hour scrolling “Substack Notes” the other night (at about 2am - go figure) - liking posts, commenting, and so on. I’m not sure if it will go anywhere, but it seems a bit more friendly than Threads or Bluesky. I suspect Substack is heading for the same tipping point as every other social platform on the internet though.
It’s a bit like coffee shops. When any town is looking prosperous, coffee shops start to appear. The marketers have started to appear at Substack - and they’re ruining it. Not just professional marketers - self-marketers - running all manner of pointless scams to generate traction - traffic - eyeballs. The same race to the bottom of the barrel that seems to happen on any vaguely popular platform. It’s a shame.
p.s. listening to Taylor Swift.