Archive — page 10
Posted on 19 April, 2019
Caught up with Clarkson, Hammond & May's for the end of Season 3 of The Grand Tour, with Clarkson's (surprisingly emotional) farewell and then the reveal that we'll still get full-length road trips (so effectively 'specials') in the future.
Feel like I've heard this idea somewhere before?!
Posted on 19 January, 2019
This post briefly complains about the content of a Medium article; to be clear, the complaints are general about this type of article, and aren't intended to be a dig at this particular article or its author.
I just finished looking at a Medium article on GUI Python interfaces on Mac — and it's irritated me.
There's a tendency with these kind of "how to" articles, when introducing a new topic for (presumably) inexperienced developers, to launch into a long list of command line instructions with a few screenshots. And there is nothing wrong with that.
What irritates me though, is when there's no context given. No explanation as to what it is that the instructions are achieving, or why. The linked article essentially boils down to:
... morePosted on 26 November, 2018
So first things first, let’s explain — whilst the title says ‘seniors’ this is really about setting up an iPad for one particular senior; my mother.
My mother is in her (early) 80s, could comfortably be described as a computing Luddite, and has very poor eyesight. She’s had a computer for several years (always a Mac laptop) but has never really been comfortable or confident with using one. When my father first bought her a computer, probably in 2012 or 2013, I expressed surprise that he hadn’t gone for an iPad instead — to which his reply was “They’re so expensive, might as well buy her a real computer instead”.
“iPad are so expensive, might as well buy a real computer instead.”
I’ve always felt that this missed the point of the iPad (and presumably an equivalent Android tablet), particularly for my mother; I believe that an iPad would provide pretty much all the functionality that she requires, but wrapped up in a more friendly, intuitive and obvious user experience.
... morePosted on 13 June, 2018
I've been working with the son over the past few weeks to update the Bowles website.
The previous site was built using a piece of software called RapidWeaver, and whilst it was definitely the correct tool to use at the time, I now know a lot more about websites design and much prefer to be able to 'get to the code'. Seeing as the old site really needed a refresh, I decided to use Gatsby as the basis of a complete re-build; this had the added benefits that:
- it's designed to help with automated production of 'blog pages', which are not something you ever want to by hand
- it's possible to set up a system so that you deploy by pushing changes to GitHub - no need for FTP sync
- I'd get to learn Gatsby!
Because I was planning on using GitHub as part of deployment I was able to get help from the son - I concentrated on building and styling the site, whilst he was able to transfer the news articles from the existing site and create markdown files that were needed for the new one.
All told it took nearly four weeks, but quite pleased with the result ...
... more