One of my new year’s resolutions is to try and be more intentional about the way I lead my life. That includes a close look at habits and deeply wired-in behaviours.

Last year I had the epiphany that whilst chocolate, ginger nuts, IRN BRU and sugary comestibles were very enticing and almost unthinkable to give up, I’m far better off without them in my life. I’ve known this for at least 15 years, but last summer I actually did something about it.

My wife sent me an email. It conveyed words to the effect:

It is snowing!

I replied:

Is it now

We make a point of sending each other grammatically ambigious emails.

And that made me realise that in the sentence

“Now it is snowing”

has at least two levels of word-order to contend with.

Working with colleagues spread across Massachusetts, New York, California, Oxfordshire, London, Britanny, Victoria, Lower Saxony (and that’s when they’re not travelling) means that face-to-face conversations aren’t universally available. Instant messaging is good because it’s the next-best thing to direct contact.

With geographical distance comes timezone distance. Before the invention of immediate communication this was a self-correcting problem (most people can’t shout over more than two timezones). Of course, when one simply has to type into a computer (caps-lock for shouting) one must be sensitive to the timezone of one’s correspondent. Easy advice to give, but also easy to forget. Slack, like any long-distance communication medium, has the effect of reducing people to avatars somewhat.

On November 30th 2016, the login feature of FolkTuneFinder.com will be removed, and you will no longer be able to use favourites and group tunelists.

One month ago I wrote the a blog post about sign-in on FolkTuneFinder and placed a message on the site. I also put word out on the FolkTuneFinder Facebook page. Since then I have recieved only two messages. There are 5,367 accounts on FolkTuneFinder. Some of them are spam, but some of them are real users who log in and use favourites.

The Royal Mint are launching a new pound coin. It’s

The most secure coin in the world

according to their website. I saw it linked from BBC news.

The site looks good. It’s all about how businesses should look out for the new coin and adjust their security practices.

It goes into some detail about just quite how secure this coin is. They’ve obviously put a lot of thought, time and energy into the micro-lettering and latent image.

I’m sitting on the bus writing this on my BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu edition tablet. It promises ‘full convergence’ so, taking it on face value, I thought I’d start typing a blog post using the on-screen keyboard at work then continue with a bluetooth keyboard once I get home.

The tablet ships with LibreOffice, gEdit, mystery ‘browser’ and Firefox which might be used to access Google Docs. But I’m not using any of those to write this blog post. I am instead using the Notes app, for reasons I’ll come to.

These are my first impressions. All of them are honestly observed, but a couple turned out to be special cases. But they were all things I experienced.

Some background to timelapsebeehive.com

I’ve wanted to keep bees for 20 years, and I’m finally getting round to doing it. There’s a lot of nonsense going around about how it’s a new middle-class fad, but I recently dug this book out. It’s called the Golden Throng and it was printed in the 1940s.

I bank with the Co-Operative bank. I know there was some awful mis-management in the past, but their heart is in the right place (I think) and they have ethical policies. I think it’s a good idea that they should exist, so I’m sticking with them.

Recently they changed the user interface on their online banking. I don’t know why. I preferred the old one, but that’s just, like, my opinion.

But the more I used it the more careless the design looks.

There’s something very odd going on with the comments on the Oxford Mail site. No disrespect to the paper, but I have a tough time tallying up likely size of readership with some of the behaviour seen on the site.

A fascinating bug in Adobe Photoshop. Presented here as a photographic essay. Bug report as photojournalism. I only created one triangle and moved it around a bit.