Technology

I expect nothing less..

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Next goal is to obtain the PQC key exchange, but this is sadly not entirely possible with the Linux distribution I’m using due to various important supporting libraries.

Also pleased with this with regards to performance. Again, could do with tweaking a tiny bit, but I’m overall happy with this. For now.

And likewise for the mail side of things, I can’t achieve any higher because BIMI is very much a business function that requires access to a registered trademark with an image/logo. It also costs over £1,000+ per year for the certificate that’s needed to prove the organisation’s identity. Google Workspace does not support TLS (DANE), so I can’t use that, either.

But my edition of Google Workspace does support S/MIME for encrypted email and sender/ID verification – so if you get an email from me using Gmail, you’ll likely see that the sender has been verified. If you use Outlook, not so much, because Microsoft makes it a pain in the arse to deploy and use S/MIME.

Three: Possibly dumber than a certain orange president, even worse than O2

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During the time that I was off work and beginning to run out of money, I had looked at the possibility of setting up a cheap 30-day rolling Three pay-monthly SIM account so that if things went sideways with EE and they blocked my main number, I still had a phone number that I could use to make and receive calls. The downside was that I’d have to give out my new number on all future job applications as well as relatives and friends.

I decided to do this. And added an Apple Watch data plan too (in case I was far away from the phone that I wasn’t able to take a call). Three months later (ironically), I had my offer with UAL and I didn’t need to do anything with my EE account, so I began cancelling the Three line. In some ways, having used another number for a few months has probably saved me from many random phone calls from recruiters asking me if I am still looking.

But, ALAS!

Firstly, cancelling (or porting) a Three number – especially the the main number – will cause you to immediately lose access to the web site and phone app. It requires the phone number for both the logging in and two factor authentication (which I still say is a major security risk – let us passkeys or third-party OTP authenticators). If the phone line is cancelled, you can’t log in at all.

While the main line was cancelled (along with it the direct debit), I couldn’t cancel the Apple Watch data plan because it wasn’t eligible at the time for cancellation. Yet, I couldn’t access my account online to see any of the details. In order to cancel and pay the remaining bills, I had to call Three which is the worst experience of any of the phone operators out there. It has a typical horror maze of options which aren’t helpful at all, you usually have to keep stabbing a number key or hash before it’ll even put you through to a human. Sometimes that doesn’t work and you just have to keep waiting until the menu system times out. Takes an absolute age. It took two months to cancel down (you need to give 30 days notice within 30 days – you can’t do it ahead of time) and pay off Apple Watch data bills. Apparently there is still a final bill to pay, so I’ll await the notification. I raised a complaint with them when I last spoke to them earlier this month about all this.

Today I received this email:

What particularly amuses me is that they also sent me a text to my EE phone number…

So clearly Three can contact me – email and phone seem to be fine. Now, I’ve had to put my phone into call screening mode as I’ve been getting a lot of spam and scam calls of late (those in my contacts should be able to bypass this – unless its an upcoming iOS 27 feature – I can’t remember right now).

If Three operates an auto-dial system, call screening could potentially cause it problems, but tough shit – this is 2026 and the state of spam and scam calls through phones is at all time high. I’ve had so many phone calls from a wide range of unrecognisable numbers that haven’t left voicemails over the past few weeks that I’ve simply blocked them. If it’s important – you should have left a message.

Companies need to work harder to improve communications around stuff like this. For example, the email could have said: “We tried to call you from this number: XXX XXXX XXXX”, as I could have checked my blocklist and even whitelisted the number through my contacts – but, alas, no). But. don’t tell me that you tried to contact me when you can clearly send texts and emails without a problem.

Meanwhile O2 still haven’t fixed the “too many redirects” loop bug that prevents me from doing anything useful in my account on the web. It eventually leads to a system error. I have raised a complaint/ticket with O2 and tried to email their webmaster, but to no avail. It’s an issue that cropped up after Telefonica and Virgin Media joined forces and united their authentication systems into one. It’s a complete bloody shambles.

Why are telecoms companies unable to design a web site that serves its customers well through a web site that offers performance, stability and security? What we get with the major operators is a massive pile of shit that is unfit for purpose and probably combines 20 years of inherited code that hasn’t changed very much in that time leading to all manner of problems. Three, Vodafone and O2 should all be ashamed. EE is the only company that has improved not just its web site, but its contact options so that you don’t go through a maze to get to the right people. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a damn sight better than the others.

Apple’s Reality Distortion Field v2

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I watched the latest Apple WWDC keynote presentation today and found it to be as exciting as mud. It’s effectively fixing and optimising everything from last year, and providing the kind of features they were promoting last year and failed to deliver.

What I found particularly grating was the revamped Image Playground which allows you to take a person from your photo library and use generative AI to put them into something or have them do something. This is somewhat worrying. Regardless of privacy of the AI model – e.g. whether it runs locally on device or in the “private” compute space, the problem is that this could potentially be abused. That said, it’s not as if people can’t already do this with the likes of Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro or Nano Banana 2. Apple just makes it easier.

Speaking of which, Siri with Apple Intelligence will let users reframe photos and allow generative AI to fill in stuff that doesn’t exist because of the framing. Talk about Orwellian nightmares! Everybody will soon be part of the ministry of misinformation! It’s all fun and games until it isn’t.

Another thing I’ve noticed at work – there appears to be increased presence from something called “Applebot” which, I assume, is linked to Apple Intelligence/Siri. This bot (which legitimately comes from Apple IP addresses) was hitting a site I was working on pretty hard (but not as hard as some others) which is somewhat worrying. Can we all expect these AI bots to start consuming web site bandwidth and CPU/memory as it crawls, digs and extracts information from websites?

Also, with all this Apple Intelligence baked into the phone and macOS, I find it strange that they haven’t mentioned about any possible improvements to call features such as call screening or scam detection. Are there any improvements? Even just having call screening as a toggle switch in the Control Centre for iOS would be a big improvement for me.

Everybody sing: Old McDonald had a server farm, A.I., A.I., OH NO?

Gmail: Google, please give us better font options!

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Google, while I appreciate the efforts you’re going to make A.I. genuinely useful in Google Workspace, I’d really like you to revisit a few basic options that have gone untouched for decades. I’m talking about font selection and font sizes. At the moment, this is all you get:

In this case, I’ve chosen the larger size rather than normal. Normal, to me, is far too small when composing and sending messages. And what’s worse, you can’t specifically set a size for reading emails that have been sent in plain text. What are small, normal, large and larger sizes? Who knows – they are not allocated a number size – unlike the majority of font size options in.. oh, let me see, pretty much every other bloody product. Including Google Docs.

Whereas this is what I see in Outlook and Outlook for Web, I get a much better range of options:

Aptos 14 in Outlook is a good size. Larger Sans Serif in Gmail is larger than Aptos 14, though it is close. But it’s not close enough and annoys the heck out of me. As somebody who started their email journey on quite literally text terminals where there no such things as fonts or font sizes (as such). Everything was consistent.

Gmail has unfortunately been one of the few services that hasn’t really kept up with the basics – instead choosing AI over all else, and appears to be slipping behind even good old Pine which was a very capable email client back in the day. I just don’t get as much joy as writing emails with Gmail as I do with Outlook or any other client.

Reading email when the sender uses Gmail’s default small font or plain text is also a terrible experience. Take this email from my server to let me know local backups have completed. The font is too small. Gmail offers me no official method of setting a default size for reading email.

I’ve tried to create a Chrome extension using Claude that will override Google’s default fonts and font sizes, but while it works in principal, it’s an uphill struggle with potential compatibility issues and future updates from Google.

There is also a third-party Chrome extension that I’ve used in the past called V7 Gmail Zoom – and it works wonderfully well. You can set default text sizes for both reading and composing. But because Gmail ends out such tiny text by default, and having now gone “large” to make thing easier – email I send myself looks too big.

Sigh. This shouldn’t be a thing in 2026. Come on, Google, fix this stuff.

My third and final video game credit..

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Thanks, YouTubers, for releasing entire gameplay walkthroughs before the official release date. Though I should really be saying: bad YouTubers, bad. To your beds. Naughty YouTubers.

But at least this confirms that myself and others that have now left the company have been given credits for this game which as been in development for as long as I was at SMG. One day I shall look forward to playing it myself.

I am somewhat amused with my own IMDb entry in that the “Known For” section shows three video games and one video game film adaptation.

Back to the future.. the white ZX Spectrum

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Having grown up mainly around the ZX Spectrum (the ZX81, the 48K, 48K+ and the +2A), it makes me happy to see companies releasing authorised modern equivalents of these 8-bit masterpieces (we have the Commodore 64 Ultimate and 64C Ultimate, the Amgia A1200, and the ZX Spectrum Next).

I must admit I like the idea of this white ZX Spectrum based on the rubber key variety. It’s been fully updated with HDMI and modern inputs including USB-A ports. £129. I’d also like to own the Amiga A1200 (£169) as there was no possible way of owning one back when I was a kid – it was far too expensive (as was the BBC Micro which had the best keyboard of any of the 8-bit computers).

However, even if I had the budget for them, I don’t have the space as it is. I’ve also feel that I’ve moved on quite a bit from the 8-bit retro gaming scene (though I occasionally yearn for a quick go at Chuckie Egg). Things got really interesting when I moved up to an Amstrad PC3086. It didn’t have a hard drive, but it did have two types of floppy drive and you could easily play decent games thanks to its VGA graphics (which was fancy at the time – especially at that price point) even if you had to keep swapping disks out every so often.

Ah, the memories.. but it was a right bugger to type on

But it’s great that there are companies out there that cater to those who are nostalgic for the good old days of gaming and programming. It makes us appreciate what we had before all the nonsense that we have now (Windows 11, I’m looking at you).

The Atari ST or the Amiga A1200 was THE ultimate gaming machine back in my day

So long, and thanks for all the fish, Tim Cook

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I must admit that I am rather sad that Tim Cook is stepping down as CEO of Apple. During his tenure, he’s seen the launch of what I would consider to be three of Apple’s greatest achievements in the past 20 years: the Apple Watch, and Apple Silicon Macs (e.g. the M series).

The Apple Watch has played a vital role in my health (its sleep apnea detection forced me to go and see a doctor, and I now have a CPAP machine) and continues to do so by monitoring my steps and other vital signs to improve my overall fitness and health.

The Apple Silicon Mac, when it first launched, proved that moving away from Intel was a very smart move despite launching in the middle of the COVID pandemic. I personally thought it was strange timing, but thankfully, I was proven wrong. The M1 series proved to be an absolute powerhouse of a computer, which is still going strong 5 years later – many people are still perfectly happy with the performance of their machine despite the M5 series potentially being three times (or more) as fast. I will always try to get a Mac for work – to give you an example, my current work M4 Pro MacBook Pro allows me to work completely untethered all day and still have enough juice for the evening. It’s extremely power-efficient and fits in well with the university’s energy policies – probably more so than the standard Windows laptops.

And I’ve always seen Apple gear as a good investment; it’s excellent value for money in both the hardware, software and services. I’ve got fair and decent pricing whenever I’ve sold Apple kit (unlike my Windows laptops). In terms of services, under Cook’s management, we’ve seen the launch of Apple TV, which has given us some of the best science fiction (For All Mankind, Severance, Silo, Pluribus) and drama (Slow Horses) and factual content (Long Way Up, and Long Way Home) I’ve seen anywhere. News+ is a great aggregation of newspapers and magazines, and Apple Music provides me with a quality music service where I can upload my own music library across all my Apple devices easily and without fuss – all in excellent quality.

Apple hasn’t always gotten it right, and they can be quite stubborn at times, but ultimately, the whole experience has been far more positive than with other technology providers. The most recent annoyance was having to prove to Apple that my 83-year-old dad, who only has an iPad, is old enough to browse the web. For me, my Apple account was old enough to immediately pass, but there was a lot of kerfuffle with credit cards, which I wanted to ensure did not end up on the account (which, thankfully, it didn’t). However, I blame the UK government for this more than I do Apple, which I suspect was ordered to implement it sooner rather than later.

You’ve got mail!

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Bit of a strange week for postal mail. As we head towards the local council elections in May, I’ve been bombarded with letters from candidates. I’m sure the independent candidate tried to call the other day, but I was in the middle of a Teams work call. He left a leaflet. Then there were handwritten letters addressed to either me personally or “the resident” from the Lib Dems and the Conservatives, and a leaflet from Reform, which was torn up and thrown away immediately.

What amused me was a handwritten letter from a religious group – possibly THAT group that usually calls around when you least expect it (no, not the Spanish Inquisition – they’d be 192 years too late). I only knew it was some religious thing from an enclosed pamphlet about Jesus and God and things of that nature. The letter itself was indecipherable. The handwriting was so illegible I suspect it might have been written in ancient Aramaic (as opposed to aromatic, which conjures the images of delicious duck in hoi sin sauce).

On the electronic mail front, I had to sigh when the latest news of Directive 8020 from Supermassive Games, for whom I worked up until September of last year, had ended up in my Google Workspace spam folder. Given that I had set up the infrastructure for the marketing department to ensure maximum delivery (ensuring DKIM, SPF, and DMARC were all correct, etc.) for this sort of thing, it was hugely frustrating to find that Gmail decided to throw it in the junk because other people had been reporting those kinds of emails as spam. You can do everything in your power, technically, to get mail delivered, but you’re still at the mercy of a mail provider’s anti-spam/anti-phishing/anti-malware heuristics as to whether it will get seen by anybody. I signed up for the mailing list. It’s double opt-in (e.g. you get an email to confirm that you want to subscribe), but Google knows best. Anyhow, I’ve had to mess up my contacts list by whitelisting a no-reply email address because of Gmail’s design….

Anyway, Directive 8020 is due for release on the 12th May. I’m still undecided whether I’m going for the PC version (RTX 5070 Ti with 12Gb VRAM with Ultra 9 275Hx CPU) or the PS5 Pro (which apparently the game is optimised for).

The Apple MacBook Neo: A potential game changer

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I’m so excited to start the new job that I’m up at 4:45 am writing this blog post. I’m certainly going to feel it at the end of the day (though, to be fair, I did go to bed early and have had a good 6 hours of continuous, uninterrupted sleep)…

Anyway, the point of this post is to say that Apple’s new entry-level laptop, the MacBook Neo, is rather spiffy. For £599 (or £699 for double the storage and Touch ID), you get a MacBook powered by last year’s iPhone 16 Pro (and Pro Max) mobile processor (which, although sadly limited to 8Gb, will be more than enough for less demanding tasks). The chassis is aluminium (and comes in a variety of different colours), and the keyboard is full-size and sturdy. The display, while not as good as the MacBook Air or Pro models, is certainly good enough for most people. It hasn’t been calibrated to the many colour spaces that the more expensive MacBook range, for example. It doesn’t have MagSafe charging, but instead comes with two USB-C ports – albeit with one running at 10Gb/s thanks to USB 3 and the other at a much slower 480Mbs thanks to USB 2. Only the USB 3 port can be used to connect to an external monitor, if required. Therefore, a dongle that can drive Ethernet, video display, and multiple USB-A or USB-C ports will be part of the Neo owner’s arsenal.

But despite these limitations, this is a full, macOS-powered laptop for less than £700. It joins the Mac Mini (starting price of £599) as being one of the most affordable Macs ever made – and given the shitshow that is the AI industry is allegedly buying up all the RAM and NAND (SSD) chips for data centre use, this is an absolute bargain. Especially for the education sector.

I had intended to give one of my nephews my former SMG M2 MacBook Air, but alas, I was forced to sell it to keep things ticking along until I got the new job. But, given the price point of the Neo, when my finances are in a better position, I’d be more than happy to buy a MacBook Neo for him, as I know he wants to get into the computing field. While the Neo has neural processing built into the A18 Pro chip, I wouldn’t want to try running any LLMs on it. With the Swift programming language (all the tools are included), he could certainly learn to build his own Mac and iOS apps, for example. Then there’s Terminal. He could learn Unix (well, the BSD equivalent), too, which is a handy skill in today’s IT market (along with Bash, Python, etc.). As a result, it wouldn’t take him long to get used to Linux. There is huge potential here.

The Neo has a lot of potential. There are a lot of naysayers that say that 8Gb is not going to be enough – especially in five years’ time and it’ll just lead to e-waste – but as somebody who ran a 13″ MacBook Pro with the base M1 chip when they first launched with just 8Gb RAM and 256Gb SSD, it worked well enough for this sysadmin – though 16Gb or 24Gb are much more preferable for those going beyond word processing and light video editing work. Also, remember that Apple generally supports its products for at least 5-6 years, including OS updates. It will have to support 8Gb RAM on these models for that length of time. I have no doubt they may switch out the A18 Pro chip for the A19 Pro chip, which has 12 GB of onboard RAM at some point, but that won’t happen for at least a year or two.

I think the MacBook Neo will take off and do spectacularly well, given the current economic climate, and I look forward to seeing the first batch of reviews as they come in this week.