Technology

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Back when Valve was a very active games development company and not just building out infrastructure for other developers and gamers, the big multi-player game of the moment was Team Fortress 2 (or TF2 for short). Hours of fun were had (virtually) running around blasting the other team into oblivion and attempting to push a cart or capture points on a map.

14 years later, the game is still actively played, but its development? Considerably less so. As a full-time Mac user, TF2 stopped working natively on the Mac when Apple pushed out macOS Catalina which prevented 32-bit applications from running (part of their master plan to move to 64-bit only ARM processors, the kind I’m running on now). But that’s okay because relief came from the form of game streaming services such as Shadow.tech and NVIDIA’s GeForce Now.

I’m using GeForce Now because it’ll take a full year before a machine is provisioned on Shadow.tech’s service – that’s how popular it is. Unlike Shadow.tech, however, GeForce Now provides you with a limited set of games (whereas Shadow.tech effectively give you a full Windows PC in the cloud on which you can install anything).

GeForce now only costs me £5.99/month (in 6 monthly installments) and allows me to run pretty much my entire Steam library (Steam being Valve’s game store) in the cloud – with little to no performance hits. My 500Mb/s Virgin Media service is more than adequate for this, and TF2 runs remarkably smoothly – although occasionally I need to keep resetting the display resolution from within TF2 from 1280×768 to 1920×1080.

Now, having not played TF2 for more than a year at this point, many thanks have happened. The entire TF2 network has been affected by ‘bots’ that will join a game, clone an existing user already in the game, and then start cheating their way to victory or play annoying/offensive sounds and generally be a massive nuisance. The only way to get rid of them is to hold a group vote. Occasionally the person holding the vote picks the wrong username and the innocent player is subsequently kicked and banned from the server. I provide an example below – be aware there is strong language from the start. Once the bot has been kicked, the game can resume normally without any further incident.

One company, FaceIT.com, has come up with a better solution (since Valve is unwilling or unable to provide a more viable means of dealing with the problem) in that they severely restrict who is able to connect. The only ‘bots’ are “good” bots that emulate players. Sometimes well, sometimes not so well (one bot “engineer” player set-up a teleporter at the second base of an attacking team to send whoever went through it back to the original base right at the start of the map). But that doesn’t happen unless a player bails out.

In order to play a game of TF2 on FaceIT.com, you just connect your Steam account to it, then join a match. You’re placed in a queue and after a while (it can take several minutes), you’re put into a match of 12 people vs 12 other people. You must accept the match within 30 seconds, otherwise the match is cancelled, and everybody goes back into a queue again. Once a match is successfully connected, you can use a Windows client to automatically connect, or use the TF2 console to connect to the FaceIT.com TF2 server.

As I’m using GeForce Now, I had to provide Steam with an extra parameter for TF2:

-console

otherwise, you won’t be able to access the TF2 console which is needed to connect to third-party servers. I use macOS’ Notes app to make a note of the server, then open up Notes on my iPhone and type in the server connection string manually (because there is no copy and paste between the host machine and GeForce Now’s virtual machine).

Once connected, enjoy:

FaceIT.com has three different regions:

  • Netherlands (EU)
  • Dallas (US)
  • South Africa (or South America; didn’t select to check as it’d mean I’d have to join match) (SA)

I found that I get the best enjoyment from Dallas, despite being much further away because the Americans are a lot more vocal and organised. They’re also much more competitive which generally leads to the team banding together in a tight formation, with everybody with their own job to do in order to move the team forward. Besides this, It’s TEAM Fortress 2, not ME Fortress 2. There have been some seriously good and fun games using voice chat.

That said, I have just had one very unpleasant experience (until now I’ve had no such experiences in the 14 years I’ve been playing this game) when I made a mistake by selecting the wrong weapon while in “uber” mode, causing the player who is playing the “medic” to start effing and blinding at me, telling me to “go back to your country” and various other racist (well, I suppose nationalist rather than racism) insults and mocking my accent. A typical Trump supporter, I suppose. Or at least somebody with uncontrollable anger who, if it goes unchecked, is going to seriously hurt somebody one day and will end up in America’s revolving door prison system.

I quit the match initially, made sure to report the guy via the FaceIT.com reporting system (which, thankfully, won’t match me with him again on future matches) – and also reported him to Steam. I went back into the game, muted the guy and while another argument was going between two other players, I just text chatted everybody to just use the Mute function. Thank goodness Valve built the Report and Mute functions into TF2 – they are a genuine lifesaver. But I will not tolerate any form of racism/nationalism or any other kind of abuse against myself or others. As of the 13th April, FaceIT hasn’t taken any action despite assurances on a ticket that they would investigate – but trawling the FaceIT Reddit forums suggest that the ban/penalty system is extremely unbalanced, with people who shouldn’t be penalised being so, and those that should, walking away scot-free.

For me, however, it is too late. TF2 is such a mess and FaceIT needs to do more to match the more competitive, stronger players with each other. The arguments and attacks against players in the text chats are getting worse, and the game is still attracting immature idiots who are still far too competitive for their own good. Now we’re replacing the problem of bots with human super-competitors who bay for blood and God help you if you stand in their way.

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The one thing that drives me completely nuts about the whole raft of current legislation against Apple from the likes of Spotify and Epic Games, who accuse Apple of market dominance is that it’s simply not true. Take for example the other day – my company organised a Zoom-based yoga session (which went very well) and the teacher provided a Spotify playlist of music. Spotify. Not Apple Music, not Deezer, not Tidal, not Napster. Spotify.

At Christmas, we were all invited to add our own recommended Christmas tunes to a shared Spotify playlist. Not Apple Music. And it should be pointed out that Apple Music’s does have a presence on Windows and Android devices, so it’s not exclusive to Macs and iPhones. Spotify’s big advantage over Apple Music is that it has a free tier versus a three month Apple Music trial. Plus, ultimately, Spotify has been established far longer than any of the other premium music streaming services.

So until shared Apple Music playlists take over from Spotify’s, I can’t see how Spotify can claim that Apple is being unfair to them. When I used to use their Premium service, I paid for it via the Spotify web site because that makes sense to me – my contract (and account) is with them. Would I like the choice of doing so through Apple? Yes, it’d be nice (and would save time – e.g. it’d be convenient), but ultimately my contract for those subscriptions are with Spotify, Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video and I pay for them directly with the video streaming provider. Interestingly, I found that a macOS software subscription to BBEdit to be .. troublesome. Apple’s system kept prompting me every so often to verify the subscription despite auto-renewal being enabled that it annoyed me so much, I just bought the version directly from the software developer.

This leads me to Epic Games. I fail to understand their reasoning for a third party store on iOS. Firstly they say 30% fee per transaction is too much. Yet Epic and other whinging developers who claim Apple is being unfair to them fee-wise don’t contest the likes of the 30% Microsoft and Sony console store fees. These are not open platforms either and strictly controlled by both Sony and Microsoft. If I wanted a fully open platform (or as open as it can be), I’d pick Linux, Windows and Android. As it stands, I’ve found the Apple ecosystem to work for me very well at a consumer and professional level. A lot of developers I work with say the same – practically everybody I know uses a Mac (with Windows being the exception).

While the iOS App Store is not perfect, it still does a pretty decent job of weeding out bad actors, though there are a few prominent cases right now which make Apple look bad – though these are few and far between and potentially a lot of stuff we don’t know about – Apple usually comes to their senses in these matters (listen, I never said Apple were perfect). What makes people think that a third-party store is going to be any better? The case against Apple is strictly a developers’ issue and not that of consumers. Do you think I like having to pay a subscription fee for Adobe Photoshop that ties me into subscribing for a full year? There is no choice of buying it outright. So don’t kid me about consumer choice.

People pick Apple for security and privacy over the likes of Google, a company that ultimately deals with advertising and sharing of personal data (although their Workspace product obviously doesn’t do that otherwise I would have got rid of it a decade or so ago). Having a third-party app store on iOS would make security a living nightmare, and possibly introduce more issues than I care to think about. Assuming for the moment that Epic Games get to put its own store on iOS and there’s a massive vulnerability in their code which could affect data stored on the iPhone/iPad. Or even worse, a piece of code in Epic’s store that, combined with a new vulnerability found in iOS, could cause a major security breach in iOS? And what if it was exploited? Who would you sue (if you’re lucky enough to be able afford to sue)? Apple? Epic? Both?

Then there’s exclusivity. Epic complains about the exclusivity and terms of Apple’s own App Store, but Epic already exerts extensive control over the in-game currency of Fortnite (to the point of compensating people in their own in-game currency after losing a lawsuit over loot boxes – remember, Epic control the value of that currency), the billing methods used to pay for it, and having sole exclusive of any sales of games and products through its own digital shop. Epic (and others) wants to dictate its own terms on a platform that’s been created, managed and supported by Apple, and from whom they have benefited considerably over the years with the macOS and iOS app stores. I firmly believe these companies do not have any entitlement to the iOS or even macOS platforms whatsoever. Epic Games’ behaviour over Fortnite has been appalling, and that’s why I’ve closed my account with them. And I’ve just done the same with Spotify too.

I find companies like Epic and Spotify to be hypocrites. They should be investing in innovation – improving their products and coming up with new ones rather than spending silly sums of money on lawyers across the world. Lawyers are the only ones who going to make any money out of all this nonsense, and I can think of much better things to spend that money on.

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For those of us that signed up to DIsney+ first thing last year – it’s renewal day! And the only opportunity to get the discounted price before the price increases hit us next year. But alas, my payment has just bounced and attempts to update the card on the Disney+ web site is being met with technical errors galore, and I’m currently sitting on the phone to Disney+ technical support for 18 minutes and counting not getting anywhere. Pressing ‘1’ to get them to call back isn’t working either.

Update: I managed to through to an operator who didn’t tell me much as why things were not working properly; he did tell me, however, that there is a 10 day grace period in which the account will be kept active. They will keep trying the card on file, so presumably, they will attempt to take payment tomorrow (which is fine, though I’d prefer a button that grants Disney to take the damn money already).

I suspect Disney+’s payment processing and web site have gone into a bit of a meltdown with annual subscription renewals and I suspect there are a large number of payments that have failed. Even giving Disney+ another card (which definitely has enough funds), it’s still failing on the web site – telling me that payment failed. No activity in the banking app. Nada. Zip. Kaput.

It kind of makes me wonder what kind of performance testing Disney+ did prior to the launch renewal day.

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This little slice of the web is now proudly hosted on an AMD-powered server in Frankfurt. Although if my hosting provider was ever to provide ARM64 servers, I’d move to that. I’ll never host with AWS, Google Computer Engine or Microsoft’s Azure platform because they’re just too expensive for a little blog like this.

I used a WordPress plugin called UpDraftPlus Premium to backup and restore this blog to the new server. I used my own scripts to install and configure Nginx, PHP and MariaDB, then all I needed to do is drop in a basic install of WordPress. From there, it was just a case of installing the UpDraftPlus Premium plugin and activate it (for the Premium features), then connect it to one of the cloud storage services (in this case, Google Drive), rescan the backup store, pick a date, and then restore everything (though I’d avoid reinstalling WordPress core if you’ve already just installed the latest version).

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Apple’s move to their own silicon may be the single, most important change since the iPod was first introduced the world. By kicking Intel to the curb, Apple has the power to fundamentally influence how personal computing will turn out for the next decade. Not just for processors, but for operating systems too.

I must admit I was very sceptical at first – especially having bought a 32Gb/4Tb 16″ MacBook Pro the previous year (which happened to be the same year that Apple first announce its transition to their own chips), as well as being in the middle of a major worldwide pandemic. I didn’t think such a strategy would pay off as a result. But I am very happy to say that I was wrong.

But having now had two weeks with an M1 based Mac, I can honestly say that the future of the Mac is going only get more interesting from this point onwards. For starters, for their first-generation Apple Silicon processor, the amount of power versus the amount of power used is just incredible. This thing can beat my 16″ MBP in quite a few areas (though not, understandably, in all of them). It makes me wonder what the higher specced MacBook Pro, iMacs, iMac Pro (if they still continue that range), and Mac Pro are going to look like. Sure, they’ll put something like the M1 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU and 16-core neural processor to shame for sure – but already we get excellent performance from the lowest end of the chain which is going to last most of us, me included, a good number of years.

I’ve had absolutely no incompatibility issues, other than with Big Sur’s outrageously disappointing DisplayPort over USB-C implementation. This has forced me into using HDMI and that’s generally been okay, though even with HDMI I did notice the pink display issue (and a snow-like screen) when putting the M1 MacBook Pro to sleep manually. Waking the unit up got the display back, then putting it back to sleep sorted it out. I’m confident it’s not a hardware issue, just how Big Sur handles external displays.

Some other issues include excessive disk writing when using some Rosetta 2 apps – mainly system utilities/anti-virus. I mentioned before in the previous article that given 8Gb RAM, I expect there to be swap – and there is – but Activity Monitor reports usage within acceptable use for what I’m using this machine for. When I get around to buying the M1 Mac Mini in a few months (with 16Gb RAM), it’ll be interesting to compare, though I suspect most of the utilities that I used to use with my Intel MacBook Pro will have released Universal or Apple Silicon binaries (kudos to 1Password for releasing their own Universal binary update – I’ve got access to unlocking via Apple Watch again.)

As I’m using the machine primarily in clamshell mode at the moment, I can’t really comment on the keyboard – but when I have, it feels a lot nicer to type on than even the 16″ MBP! What’s particularly intriguing is that this machine has never, ever gotten hot. Not once. Haven’t heard the fans spinning at all. Battery life, again, I’m using it as a desktop replacement for the moment, so I’ve not been able to attest to the 20 hour battery life. But it’s there, waiting for me use it when I do go mobile.

No issues with Bluetooth for me – my Apple Extended Magic Keyboard has Just Worked(tm), and my Logitech MX Master 3 mouse has similarly has done its job without fault. While I don’t have a Wi-Fi 6 router, Wi-Fi itself has been rock solid here with decent throughput.

I thought the two ports would be limiting, but using that Anker hub (see previous article), this has not been a problem at all, even if the unit does heat up quite a bit.

Time Machine has, incredibly, been more stable on the M1 Mac than the Intel one. It’s never been slow, lagged or otherwise caused any sort of problem for me. I was at one point looking at alternatives – but thankfully I won’t have to going forward.

Virtualisation via Parallels Technical Preview has been rock solid too – my ARM-based Debian virtual machine runs just fine and doesn’t take up too much RAM, CPU or disk space. Ideal for running bash scripts that would ordinarily need a bit of tweaking under FreeBSD.

With some of the lowest prices in the Mac range right now, an M1 Mac should be your next computer. I think it will last four-five years just fine, and by the time it comes to replace it, new MacBook Air/Pro/Mini designs will have probably rolled out and will be even better. It’s difficult to know when Apple will pull the kill switch on Intel binaries, but I wanted to move across sooner rather than later. The old MacBook Pro will probably be traded in for the Mac Mini (though I have to pay for the Mac Mini first before Apple will give me the dosh back).

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UPDATE: I’m convinced it’s best not to install any Intel-based system utility – monitoring or anti-virus/anti-malware – until the vendor has released Universal or Apple Silicon only binaries. I just installed BitDefender Anti-Virus for Mac, which is still Intel only, and it wrote – according to Activity Monitor – 35Gb of data to disk within a period of 5-10 minutes during a scan (it read 22Gb).

There’s been lots and lots of news recently about how the SSD (the internal super fast storage) within M1 Macs (MacBook Air, Pro and Mac Mini) is being excessively written to, and that an M1 Mac’s SSD lifetime is being reduced substantially through all these excessive writes. Like us humans, SSDs have a finite time here on Earth given the nature of the beast, but ordinarily, they should typically outlast the machine they’re installed in many times over.

I have only 8Gb of RAM in my 13″ MacBook Pro M1 machine, and I’m fully aware of swapping. But even so, this shouldn’t affect the overall lifespan of a machine that much – if at all, and especially with modern techniques for managing it within an SSD controller. But even I did notice that kernal_task was writing a substantial amount of data (~250/300Gb) of data daily (after the machine was set-up and all applications installed) – even with the swap file activity was relatively quiet and very few applications were running.

It’s worth mentioning also that the output from ‘top’ and activity monitor looks like it includes ANY disk write activity, including external drives (such as what I use for Time Machine) and other mounted volumes (disk images or DMGs) – or at least, that’s what I’m assuming here. I’m hesitant to pull data from S.M.A.R.T. utilities (or any other utility for that matter) since Apple’s controllers may not necessarily conform to their specifications. Also, if Apple intended us to use SMARTtools for drive diagnostics on the command line, they’d have had them installed as part of macOS. It’s all a bit confusing though, because this is the output from System Report:

and then there’s this from Disk Utility:

Is Apple using its own smarts via Apple Fabric to monitor SSD lifespan, and not the S.M.A.R.T spec?

What I forgot to check was my go-to-machine monitoring app, iStats Menu, was a Universal binary (or at least Apple Silicon). I was wrong. It is still an Intel native app, and is run through Rosetta 2. It is able to monitor most metrics just fine, so I didn’t think much of it. Of course, it was installed on day one of getting the MacBook Pro…

Thinking about all the apps I use, and the kind of use they get, I thought whether iStats Menus may be aiding and abetting in the excessive SSD writes somehow. I couldn’t see any file-based logs growing in size on the filesystem, nothing that would attract substantial writes at least. My thoughts turned back to iStats Menus and its binary compatibility. How does Rosetta 2 handle monitoring like that?

So I decided to uninstall iStats Menu and replace it with iStatistica Pro – something I bought a little while ago. It’s a Universal binary now, and its sensors work with M1 Macs just fine. Since then, the number of writes to the SSD has reduced considerably. We’re talking about 100Gb for 4 hours of the machine being online with iStats Menus versus 15-16Gb for 4 hours with iStatistica Pro. No other changes were made to my application line-up.

I think if there is any blame to be had, it’s probably Rosetta 2. It’s an incredible piece of technology, but I am not entirely convinced – depending on the application – it is terribly I/O friendly – even if it’s no longer a JIT translator anymore, but rather it “compiles”/translates the ARM64 binary from the original when an Intel application is first opened.

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.. because the number of reported problems (condensation and excessive battery drain being the main culprits) makes it feel as though the product was rushed to market and stops me from buying a pair.

The fact that a £529 pair of headphones can’t even be switched off properly is ridiculous. When Sennheiser released their Momentum 3 wireless headphones (I have a pair – they’ve extremely comfortable and I’d highly recommend them), they too had a problem that you couldn’t directly power them off without putting them into a certain position, so you couldn’t hang them on a headphone stand, for example. But Sennheiser eventually did the right thing and released a firmware update that allows you to turn the headphones off when holding down the multi-function button.

Now, why can’t Apple do that with the Airpods Max? Why can’t they release a firmware update that allows you to, say, hold down the digital crown for 2 seconds to turn the things off rather than put up with their dodgy power management system?

But I have bought the Sony WH-1000XM3 headphones through EE instead. Their noise cancellation is second to none – better than the Sennheiser for sure. The Sony headphones quickly, the gesture controls are decent (and easy to remember) and you can turn the things on and off at will. Plus the battery lasts 30 hours. It’s great for watching TV (when paired with a transceiver such as the Avantree Oasis Plus Bluetooth 5.0 Transmitter and Receiver) or listening to audio from the Mac or iPhone. My only complaint is that the ear cushions feel like the weak point in the entire system – likely needed to be replaced well ahead of time – and I’d really like to see Sony adopt a similar system to Apple with magnets to allow easy replacement. Maybe we might see this with the WH-100XMM5?

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I’ve been quite busy of late – hence the lack of new posts – but you’re about to see why.

I’ve always found online dating to be a massive pain in the arse. It really is a massive, massive pain in the rear end. It’s incredibly expensive, it’s potentially dodgy as hell, and the level of satisfaction is incredibly low.

These sites are rarely well managed by the site owners, who will be more than happy to take your money but provide a substandard service in return. You’re likely to be scammed left, right and centre, and you’ll encounter many, many, many, many time wasters. And when you do encounter somebody, their messaging skills are dire or they just don’t want to be bothered to respond even with a simple, “thanks, but no thanks”.

My main advice would be to check out rating services such as Trustpilot and Money Saving Expert before you even think of handing over any money for a subscription since almost all of these services will force you into a contract and will make you pay some or all of that contract in the form value compensation even if you cancel for ANY reason within 14 days. Yet, these sites make the free tier almost impossible to use without a subscription. There’s no point in it being free. You can’t do anything. I got caught out by eHarmony (as have many, many, many others) – but the other sites were very reasonable all things considered. Check those terms and conditions like a hawk.

Online dating is not the faint of heart. But I have tried many of the UK’s most popular brands over a three week period to find out which one would likely to attract a long term subscription from me. The answer to that is none of them. These are my notes:

Match.com

Given how prolific this service is, it probably hosts the most comprehensive number of profiles of any service (with the exception of Plenty of Fish), but it’s definitely not without a good number of scammers either.  Within hours, had to report at least one possible scammer.  Can’t stop people outside the UK looking at your profile.  Honoured 14-day refund period.  Problems include uploading photos.  

One thing to note: they really do want you to upload recent photographs, and one way they will check and enforce this is by scanning the EXIF metadata of any photo being uploaded.  They do this to make sure that the creation date of the photograph falls within a one or two year period of whatever today’s date is.  As I don’t take too many selfies and my appearance tends to remain the same, I tend to use a photo I had taken at work a while back which is a couple of years old,.  So when the photo was initially rejected, I manipulated the EXIF data and fixed the date so that it appeared to have been taken the same day as the upload.  I re-uploaded and it was accepted.  I’m not suggesting everybody should do this, but it’s one way of getting around the automated moderation if you really, really want to use a particular photo.

Tinder

Super expensive, especially when “boosting” your profile.  More catered for the younger crowd – too many “pouting” pictures alongside boob shots and women in their underwear – something that wouldn’t be allowed on other services.  User interface is a pain in the arse and unfriendly.  Apple honoured refund.

Plenty of Fish

A very comprehensive number of profiles – possibly more so than Match.com.  But it’s super expensive, especially when you have to pay extra for profile boosts.  But even worse is the user interface which is extremely buggy on the web version, with messages being mixed up with Plenty of Fish’s own mailbox at times – refreshing the page fixes it.  A lot more scamming going on.  Twice I encountered (quite possible the same scammer) with a profile containing photos of a nice lady – except the profile claims to be a 49-year-old man who is blonde (the lady in the pictures was dark-haired).  Plenty of Fish honoured the refund request.

eHarmony

Can’t stop people from outside the UK looking at your profile (though you can stop them contacting you).  Attempted to fix grammar mistake with profile (apostrophes out of place) which was rejected by “customer service” (no additional content was added, and previous edit was absolutely fine.  Absolutely bloody useless customer service as a result.  That said, they have the most stable and better designed UI than the other dating sites.  One doesn’t “boost” the profile to as far and wide, rather you use their algorithm for match compatibility which seems to work pretty well and gets a decent number of views.  Messaging is relatively straight forward – and well designed.  However,  giving “compliments” on parts of a profile are a lot more complex than it seems – what generally should start conversations usually is a massive non-starter.  

The 14-day statutory right to a refund is essentially negated if you pay for Premium Membership which pretty much the only thing you can do to make ANY sense or use of the service (which applies to pretty much any dating service – the free membership is useless).  Even then, they will deduct a further fee for “value compensation” (which is mentioned in the terms and conditions) due to your use of the Premium Membership – essentially charging £130 for the “scientific” match report.  But, at the goodness of their hearts. they will half the fee and deduct the first month’s fee from that.  I ended up paying £65 for a service which did not live up to expectations.  On the other hand, I am no longer tied to the contract.  

The report fee is not mentioned in the terms and conditions which is publicly available on the site and is sent as a PDF to you after you placed the order (which brings down your subscription costs too).  They claim the £130 *is* mentioned prior to placing the order, but I do not recall this, and when pushed to prove that it’s there, I got no response.  I’ve filed a complaint with the CMA (Competition Markets Authority) over eHarmony’s lack of transparency.  Visiting Trustpilot will show many, many, many people have been caught out by this fee, and even eHarmony’s very own Facebook page has scores of people following up their own posts complaining about the value compensation fee.  This suggests to me either the company is deliberately hiding behind it, or are completely bloody useless and doesn’t give a toss.  eHarmony were forced to pay a $1.2 million fee and $1 million in restitution after a variety of renewal related chaos:

https://mynewsla.com/business/2018/01/09/dating-site-slapped-with-big-fine-for-automatic-renewals-denied-refunds/

and here in the UK, eHarmony got in a lot of trouble with the UK Advertising Standards Agency for their adverts:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/03/online-dating-ad-banned-scientific-claims-dismissed-fake-news/

Encounters Dating

This one is very much up front about refunds – you pay and use the service immediately, you remain in contract.  No refunds.  So I signed up for one month only to get a feel, then can let the thing run out.  I feel it’s fine to compensate a dating site for at least one month’s of service if they really insist on it.  

Problems included one “fan”‘s subscription running out and not being able to contact me, but would write when she renewed her subscription – either it was a scheme for me to “gift” a subscription to her, or just to tell me to bugger off (which would have been simpler).  Another fan, I’m sure, was merely a mistake.   Then there was another that had locked her profile down so much there were too many non-negotiable elements that it made it impossible for me to contact her.  All pictures were hidden and you’d have to ask.  So she was immediately blocked – why waste somebody’s time like that?  There’s no method of boosting a profile, but they seem more relaxed with photographs and profile statements versus others.  

I  noticed that Encounters Dating seem to cater for the more mature side – given its association with the Telegraph you can expect plenty of people 45 years and up and with a more conservative view.

Overall / Conclusion

Each site needs to introduce stricter verification processes to deter fraud and scamming.  If this means a credit check against the account owner, alongside manual verification of ID, so be it.  A few of these sites offer a phone verification which is displayed alongside a user’s profile, but not everybody does this – it’s entirely optional.

The cost of subscriptions is pretty damn outrageous with the likes of Tinder. Match and Plenty of Fish charging eye popping fees to pimp (maybe the wrong choice of word there) your profile to everybody.  To give some context, I pay Google £15.30 a month to access their *Enterprise* email and workspace (Docs, Drive and Presentation) product.  I have 24/7 round the clock support for business critical outages or problems.  I also pay £11.99/month for YouTube Premium which does away with adverts and provides downloads via the YouTube app for offline viewing.

£15.30 + £11.99 = £27.29

This is still CONSIDERABLY cheaper than any of the monthly (or even of the many other quarterly, bi-annually or annual) subscription costs for dating sites.  The support will be considerably worse off.  You’ll more than likely get scammers.  And if you don’t like it – especially after 14 days – you’ll either to pay off the remainder of your subscription or a hefty value compensation fee.

My general thinking is maybe we need to stop with all this algorithm nonsense and go back to the old fashioned match making systems of old – e.g. humans behind the matching process.  I was amazed when watching an unlikely dating show, The Undateables, just how *nice* it would be to have that human contact when setting up a profile and throughout the whole process.   Plus it gives a sense of security and verification to the proceedings.  But this would come with even high costs than what is on offer now (I estimate around £600+ a year) – and, of course, trying to deal with hundreds of thousands of profiles would be impossible.  

Another issue I have with these online dating services is that most of the women I have some conversation with just can’t go beyond the length of simple text messaging.  I’m fine with talking of course, but I need to engage and get a sense of the person through their writing first.  I was complimented once, long in the distant past, by somebody who said that I had at least taken the time to compose my messages which weren’t along the lines of “ugg, urgh, yes, or no.” I understand people want to talk, but I’d like to initially see some form of literacy in a date that goes beyond three or four words.  Is it too much to ask?

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.. because Apple has introduced what appears to be a bug whereby you can’t change refresh rates. My BenQ EX2780Q monitor has been working absolutely fine with my MacBook Pro 16″ Core i9 since I bought both earlier this year. It worked fine with Catalina, and it worked fine with version 11.01 of Big Sur (the first full public release of Big Sur).

ALAS!

After updating to 11.1, I was in full resolution with the external monitor, but I couldn’t set the refresh and it enabled HDR mode. Rebooted. Couldn’t get full resolution no matter what I tried. Rebooted again. Bingo. It worked, but subsequent reboots only ever bring the display down to 60Hz – way down from 144Hz. Unplugging the monitor and plugging it back in again seems to fix the issue, but this isn’t a very elegant solution.

This appears to be a bug brought forward from the 11.1 betas.

One thing I’ve found that helps – start the MacBook Pro without the monitor turned on. When the system boots into Finder, switch the monitor on and close the MacBook Pro lid. As this bug seems to randomly change resolutions, you may be in a much lower resolution than expected – but you should find that you can change the resolution and the refresh rate.

However, if you leave you MacBook Pro on and switch the monitor off to have a bit of a break, you’ll come back to find that the monitor has changed resolution and refresh rate again, possibly requiring a reboot.

You’ll also find that it takes much longer for the MBP or monitor to switch resolution versus Big Sur 11.01 or even Catalina.

This is by far one of the worst bugs I’ve encountered with macOS in over a year – and I sincerely hope that Apple fixes it soon. I’ve already filed a report with them via Apple Support and if you’re experiencing this same issue, I strongly suggest doing the same.

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Just look at it – all smug and trying to be useful. But it has other plans..

Apple are well known for being stingy buggers under the guise for doing their bit for the world, but their new MagSafe Duo is REALLY, REALLY, REALLY taking the Michael. Extraordinary so.

It can also charge a wireless AirPods/AirPods Pro case too.

Not only is this an expensive accessory, but for a charger, you don’t even get the charging brick included. Just a cable. AND THAT FRIGGING CABLE IS TOO SHORT. I can’t run the thing from my desk because the desk height is greater than the pathetic 1-metre cable supplied by Apple. So you had better make sure that your desk comes with built-in power sockets, or use a third-party USB-C to Lightning that’s the right length. Apple does sell a 2 metre Lightning to USB-C cable, but that’ll cost you £35. They can seriously go and do something unmentionable. If Apple weren’t so frigging up its own arse about Lightning, I could have used a spare USB-C to USB-C cable from an old Apple laptop (at least I’m trying to recycle), but I have no Lightning to USB-C cables that are longer than 1 metre.

Apple, you’ve mucked this up.

There be magnets, but they’re still weak so it’s a still a pain to find the right position, negating any benefit of MagSafe.

In terms of charging and overall use, I found it rather difficult aligning my iPhone 12 Pro Max with Apple silicone case against the MagSafe charging coils. The magnets aren’t very strong, but even so, I did find it a bit of a challenge removing the phone FROM the base when I needed to pick it up. You do kind of need to touch the charger unit itself to gently pry from the charger.

But I have also discovered that my Deep Navy Apple silicone case is getting a touch of the MagSafe burn-in on the back; a circle matching the charging coils that surround the Apple logo. Apple has gone on record to say that this is normal if you leave the phone in a case. Why wouldn’t I keep it in the case while charging? Who the hell is product managing this crap?

Well, as I’ve just found out, wiping the case with a microfibre cloth reduces the visibility of the circle – but it’s still present, albeit it very faintly.

Ring-a-ring o’ MagSafe, a pocket full of Mysterons..

Will it be useful when travelling? Oh yes, undoubtedly. As a desktop charger, without a longer USB-C to Lightning cable included, it’s a seriously taking liberties. Even more, so is the lack of the charging brick.

My score: 3.5/10