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I’ve owned plenty of mobile phones over the years. My current daily driver is iPhone 13 Mini, sporting a bright, funky, and cheap OIIAEE Silicone Case. Look at it. It’s gorgeous (ignore the notification badge count, please).

Picture taken with the potato camera on my old OnePlus 5.

As I mentioned in a previous post, my favourite phones include the flyweight Nokia 6600 (2.1"), bantamweight N82 (2.4") and featherweight iPhone 4s (3.5"). All were very compact devices, some with tiny displays.

Steam - the video game distribution and launching platform from Valve, is twenty years old today. Steam has become quite a fixture of PC gaming life in those two decades.

I didn’t really pay any attention to Steam initially. I wasn’t really into PC gaming in 2003.

At least partly because, coincidentally, my daughter also turns twenty today. She was born just hours ahead of Steam.

A short while later, here we are, probably not thinking about video games.

Podcast consumption

At the start of 2021, I wrote up my 2021 podcast listening list. In it, I categorised podcasts I listen to broadly as ‘Must listen’, ‘Regular listens’ and ‘Once in a while’.

Back then I was using PocketCasts on Android. The full list of subscriptions can be found here.

Android ➡️ iOS

In June 2022, I switched from Android to iOS as I moved from OnePlus 5 to iPhone 13 Mini as my primary device. During that migration I decided to use the built-in Apple Podcasts app rather than continue with PocketCasts. I couldn’t figure out how to migrate the subscriptions from PocketCasts to Apple Podcasts, so it’s a fresh start!

About a year ago, I left a comment on a Nostalgia Nerd video about Viruses. It’s a good video, worth a watch, like most of their content.

Here’s my silly comment.

At 1.7K 👍, it’s my most upvoted comment on YouTube, ever. I do enjoy free Internet points.

Some of the replies to me on YouTube were quite 🌟fun🌟.

“Any chance you made a back up? I’d love to look at the source code”

[Read More]

At Axiom, our design team has recently come up with a “new” (to us) 🌟aesthetic🌟 for some of our online content. It shows up in posts & ads on social media and in featured images on blog posts. Here is an example.

It’s the lines, the boxes, the drop-shadow for me.

This is the first in (maybe) a series of “Tales From Tech Support”, which are true stories from my point of view. I’ll probably only post these on a Friday.

In the 1990s, I worked as a contractor for a large, well-established accounting firm.

We’d often buy new equipment and unpack it at the helpdesk, throw away all the packaging, and then take the actual kit to the user for deployment. That meant in our helpdesk area, we had hundreds of copies of the same manual for equipment. So we had a policy to throw most of the manuals away and only keep one or two in our ’library'.

I have long said I’m not really a developer. Whenever I used to see news articles in the past quoting me as “Alan Pope, Developer at Canonical”, I would cringe quite a bit. I say to my professional developer friends that I’m not one, and they often roll their eyes at me.

What makes someone a developer though?

I have a GitHub account. I have developed code myself. I’ve badly written HTML, BASH shell scripts, JavaScript, Python, and even some (finished, and some unfinished) “games” in BlitzBasic, BlitzMax, Z80 & 6502 assembler.

One thing I’ve loved about ThinkPad laptops for many years, is the upgradability and repairability. Ever since the early days, it’s been possible to noodle around inside a ThinkPad.

Sadly, some of the modern X1/Ultrabook line, and some others, are less upgradable than previous generations. My year-old ThinkPad Z13 has a few options for noodling around inside though, including storage.

My Z13 shipped with Ubuntu out of the box. I wanted to try something different, but didn’t want to wipe the OS off the SSD. So I replaced the existing SSD with one of these 256GB Sabrent Rocket NVMe SSD devices for ~£45.

Time for a listicle!

I’ve felt the need to list (almost) every mobile phone that I can remember owning and using, ever. There’s at least one missing from the list. My stupid old brain won’t let me recall the niche brand of phone I bought some years back. It’ll come to me one day.

There’s a table below with some of the interesting manufacturers specs, and further down are some rambling memories from my experience of owning the various devices. This is all mostly for my own benefit, to recall what I had, but you may find it mildly interesting.

tl;dr I own an BEV (Battery Electric Vehicle) BMW Mini. I previously wrote and talked about getting a ’takeout’ of my car charging data from BMW, and putting it into Axiom to answer some common questions from the ‘EV Curious’. I’m now getting ongoing data from the car, but I had to use 3rd party tools to do it.

BMW

BMW has an API for getting car data (beyond the ’takeout’ I used last time), to get the ongoing daily charge data.