It had been a long day. The drive back from the office hadn’t been smooth sailing, traffic was heavy with a sudden downpour only serving to compound the issue. Disconnecting his phone from his car he noticed a new notification from How we feel, taking a moment he found tired and logged the emotion.

As he approached the door he heard the familiar click as it unlocked itself, stepping inside the door the sound of the disembodied voice echoed down the hall… “Welcome home Ezra, it looks like you’ve had a long day at the office.” Flopping down on the sofa he heard the soothing sounds of his favourite Ludovico Einaudi album begin to gently play over the speakers in his living room, the lights dimming to a warm glow. He checked the time, 20:15, “Siri, message Michael to apologise for missing home group and tell him I’ve only just got home.” “I’ve sent a message to Michael”.

Prising himself off the sofa he walked over to the kitchen, the glow of the lights brightening and the kitchen ones turning on. Opening the fridge, he sighed. He forgot to buy dinner on the way home, “Siri, order my usual from the Chinese.” “No problem Ezra, I’ll let you know when Hakka Chinese responds”.

Back to the sofa, he turned on the TV, the music stopping automatically and the lights dimming again. The words What would you like to watch greeted him? with next episodes of the three shows he was working his way through beneath them. A notification pops up in the top right of the screen “Hakka Chinese has accepted your order, it will be delivered in around 30 minutes.”

“Time for a shower” he says to himself aware that the music starts playing over the speakers again as he makes his way to the bathroom.

Showered and changed he plops himself on the sofa again just in time to see the status of his food order change to Your rider is nearby, please keep an eye out for them. Before he’s had chance to pick what show to watch a new notification pops on screen from the doorbell and the voice says “Ezra, your food is here”.

I’ve been thinking about the smart home a bit of late, and I can’t help but think what we have isn’t really that smart. The thermostats are no better than the dumb ones people have been using for decades. The smart bulbs are cool, but are they really better than a normal one with a dimmer switch? The various sensors can be useful, although when one of mine recently fell off the door frame thanks to the heat I’m not sure how helpful the notification I received was.

The devices we have in our home to make it smart, are only smart once we’ve programmed them and set them up to do what we want. That begs the question, what would make them truly smart?

At the moment everything feels segmented (this might be because I’m using HomeKit) and silo’d to certain devices. Some of the elements in the scenario above don’t feel that far away now they are because devices don’t talk to each other properly.

It feels like a situation where the pieces are already there but they haven’t been put together in a cohesive manner yet. Fore example, if music is playing on my HomePod controls appear on my iPhone, but timers don’t… if there’s a timer on my iPhone but I’m watching TV using an Apple TV nothing happens when it goes off. Why doesn’t the TV pause and a stop/repeat UI appear on the TV? Chances are I’m cooking so need to pause what’s playing anyway. I can receive notifications from my iPhone on my Mac, but not on my iPad or Apple TV. Why can’t that technology allow the live activity from a food delivery app sit discreetly in the corner of my Apple TV?

These are just small pieces of low hanging fruit that don’t feel like big asks (famous last words) and I’ve not doubt that a proper smart home could do even more. Really all I want a little quality of life enhancements that don’t cost the earth to setup and that just work out the box.

It’s raining outside but it’s still a balmy 18 degrees. Whilst the rain is refreshing, and the plants really need a good soak, it makes inside humid, especially in this coffee shop. It’s not my usual morning coffee spot, but the batch brew is nice and the music is creating a nice ambience. The drum beats mix with the clatter from the espresso machine and the hubbub of people chatting.

There’s an interesting mix of socialising and solitude. People on their own are smiling to themselves as they tap away at their phones, the couple in front of me sits opposite each other but they don’t converse. Little words between each other, whilst holding their phones. Together but separate. Connected but not present. It reminds me of the pub I used to work in when I was eighteen. Beer replaced by coffee. Newspapers replaced by phones. Crosswords replaced by games, or perhaps digital editions. On the surface not so different, but yet it still feels like it is.

I remember seeing a photo of a train carriage in America from decades ago. People on their commute all reading the newspaper catching up with the world before their day at work. It’s a similar scene today.

We may decry the effect that our devices are having on us, our ability to concentrate and focus, the most connected to the outside world we’ve ever been with the highest rates of loneliness we’ve ever been aware of. I don’t want to minimise those thoughts, but I wonder how different we really are to the people in that photo from 60 years ago? Perhaps it is the speed of things that is the real problem. There is no need to wait for the newspaper the next morning to get an understanding of what is going on in the world. We can see it happening in front of us, in near real time, with all the inaccuracies that we can dream of. No one goes back to correct or check, there’s no verifying, just moving on to the next thing. Even people who care about certain causes don’t take the time to learn. They feed upon the fire hose of opinion, of misinformation, there is no time to study or learn. Instead they must signal where they stand and move on.

It is sad, but I get it. Everyone is busy. Not everyone has the ability or desire to inform themselves fully before forming an opinion. It is easier to react and move on with the day.

The couple in front of me have been replaced by a Dad and his Son. Coffee and apple juice, sharing a pastry together. A moment of connection in a world of solitary people, they bring a smile to my face.

It’s hot in England at the moment. The country is being hit by another heat wave with temperatures sitting at around 30 degrees. It’s not the hottest but the heat here is different to other places.

Looking at my weather app it tells me Cheltenham is going to have the same high as Jerusalem and Tel Aviv today and I find my wishing I was facing the heat there rather than here. Tel Aviv might be sticky but at least it’s by the sea, the beach a short walk away, paddling in the warm Mediterranean waters a nice way to cool off. Jerusalem is high up, its heat is drier, the evenings cooler. It’s a gentler and more relaxing heat, like a good holiday.

This morning isn’t so bad. I stood at my sliding door eating my breakfast, some Greek yogurt with blueberries and almonds, listening to the world go by. It was oddly clam and tranquil. I could hear birds twittering away to one another. The traffic noise was gone, maybe everyone went to the office early or has stayed home inside where it’s cooler.

There’s a man replacing a windscreen at the end of the road. I can’t hear his radio, perhaps he doesn’t have one on. He seems engrossed in his work. The new windscreen held up on a rack as he polishes it, paying attention to the finish making sure there are no streaks. The only sounds I hear now are my fan and the scrape of my spoon on my bowl as I finish my breakfast. It’s time for a coffee and to get back to work.

Back at my desk to do some work I’m drawn not to the messages on Teams or my design in Figma, but to Ulysses. I start a new sheet and begin typing this. I want to capture the feeling of this morning before the real madness begins. My first call is at 10:30 and then it’s back to back until 14:30.

The events of this weekend seem to weigh heavy on me. Glastonbury and the BBC have a lot to answer for. Our politics may not be similar, but how they can justify the hate speech that they gave a platform to makes me feel sick. What’s worse is the number of people who joined in. My country disappoints me more than it ever has at the moment. It feels like society is crumbling.

I’ll open my Bible for a few minutes and then get to work once I’ve published this. It’s the only thing I can think of to stave off the spiral of despair.

Interesting post from Jim Nielsen about interoperable apps, although I’m not sure that’s the right term. When I first saw the title and screenshot I thought it would be a post about apps which work together well. Instead it’s more a post about flexible standards allowing for flexible user choices when interacting with that data.

I love RSS for this reason. I use Feedbin to hold my data and then I can choose any RSS app I want so long as it allows me to sign in to Feedbin. It’s why I’m still using Reeder Classic. Likewise with email, I use Fastmail as my data store and then I can use any app that supports IMAP or JMAP to interact with it. I’ve recently switched back to Obsidian again for this reason. The app sits on top of a structure made up of markdown files and folders. I can open the same structure in another markdown app like iA Writer and it will work (mostly) with all my data.

When you take the time to sit down and think about it, there are other systems like this. calendaring (via CalDAV) and contacts (via CardDAV) work this way as well. It would be so great to see this approach adopted for things like tasks, time tracking, and read it later apps. I’d just like a bit more flexibility on how I interact with that kind of data as well.

It’s been an interesting start to the day, one which has felt like 2008 all over again. I sat down at my desk with a morning coffee, opened my RSS feeds and went through opening stories into Safari when I came across something that seemed interesting. Two of those articles led me to two new blogs, personal blogs, from people I’ve never come across before. Now my feed reader has two extra subscriptions to keep track of.

Back in the early 2000’s while I was a student and at the start of my design career, this was a regular occurrence. Blogs would reveal more blogs, which would reveal more blogs, and at the end of it all I would feel inspired and ready to create a post for my own blog. Much like today. In that sense it feels like nothing has really changed. The internet, if we let it, can still serve up new surprises and new interesting people in a way that nothing else can. The small, personal, internet that is.

The last 15 years or so has been damaging to the personal internet. We have surrendered ourselves to the behemoths of social media, falling for the promise of easier connections, when in reality those connections are shallower and don’t last. People get drowned out in the noise and lost in the algorithm. That’s why mornings like this feel more special. Like a mini-revival is taking place. Most of the personal blogs I followed nearly 2 decades ago are gone now, sadly, but new ones are springing up and old timers are returning. People are scrabbling about in the back of the cupboard, finding the old hat buried at the back, dusting it off, giving it a clean, and starting again.

It actually makes me happy, which feels odd to write, but it’s true. I like finding new blogs to read, people to follow, photos to look at. It reminds me that despite all that’s going on in the world, it still keeps spinning. People keep creating, sharing their experiences, and more (please more) often than not there isn’t any politics in sight. It’s like a new renaissance is bubbling up, and I’m here for it.

It would be remiss of me not to mention the two new blogs I found that triggered this post:

• The first by a photographer called Adrian
• The second is by Bijan Sabet

Both linked to by Om on his new blog.

It’s a dark mode day. Outside is gloomy and grey, it’s raining, and everything feels like it’s in dark mode. There’s been a few of these kinds of day recently, normally they coincide with extrovert days at work, when my calendar is chock full of meetings and there’s no room to actually Do The Work.

Today is a bit different.

Whilst it’s a dark mode day outside, and consequently a dark mode day on my Mac I only have a couple of calls today so I have chance to find some flow. These days feel rare and for once I’m happy it’s a dark mode day. I can cocoon myself at my desk, headphones on, my time to work playlist in my ears and I’ll have a stretch of time to do some design work.

Barry Hess in a post about the state of his task manager makes the point that he is DDoS’ing himself with To-dos and Reminders. Essentially there is so much stuff in his task manager and he has lost trust in the way it works to ever see the right things at the right time.

I feel his pain. I have been bouncing around task managers for, at least, the last 6 months trying to find a way that works for me to see what I need to do at the right time. It feels that the biggest issue for me, is that as work dials up its corporate security it becomes harder to wrangle all the incoming jobs in one place. Tasks can be assigned to me in at least three different pieces of software, none of which are able to be integrated. On top of this I have the tasks coming in from chats and meetings, plus keeping track of and breaking down all the tasks into chunks that make them doable.

All of this leaves me with a constant feeling of overwhelm. There’s too much to do and no enough time to do it. There has to be a better way…

One of the most active blogs in my feed reader is by Louie Mantia. He has an interesting point of view that sometimes differs from mine (mainly politics) but I like what he creates and find it inspiring. In his recent post titled Learn to Code, Don’t Learn to Code he states this:

Both parties can understand the other’s limitations without learning how to do it themselves. And—in my opinion—you can more easily push the limitations without learning it.

I agree with this and it has been my experience as well. I can code html and css, but the developers I work with on a daily basis are far more skilled than I am. On the occasions where I’ve ceded to their wisdom we’ve ended up with a finished product that’s not quite as good as it could be. In contrast, the time when we’ve worked together to arrive at something closer to my design, we’ve ended up with a finished product that is better than what I created originally. When I’ve pushed them to see how close they can get to something I’ve designed, they’ve discovered that they can do more than they thought and then those new techniques have fed my designs and refined them further.

At work we’re doing a team visibility piece to help others in the business get to know us. We’ve been asked to answer some questions and I thought it would be fun to share them here…

Favourite movie: It would be a three way fight between The Usual Suspects, Shawshank Redemption, and The Dark Knight.

Tea or Coffee: Coffee, but not any coffee… my friends would say it has to be “snobby”!

Biggest fear: Wasps! Evil creatures.

What’s your idea of a perfect day? It’d have to be somewhere warm and starts with coffee looking out over a scenic view (mountains or sea), a long breakfast with friends, then an afternoon spent reading, before dinner out with friends.

How would friends describe you? I hope reliable and kind would be in there somewhere!

I’d love to hear some of your answers. If you want to share, please post them on your blog and link to this post.

I generally don’t comment about politics on social media, or really in life in general. I find the whole topic to be divisive and alienating especially as someone who is not liberal enough for the left and not conservative enough for the right, it is a hard topic to broach.

What I can say is this: I am very disappointed in the current state of politics both in the UK and USA. In the UK we have ended up with a government that will inflict great damage on society and is already doing so. In the US it feels like no matter the result, the same will be true.

I find myself wondering how it is two supposedly educated countries find that their choices for their political leaders are so poor, leaving voters with a bad and worse. My only hope is that we don’t see scenes in America similar to the last election and people manage to keep their heads screwed on.