MrMichael

2025 Japan House Lucky Bag Haul

2025-01-04T21:53:00+00:00

Firstly, let me wish you a happy new year! I hope that this will be the greatest year so far.

I spent New Year’s Eve with my wife, and we made it to the top of a nearby hill from which we saw the fireworks for all of London. The spectacle was all around us, so it was a little bit magical.

The next day I woke up with a cloudy head and so I did not do much, but I did see that Japan House was selling lucky bags (福袋fukubukuro). I had heard about the concept a few times, so I was interested in getting one for myself.

Japan House offered their bags in three sizes / price points. I got the largest.

The first item I got was a traditional hand towel (pictured above), known as a tenugui. It features a design from Trainiart with illustrations focused on the Touhoku region. I have some homework to do if I want to discover why each of the illustrations were chosen.

The next item is the star of the show. It is a solid brass figurine of a hippo hand polished to a mirror finish, designed by Mitsumasa Kokubo for Nousaku. It has a satisfying weight and an alluring quality that makes it impossible to not pick up and smudge with fingerprints.

This was the hardest item to find information on. Initially I thought they might be wood samples but after some digging I found that they are cutlery rests from ‘Arts Craft Japan’ — a furniture maker in Takayama, Gifu. They supposedly invoke the feeling of the nearby city of Hida and after viewing some photos I can see a connection.

The largest item in the bag was this large-ish bowl. It has a rough texture. At first I thought that I might use it as a fruit bowl, but I think it may be a little too small. I hope that I might find a use for it.

There was also a small bowl, this one is around the size of a soap dish and has a very smooth texture. It also has the effect of looking blurry in real life.

This is a fork for eating wagashi, traditional Japanese sweets. It is called Tsurara, is made by Kisen, and is made from aluminium. The handle is a little rough which helps to prevent slipping.

This is a cute sake cup with a Shinkansen illustration and pairs nicely with the tengui.

I managed to find prices for everything apart from the cutlery rests. It looks like the contents of the bag are discounted from list prices by at least 60%. I am generally utilitarian minded, and I wouldn’t buy one outside of new year, but it was a lot of fun to get lots of surprise nice objects. I might be tempted to get one next year too!

If you want to buy one for yourself, then you can still buy them from their online store (until they run out I suppose). You can also visit them on Kensington High Street. Again, no idea when they will run out but they are usually worth a visit anyway.

Nintendo announces new ‘Alarmo’ alarm clock

2024-10-10T21:53:00+01:00

Yesterday, Nintendo announced their latest device — an alarm clock. You can watch the trailer if you’re interested. In short, it’s a small alarm clock that sits on your bedside table and wakes you up with the music from various Nintendo video games.

It has some form of radar / sensor that detects stirring as you begin to wake up and plays sound effects from the selected game. Functionally useless in the age of smartphone alarms next to most bedsides, it does at least bring some fun in an age where gadgets are usually boring. I really wonder what the chain of meetings inside Nintendo HQ looked like for this to be released.

Book Recommendation — Unreasonable Hospitality

2024-03-06T20:30:00+00:00

I recently finished reading Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara, which details his career through the hospitality industry. While the book’s central idea is that the unreasonable levels of hospitality demonstrated at Eleven Madison Park can be applied to any business, the true charm rests in the stories and lessons the book has to offer.

Unreasonable Hospitality is filled with ‘legends’ where through extreme thoughtfulness and resourcefulness they exhilarate their diners with simple, bespoke gestures — such as running out and plating a hot dog for someone who is spending their last day in New York and had not gotten the opportunity to enjoy one. With good sense they then systemise many of these gestures that could apply more broadly, such as offering to top up the meter for any guests parked close by.

The next and more practical lesson from the book is the indefatigableness demonstrated each time a set back is encountered. They came last in the top 50 best restaurants — many would settle to be in the top 50, others would wallow in despair but instead with self-control they confidently identify their faults, improve on them and come back stronger each time. By coming last and improving themselves they built something better for both guests and staff — an example for us all.

While I would not expect this to change your world, there is a lot of wisdom to collect here for those who seek it and there is additional intrigue if you also work in hospitality. I recommend this book for anyone looking to improve their approach to delivering their product — whatever their product may be.

iPhone 15 Pro

2023-09-26T00:00:00+01:00

At a young age, a passing comment by a family member about its strength-to-weight ratio captured my imagination and led to a fascination with titanium that persisted into adulthood. Unfortunately titanium is not frequently encountered in adulthood. When Apple announced the latest iPhone 15 Pro, which has an outer band crafted with titanium and comes with a natural titanium colour, my curiosity was naturally piqued.

I eagerly acquired the iPhone 15 Pro 256gb in natural titanium on launch day. As I unboxed it I was struck by two observations. First, it felt noticeably lighter than its predecessors — beyond its stated reduction in mass. Second, the natural titanium colour imbued the device with a ‘tool-like’ quality — it exuded a sense of purpose, more like a crafted tool designed for productivity rather than a device for entertainment. The material and colour would be a great match for the Apple TV remote, for example.

The camera improvements are subtle, but discernible. Most notably, portrait mode now operates automatically on regular photos — all you need to do is snap away, and then you can apply portrait mode filters afterwards. Additionally, the main camera now offers a range of focal lengths that you can alternate through without sacrificing image quality — a welcome addition for those preferring a 35mm focal length.

In terms of performance, I measured a roughly 12% improvement over the iPhone 14 Pro. While current everyday tasks will not fully exploit this power, the new tranche of AAA games making their way to the iPhone will. I am mostly looking forward to trying out the new Assassin’s Creed title, and the prospect of console-grade gaming on an iPhone a-la-Switch could breathe new life into the mobile gaming sector.

Finally, the biggest outward change is the action button, which replaces the traditional mute switch. Its versatility is a potential game-changer. The action button lets you trigger an action on your device when it is pressed, the very nicely 3D rendered UI for selecting the action gives you a range of basic options such as muting, opening the camera, toggling a focus mode — but the most powerful option is the ability to launch a shortcut. I currently have mine setup to streamline task management, reminders, and manually logging health data.

Summarising, the iPhone 15 Pro is a solid, albeit incremental improvement and as such it is undoubtedly the ‘best iPhone ever’. The changes in material, and the addition of the action button subtly shift your perception of the device as you use it away from entertainment, and towards utility. It will be interesting to see if this silent nag will have any long term impacts in how people use their device.

The best tricorder ever.

Laser eye surgery

2022-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

On Tuesday, the 18th of October 2022, I arrived at the eye hospital ready to have wavefront guided LASIK eye surgery. On entry, a sign directs me to wear a face mask and I oblige — my glasses immediately fog up. I clear my glasses and forcefully fold the mask over my nose to avoid more fogginess and make my way up the stairs. A nurse hands me a goody bag with three different types of eye drops that are to be taken at declining intervals over the next few weeks. I see a fellow patient who has just undergone the same procedure sitting in silence with their eyes closed. After a short wait I am taken into the operating room where I sign some paperwork and then lay on the table beneath two imposing machines. A nurse places a foam wedge under my knees, and with that we are ready to begin.

Throughout childhood I managed to get by without glasses but at 17 after struggling to read the whiteboard for a few months I went to the opticians with what I thought were dry eyes. One week later I was walking out of the opticians with a myopia diagnosis and a pair of glasses. Many people who have experienced a change in prescription will understand the thrill of a new pair of glasses: the world is suddenly viewed with a clarity that was hitherto unimaginable — but over time the elation wanes. Glasses need to be cleaned, glasses need to be pushed back up, glasses need to be adjusted, glasses need to be maintained.

Eventually the accumulated frustration had built up sufficiently to break through the fear and procrastination and I decided to get contact lenses. Euphoria once again returned, not only was my vision crisp; I could see all around me. Ascending a set of escalators I could see every crevice of the store below in my periphery. Years passed, I would occasionally switch to glasses for a time but always returned to contact lenses.

After nearly a decade of contact lens use I visited the opticians for a routine checkup. They told me that because I was wearing contact lenses for too long each day they were starting to scratch the surface of my eye. This wasn’t a problem per se, but would eventually make lenses untenable. They asked me to reduce my lens usage first, but rather than take this risk I decided to switch back to glasses full time. I invested in a great pair from Ace & Tate — blue light filter, ultra thin compression, every coating available — and for a time I enjoyed them greatly, but they had unimagined consequences.

In an effort to lose weight gained and regain health lost over lockdown, I had recently taken up running. My resting heart rate had declined from 74bpm at the start of the year to 60bpm in July before I switched back to glasses. Unfortunately, running with glasses proved to be more difficult than imagined. During a run, the glasses needed to be pushed up, they would inevitably get a highly distracting smudge on them and they would interfere with my headphones. Running without the glasses was somewhat viable but I ran in perpetual fear of tripping on a loose paving slab or running through an otherwise unseen hazard. Every kerb became an obstacle to slow down for rather than something to be leaped up with confidence. I stopped running eventually, and failed to replace it with another form of exercise; the consequences for my health were dire as can be seen by the resting heart rate charts.

We humans are creatures of habit - our habits are nudged not only by our objectives but also circumstances and environment. You might want to learn a new language, but it’s a lot harder to get into the habit of using Duolingo every day if your phone has a cracked screen, barely holds a charge and periodically crashes. Willpower and discipline will overcome this to a certain extent, but things are easier if you set your environment up for success.

I eventually identified my glasses as a source of such psychological burden, nagging me towards inactivity, causing me to think twice before taking any action remotely active and placing a barrier between me and the world. The obvious solution was laser eye surgery, so after some research I booked an appointment with Moorfields Eye Hospital and I was soon on my way to the operating room. I confess that I had not considered Orthokeratology lenses — lenses you wear at night which correct your vision during the day — because I simply hadn’t heard of them. The price makes Ortho-K lenses uneconomical compared to laser eye surgery but given the lack of invasiveness I may well have sought them out as an alternative.

Back in the operating room the surgery is underway. The surgeon rotates me between the different machines and I get to the step where I am mostly blind. The experience was unique, I could see only an ocean of nothingness and the faint blinking red light of the machine I was somehow supposed to focus on. Even the blur of that light was something I had not previously witnessed, it was not only a gradient but distinctly grainy. The surgeon finishes up and I sit up. Looking around is strenuous, everything is extremely bright, but I make my way to the waiting area and start to apply eye drops every 3-5 minutes for the next thirty minutes. The consultant checks up on me, gives me the all clear and sends me on my way. I call my own Uber.

The next few days are the most exciting. For the first few hours I take occasional peeks, everything is so crisp but light sources are difficult. By 5pm I can keep my eyes open, bright lights are a bit of a problem but not too bad. The next day I would describe the process as complete, I had regular eye drops but any discomfort was gone, my vision continued to improve over the next several weeks.

My vision now is beyond flawless. I can read signs at distances where I previously may have only just realised there was a sign. The most unexpected aspect is in the periphery. When wearing glasses you are effectively wearing blinkers, you can see in-front but the sides are blurry and obstructed by the frame arms. Contact lenses liberate you from much of this, though compared to laser corrected vision the acuity is not so pervasive. The best way to think about this might be through video games. Modern video games blur and render in lower quality areas of the screen that are not in focus. Laser eye surgery has made the clarity like slightly older video games where the edges of every surface — even where not in focus — are perfectly crisp. Indeed, I now look at some of the cleaner stone buildings around London and the lines are so straight and crisp that they now feel more like artificial renders.

The surgery was expensive — and the cost may be prohibitive to many — but I believe that if anyone who wears glasses or contact lenses could somehow test the outcome of laser corrected vision for a few hours, they would largely be organising their life and finances around finding a path to make it happen. If you are on the fence, get off.

 Arcade: Assemble with Care

2020-07-04T00:00:00+01:00

It has been several months now since the release of Apple Arcade. I had a subscription for the first couple of months, then dropped out after I started my new role @Soho House and for whatever reason I spent all of my new-found commute time playing solitaire.

I was later enticed to re-join with the annual payment of £49.99 for the year (a saving of £9.98). I’ve enjoyed most of the games I’ve played on Apple Arcade, it’s liberating to have real mobile games, and not be continually pushed in-app purchases.

By far the best game that I have enjoyed is Assemble with Care, a narrative driven puzzle game where you have to assemble or repair various objects for people in a town the protagonist is visiting. The game starts by encouraging the player to wear headphones. Follow this advice, the audio is rich and incredibly immersive.

I would have liked for there to be more complex or challenging repairs. The game designers did a great job of keeping the puzzles at the right level to not be frustrating, perhaps adding more complexity would have pushed it too far. It was great to get lost in the repair, with the side characters standing over you to provide encouragement (or distraction). The small details were great.

There have recently been rumours that Apple has been cancelling contracts for games that are not so long lasting in favour of more engaging games often citing Grindstone as a positive example. I played Grindstone, I enjoyed Grindstone, I played Grindstone for many more hours than Assemble with Care.

That being said, games like Grindstone will never be the reason for me to pay for Apple Arcade. Games like Grindstone already exist on the App Store, but funded with in-app purchases instead of an annual subscription. I have no interest in only changing the business model. I am drawn to Apple Arcade because of its promise to move mobile gaming forward, to provide unique experiences that are not present elsewhere.

WWDC 2020

2020-07-03T00:00:00+01:00

This year, due to coronavirus the conference was moved to be entirely online. For most people the WWDC was already online but this year was different. This year, without the constraints of a live physical audience, everything was pre-recorded. Overall this was a huge success and I would say that all of the sessions were tighter and easier to follow as a result.

My one criticism is that the keynote felt relentless. Compared to normal, everything felt compressed. Gaps in time where the audience is cheering, or speakers are alternating, which allowed the viewer to absorb an announcement or talk / tweet with others were almost entirely gone. I think Apple were aware of this problem as later on they had quite a few fun/gaudy transitions which I enjoyed, but I think there needed to be more.

macOS 11

macOS certainly had the spotlight for most of the show. Everything has been redesigned to be more evocative of iOS design, but with a twist of macOS dimensionality. The biggest announcement was of course the transition to Apple Silicon. There has been much speculation as to the eventual performance of these systems, but Apple themselves have said very little. Their strongest statement was perhaps in the below image, which would seem to indicate that they occupy the power consumption range of a notebook processor, but with the performance covering the range of low-high end desktops. It remains to be seen how accurate this will be, but if it is then I will be at the front of the line to buy a new system.

Catalyst has received a lot of polish this year too, and I now believe it’s 100% possible to build great Mac apps using UIKit (which I fully intend to do). If developers don’t want to make a Mac app, that’s fine, the new Apple Silicon devices will allow people to run iPhone apps. I imagine many services, in particular banks, will not wish to release their apps for Mac. They should reconsider, I would relish having access to my Monzo or Natwest bank account from the place I am most productive.

iOS 14

Honestly, I barely remember the announcements for iOS the gravity around macOS was so consuming this year. There are a few notable improvements though.

The home screen now has widgets. These are not the today view widgets we already have, which are tiny, but real, apps. These new widgets are a SwiftUI view hierarchy, combined with a date and a relevance. For now there is no deep interactivity, and the view hierarchy is static. The exception to the static rule is dates / times, which are the only things that can update dynamically. The way I have chosen to look at it is that an app can choose to provide a series of images, with the times that these images become relevant. These should use almost not additional battery power, which is pretty cool.

Another home screen update: you can turn off some pages of your home screen. All apps will then appear in a searchable app library. The app library search is entirely separate from spotlight, and spotlight seems to now de-emphasise app results. I’m hoping that latter behaviour will change before release as Spotlight was my primary method of launching apps that languished on page 3+, and significant muscle memory has been accrued for that method.

Picture in picture has made the jump from iPad to iPhone. I can’t wait for Youtube to continue to not implement this, and ruin the video watching experience for everyone.

App Clips look super cool, I really want to work with them. Unfortunately I don’t think I have any viable use for them right now.

What will have the most impact to developers of many apps is the change to permissions around IDFA usage. IDFA is the identifier for advertisers that can be used by marketings to track the effectiveness of their advertisements across apps. Using the IDFA will now require an up-front system alert, similar to those used for location. As an end-user there is simply no incentive for you to ever accept this. The IDFA is dead, move on, switch to fingerprinting if you want to stalk your customers.

Overall

This has been a good year. Every Apple platform has taken steps forward, and it truly feels like everything has progressed, and nothing has been left behind.

R has increased. Time to panic?

2020-05-17T00:00:00+01:00

You may have recently seen in the news that R₀ (the reproduction rate) in the U.K. has increased. This is concerning and we should all keep a close eye on the overall R value. However, it is wholly possible that R₀ as dropped all over the country, but for the average value to appear flat, or even increase because of something known as Simpson’s Paradox.

Imagine we have 2 large 12-slice pizzas. One is anchovy, the other is pepperoni. Pepperoni is more popular, and the rate of pizza consumption is 100% (R_pizza = 1). Anchovy is less popular, and the rate of consumption is only 50%! Out of 24 slices in total, 18 have been consumed. This represents an overall rate of pizza consumption of 75%.

Now, because of a wide-scale weight loss program, everyone decides to eat less pizza. The anchovy pizza now only has 5 slices, but we have the same amount of pepperoni.

In the below example, only 11 slices of pepperoni have been eaten, and 2 slices of anchovy. We can rejoice, the rate of pizza consumption has gone down across the board! Only 92% of the pepperoni, and 40% of the anchovy pizza has been eaten! The overall picture tells a different tale. In total 13 slices of pizza were eaten out of 17 slices available in total. That works out to 76.5%! The percentage of the pizzas being consumed has gone up, even though: a) Less pizza is being consumed in total, b) Both pizzas have a lower percentage being eaten.

This has happened because the pizza with the lower R_pizza is no longer as represented in the overall figures. The same could be true for England’s R value. It could well be the case that transmission everywhere has reduced, but because the reduction in the normal community was so much more the R value is shifting to become a representation of transmission in hospitals and care homes. If the recent estimations of around 25 new infections in London per day prove to be accurate then this could well be the case.

Top 8 interesting apps

2019-06-15T00:00:00+01:00

This is a list of apps that I use regularly that I feel are uniquely interesting in some really cool ways. They each have features and aspects that, I feel, are worth paying attention to. Without any further delay:

1. OmniFocus 3

OmniFocus is a todo list manager that is great for Getting Things Done (GTD). It syncs between phone, iPad and Mac, has a liberal tagging system, you can add attachments to tasks and put them in projects and sub-projects. Tasks can be delayed and/or hidden until they’re relevant. This is a great tool for managing your personal tasks for work and at home.

2. Monzo Bank

Monzo (formally Mondo) is a relatively young challenger bank from London. If you have a good credit history they (currently) have nothing to offer in the traditional sense as you can get better rewards, loans, overdrafts, interest rates and credit cards elsewhere. What you get however, is an excellent place to manage your money from. When you open the app, you’re directly taken to your recent transactions. Your current balance and daily spending are right at the top in big letters with a line graph that illustrates your dwindling funds over the course of the month. Expenditure is automatically categorised so you can see how much you’re spending, and on what. Statement items show company logos, and opening them reveals the location of the store (if relevant) on a map.

Right after your first purchase when travelling you get a notification welcoming you to the country, with a very clear exchange rate. Every overseas purchase will list the local currency cost with the amount taken after conversion, they’ve really nailed down foreign transactions.

Monzo has multiple methods for sending and requesting money, but the way they handle traditional account number + sort code transactions is sublime. For any incoming transfer, the account details of the sender will be saved automatically, so if you ever need to pay them for a pizza further down the line you can do it without even asking for details. Outgoing transfers are similarly easy to setup, sort-codes are automatically parsed and the logo of the target bank is displayed which just adds an extra level of comfort that you’re typing the correct numbers. If the other person has a Monzo account then they’ll already be in your contacts, complete with a profile picture!

If you’re a developer working for a different banking app then please pay attention to Monzo, their app has close to everything you would want in a banking app without being gaudy (looking at you Sterling).

3. Tweetbot 5 for Twitter

Tweetbot 5 is an unofficial client for Twitter. It provides a cleaner, more iOS like experience for viewing Twitter. It has satisfying gestures for liking, or otherwise interacting with a tweet and supports multiple accounts with rapid hot-switching. It’s fast, and just about everything is 3d touchable so you can have a quick peek at people’s profiles without interrupting your flow when reading your timeline.

In the tab bar at the bottom, they have this crazy long press for extra tab options thing going on, so the final 2 tabs are actually 5 tabs, and you can customise both. It’s definitely an interesting way of having way more tabs of content, though I’m not sure it’s one I would want to use personally.

4. Castro Podcast Player

What I like about Castro more than anything is that it demonstrates how much is possible without a backend to manage accounts and send push notifications. New episodes are identified in background processing mode, and the rich notifications are triggered then. The inside of the app is extremely well geared to the role of playing podcasts with careful thought applied towards what people will want to do when listening. The bottom, like Apple Music, has the current playing status which can be swiped up from anywhere in the app. There’s an ever-present airplay button, which I’m a big fan of (looking at you YouTube, why would anyone want to play audio/video on a different device right?). Playback speed can be increased, voices can be picked out and enhanced and lengthy gaps of deafening silence can be automagically trimmed. The UI throughout can generally be described as big and bubbly.

5. CARROT Weather

Elegant, joyous, amusing and useful; CARROT Weather is one of those rare apps that has it all. When you open the app, you’re immediately shown the current conditions for your area right at the top of the screen. The next section of the screen is dedicated to changing weather conditions over the next 9 or so hours, again everything is presented with lucid clarity. At the bottom, you have the changing conditions over the next few days, and you even get a witty, often topical and sometimes homicidal, remark thrown into the mix. All of this is packaged in wonderfully beautiful illustrations that echo the current weather.

If the app ended there it would be perfect, but the developer here clearly has too much time on their hands. The Apple Watch app is equally as elegant, there’s an AR mode where the weather can be presented by CARROT, you can rewind to previous weather conditions, there are achievements and there are also secret locations that are mostly (entirely?) based on movies. CARROT Weather makes the weather fun, which as a British sparks joy.

6. Babylon

I have no doubt that Babylon is the future of GP appointments in the UK. The app is a bit of a jumbled mess with far too many sections that should have been culled at the planning stage, but it’s functional. Booking an appointment is relatively straight forward and you can generally get a video appointment for the same day with little effort. The video calls work, and on the conclusion of your call the app will provide you with a transcript of everything that was discussed complete with any actions that you may need to take. If your medical issue needs to be escalated then you can be referred in the same manner as a traditional GP.

7. Halide Camera

Halide Camera is an app for taking pictures but unlike the default camera app Halide offers far more control. Launch the app and you’re looking at a camera preview. Swipe across the bottom and you’re manually adjusting the focus. Tap the top right and you’re setting the exposure. Everything is quickly in reach. Further to this you can use portrait mode to take depth maps at the same time that you’re taking an image, and you can view the results in augmented reality! What is more impressive however is how fast the developer of Halide adjusted to the notch paradigm. I believe it was before the release of the iPhone X that the developer had already shown the EV indicator occupying the top right notch. I have yet to see another app utilise this narrow slice of real-estate so effectively.

8. Apollo for Reddit

Apollo for Reddit is like Tweetbot for Twitter, but for Reddit. I frankly spend too much time browsing memes in Apollo, and I can’t imagine a better interface for Reddit than this (and it seems that Reddit can’t either).

4G as a home broadband replacement

2019-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

A little over 3 months ago I moved from Islington to west London. After a bit of searching I found an ideal place, cheap (ish, for London) and not too far from work. A cursory glance on SamKnows revealed that the exchange was fibre enabled so at a minimum we should be at least able to get FTTC. After moving in I went to order broadband from BT, and I was greeted with this:

Needless to say, this was not great news. After some further digging it was revealed that whilst the exchange was fibre ready, our specific cabinet was not (and with no plans in place to upgrade it).

With Virgin Media also not a viable option, I started investigating alternatives. Relish was the first option that sprung to mind, having seen advertisements on the Underground for their unlimited service. There were 2 problems however:

No idea how good the signal would be at the apartment
10Mbps capped upload speed

I was not super enthusiastic about potentially locking us into a 12 month contract where the service might not even be viable. I did however know that I had close to perfect signal on my phone with my provider (EE) with whom I routinely get 140-200Mbps down and 40-80Mbps up.

Looking on their site, they were selling a contract with a home 4G router! There was one catch however, the service has caps with a different price at each of the following tiers:

100GB for £35/month
200GB for £50/month
300GB for £80/month
500GB for £100/month

Unsure of how much exactly I’d need, and with the assurances from the salesperson that we could upgrade our tier at any time, I started at 100GB. After setting up I initially only achieved 100 Kbps download speed, this was super concerning but after waiting for a couple of days the speeds picked up to ~70-80Mbps.

100GB This did not last very long, with that in mind we went up to 200GB. 200GB was mostly ok, but still felt constrained towards the end of the month. I didn’t want to feel constrained in that way, but I also didn’t want to pay £80 or £100 a month for internet. With some quick searching I determined that Netflix was our primary consumer of bandwidth at ~3GB per hour, and that by lowering the quality of the stream to medium we could reduce that to only 0.7GB per hour! Certainly the drop in quality was initially noticeable, but with time we grew accustomed to it and we can now comfortably reach the end of the month without being anxious about running out of internet.

The largest problem hurts, but is sadly unavoidable: the internet connection is NATed and as such Super Smash Bros ultimate does not work online.

Conclusion – is 4G home broadband viable?

For practically everything other than gaming: go for it, it’s definitely better than ADSL. For uploading it’s probably one of the best home products on the market. For gaming, at least in my experience, it’s not viable. Other non p2p online games probably will work fine, but Smash Bros does not.

Merry Christmas!

2018-12-25T00:00:00+00:00

Merry Christmas everyone! Best wishes to you and your families this holiday period, in this the year of our lord 2018!

Affinity Designer released for iPad

2018-07-11T00:00:00+01:00

I’ve been waiting for this one for a while. Affinity Designer is a powerful vector editing program that I’ve been using professionally on Mac for years, and now it’s available for iPad. I’m excited to start adding this to my workflow and to see what this means for the iPad as a platform for content creation.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/designer/ipad/

Toucan 1.3

2018-06-19T00:00:00+01:00

Hi everyone!

Toucan Authenticator 1.3, Charismatic Canary is now available on the App Store. This release adds a today widget, letting you view and copy your codes without even launching the app^[1]!

[1] Does anyone still actually launch apps in 2018?

Announcing Toucan

2018-05-19T00:00:00+01:00

I’m happy to announce that my first solo app is available on the App Store!

Toucan is an app for 2-factor authentication focusing on speed and simplicity. I made Toucan because as the prevalence of 2-factor authentication increased across all the services that I use daily, I began to grow increasingly frustrated using the mediocre offerings available. I bought one of the best smartphones on the market, but for something that I used every day I was being forced to endure outdated apps.

I knew that I could make something better. I wanted to be in and out as fast as possible, so I focused on glanceability which meant keeping information density high enough that you can see a respectable number of entries, but not too high that you’re overwhelmed.

View Toucan on the App Store!

iPad Pro 10.5”

2017-07-01T00:00:00+01:00

I recently decided to purchase the new 10.5 inch iPad Pro, along with an Apple Pencil. I’ve been using it every day now for the past few weeks so I thought I’d share some thoughts on it, coming from an iPad Air 2.

Hardware

The device doesn’t particularly feel bigger than an iPad Air 2 (because it mostly isn’t), but content and the keyboard is allowed to breathe just enough more that it feels much more comfortable to read on, and also to type on. The 120Hz refresh rate of the display is sublime, everything glides effortlessly. Does it help you specifically achieve anything? Probably not, but it made the 60fps iPhone 7 feel slow and clunky in comparison. In short: it’s an incredible luxury. The true tone feature, where the white balance of the display adjusts to match the ambient light temperature of the room in an effort to make the display mimic paper is an odd one. Most of the time you don’t notice it, which I suspect is the idea, but every now and again you notice that it just feels more natural, particularly if you’re coming back from another display.

The cpu is crazy fast, everything runs flawlessly. I’ve restarted it a couple of times, and it boots insanely quickly, not that it’s particularly important. You can be watching a twitch stream, looking up something in an email and catching up on slack all at the same time and the performance is the same as running those apps individually. I picked up affinity photo in the launch sale, it seems to comfortably perform better than Pixelmator does on my i7 2013 MacBook Pro. Perhaps not a fair yardstick for comparison, but it’s telling of what can be achieved on this device.

Software

iOS 10 is great, and I personally don’t feel particularly stifled by it. You still have split view and popover, you still have great tablet apps designed for the platform. Pixelmator, slack, affinity photo, safari, mail, notes, numbers. These apps are all still great and work in the same way they always have.

In iOS 11 everything gets subtly better. Notes let’s you write notes without making a sketch, a subtle distinction that makes it much nicer to write notes on the go during meetings or classes. Mail lets you drag attachments around with reckless abandon, and signing a received PDF and sending it back can be achieved in seconds. Split view let’s you have the primary app on the left or right side, and you can change them at will. You can interact with the background app during slide over, and the slide over app can now also be placed on the left. Drag and drop is faster and easier than using a share sheet, though I feel like it could still be better somehow. It makes sense that the most new feature would have the most teething issues.

Nothing in iOS 11 is particularly ground shattering, but everything is just that little bit easier to the point that I find myself wanting to do some tasks on my iPad, even though my Mac may already be open and in-front of me.

Conclusion

Can the iPad Pro replace your main computer? Maybe. It depends what you do. If it can’t then it’s almost certainly not a limitation of the iPad itself, and likely only struggles to replace your computer in the same way Firefox struggled to replace internet explorer when dealing with legacy enterprise web apps. One day someone will write great iPad apps for software development and content creation, and we may be drawn to those.

For me the question is less can the iPad replace a Mac, and more are there enough tasks that are easier on the iPad for it to be worth it. The answer is yes. Managing photos, minor editing, making notes, reading the web, catching up on Twitter, emailing, making calls, chatting on slack, online banking, watching twitch and signing documents are all less effort for me to do on my iPad.

Funding Circle

2017-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

Funding Circle is a peer to peer lending service. The concept is fairly simple, you invest your money and they help you loan it to small businesses. The idea is that you can use microscopic amounts (£20 minimum) to mitigate risk, and secure a greater return than savings accounts whilst being more stable than securities. Using funding circle is outrageously simple. You throw money at them, then you can use this money to bid on loan requests. Once the loan is funded, you start getting paid monthly. If you're feeling particularly lazy (which I was), you can turn on an auto investor bot, which will buy a scattering of loans across all risk bands whilst also limiting your exposure to any one company.

There's another side to Funding Circle, there's also the loan market. The loan market is like eBay for loan parts, you can buy and sell pre-existing loans from other lenders. The potential for skimming is enormous, and people openly exploit it. Within hours of a new loan being funded there are often hundreds of loan parts available at a premium. The rationale for doing this is obvious. Traditionally you would hold the loan (and hence the risk) and after bad debt you might expect to make 7%. If you skim 0.1% from 5 year loans (the smallest premium you can charge) per day, you could see returns of 15% (Funding Circle charge their own 0.25% on the principal amount for a loan sale). For now though, they have no public API so personally skimming is impractical.

Finally, they seem to have a rolling offer where they give you and a friend £50 each if you loan £1000 within the first couple of months of registering after being referred (easy 5%!). If you'd like a referral, let me know 😉

HACK²⁴

2016-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

I recently accepted a new job as a mobile developer at Multipie. I'm currently serving my (8 week!) notice period with my old company, but in the meantime they invited me out to join them at HACK²⁴!

HACK²⁴ is a hackathon local to Nottingham hosted by Tech Nottingham. The idea is to throw a bunch of people into a room, divide them in to teams, give them 24 hours and various challenges to see what they can come up with. There were 7 challenges and 1 bonus challenge available, and whilst teams can enter as many challenges as they want, we ended up entering just the one.

We were relatively unprepared and didn't have a solid idea of what we wanted to do whe we started, so we spent the first few minutes floating ideas around. Coming up with something to do is quite difficult, you want to do something that's fun, satisfies at least one challenge, and could perhaps be useful if developed fully.

Ultimately we decided to create a digital notice board. We had the idea of using iBeacons to have local notice boards that could be used by the likes of doctors offices, restaurants or museums to give patrons immediate access to digital versions of their documents. Surprisingly a quick google seemed to suggest that nobody has used iBeacons to do this before (at least generically). Inspired by Tim Cook recently tweeting this video about a nearly blind guy using his phone to zoom in on his physical school text books, we realised that this could have real world significant benefits for the disadvantaged.

This idea satisfied the requirements for the Esendex challenge which had a cool prize of a Sphero BB-8 droid for each team member! Motivated by the lure of a sweet robot, we got to work.

Adam started work on the iPhone app that would detect iBeacons, query the API and display the notice boards. Annie started designing the same app, and later the admin interface, coming up with a cool watermelon motif (Tech Nottingham loves watermelons = bonus points). I got to work building the API and the website to set up notice boards and post content.

I decided to write the API with Python/Django, mostly for 2 reasons. 1) As a swan song, since I'll soon cease working with Python or Django in a major capacity. 2) Efficiency, we only had 24 hours and I wanted to get as much done as we possibly could.

18 billion cups of coffee later, we posted our submission video which you can watch below.

Finally, it was time to reveal the winners. The room was tense, wave after wave of winners with awesome projects entered into other challenges were announced. Eventually it came to the Esendex challenge. We won! And for our prize, the room was subjected to Samuel L Ipsum passed through text to speech (also the sweet BB-8s too!).

If you're interested you can check out our code on GitHub

Candy Japan

2014-12-25T00:00:00+00:00

A few months ago, I decided to subscribe to Candy Japan. Candy Japan is a subscription service which provides a random collection of candy from Japan twice a month. It costs $25^USD/month, which is about £15^GBP in the Queen's money.

Most recently, I got 4 things.

CalorieMate (カロリーメイト). Appears to be some sort of chocolate flavoured energy snack / meal supplement. “Naturally suited for people on-the-go who need an easy source of energy and nutirtion-at breakfast, work, sports, study, or any other busy time”.
Wakuwaku zukan gummies (わくわくずかんグミ). The name means something like exciting picture book gummies. The gummies are apple and grape flavoured, and are in the shape of various stages of a frogs life cycle! On the back there's the name of each frog stage. とtoまmaごgo(Egg) > オoタtaマmaジャjaクkuシshi(Tadpole) > カkaエeルru(Frog).
Yakisoba mayonaise sauce ^flavour? snacks (焼yakiそsoばba). They look like a pretzel flavoured snack, or maybe something similar to something in a balti mix. There also appears to be some mention of squid flavouring too. I think it says イiカka粉kona練neりriこkoみmi, but it's quite hard to read such small kanji to my untrained eyes.
Finally I got Soft Ramune Balls (ソフトラムネボール). They're kinda weird fizzy sweets, with a taffy like part too. I really like the packaging on this, it looks really funky.

All this from half of a £15/month subscription. Pretty sweet deal if you ask me!

Nanode

2014-12-24T00:00:00+00:00

I've recently started working with my [DEAD] nanode again. I have a couple of these and I want to make some cool Christmas gifts. I'm not settled on what yet, but I have a few ideas.

I'm currently just playing around running a webserver on one of them, which can turn one of the LEDs on and off. I'm limited to probably less than 30kb of data! That kind of limitation really makes you appreciate the modern web.

Welcome

2014-12-24T00:00:00+00:00

Hi, I'm Michael, welcome to my new website. I'm a programmer from Nottingham, UK. I like creating cool things and visiting places. In my spare time I like to play DOTA 2 and procastinate at learning Japanese.

I made this site predominantly to advance my knowledge of Django, Python and the Google App Engine framework (when I first started I had just moved onto a Django project with my employer). Addtionally, I thought it would be a good opportunity to further my knowledge of Japanese by giving me some material to translate in my fields of interest.

I expect I will be writing about a range of topics, including programming, DOTA, Japan (or travelling in general). There is also an album page, which will have photographs from my travels, and other images I find interesting.

If you would like to provide any feedback, I'd be excited to receive it. Please contact me at feedback@mrmichael.co.uk .