Windows Phone has still got it going on

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They say it is important to keep in mind how far we’ve come in technology. But I think that sometimes it is a good idea to consider how far we haven’t come as well. In the trip into the garage that yielded my Zune HD I also found a couple of Lumia Windows Phones, including the wonderful 1520 that I got in 2013. It still works fine (although it took a few reboots before it got past a recurring alarm). Even the battery is holding up. I also found a 1020, the one with the amazing camera. That works fine too.

If either of these phones worked like they did in their heyday, with all the apps and integration that are now long gone, I’d be back on them in a heartbeat. Apple AI or no Apple AI. In my opinion the user interface beats the iPhone hands down. All this “Liquid Glass” stuff is really lipstick on a very old pig.

They don’t feel heavy, they don’t feel slow and they don’t feel old. We watch the Apple presentations and then dutifully traipse along to buy the latest upgrades (and I’m as bad as anyone for this) but it seems to me that the fundamentals of my life could be quite easily underpinned by a 12 year old design. There must be something which has moved us beyond what the Lumia can do but at the moment I’m not sure what that is.

Liquid Glass - Thanks but no thanks

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First reaction to Apple’s new “Liquid Glass” display: “That’s pretty”

Second reaction to Apple’s new “Liquid Glass” display: “I wonder how you can turn it off”

Note to graphics developers who have impressed themselves with their ability to overlay text on a background image and make the background blurry: There’s a reason why newspapers, magazines and books are not printed on semi-transparent paper. It’s because a distracting background makes something much harder to read.

Thunderbirds on the Big Screen

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To celebrate 60 years of Thunderbirds (blimey!) they’ve re-mastered a pair of the best episodes and are showing them in movie theatres in the UK. You can find out more here. The show was shot on 35mm film so it should look great on the big screen. They’ve re-mastered the audio too, so it should also sound terrific.

We’ve got our tickets. Looking forward to it.

Gone Flying

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We’ve done a lot of fake flying. We have regular meetups where we tour the world in Microsoft Flight Simulator 24. It’s very good. But no substitute for the real thing. Today one of us got to fly a real plane and I went along to take pictures using a variety of cameras and lenses. We were at Beverley Airfield. The weather was great, the conditions were clear (if a bit draughty) and everything passed off without a hitch. The only real problem was that they serve bacon butties for breakfast in the café and we’d already eaten. But we’ll know for next time.

You should be playing Cheese Finder

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I’ve just renewed the domain for Cheese Finder. I made it a little while back when I was writing Begin to Code: Building Apps and Games in the Cloud. The board contains hidden cheeses. When you click a square it changes to a colour that represents the distance that square is from the nearest cheese. You have to figure out where the cheese (or cheeses) are with the smallest number of clicks. The puzzle above went well. I only needed four clicks. I clicked in three corners, which all came up the same colour. Which meant that the cheese was somewhere in the middle.

It’s quite fun. You get a different puzzle every hour with a different number of cheeses and different colour mapping.

This one was a bit harder to solve, what with there being four cheeses to find.

Leeds Industrial Museum

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Today finds us at Leeds Industrial Museum. We like museums. Especially this one. It used to be a Mill, and not a great place to work.

All around they have put up descriptions of the horrible afflictions inflicted on the workforce. The ear defenders above are for visitors to wear when they fire up the spinning machine. Not something that the employees got. They just had to put up with going deaf after a while. All the machines were powered by a steam engine which turned long shafts that ran along inside the roofline. Canvas belts transferred power to the huge machines that took wool into one end and then produced cloth at the other. There were no covers on the belts or the machine mechanisms. Getting mangled was just something you had to try to avoid doing.

It’s interesting to think that at the time the mill was opened these places would have seemed like the ultimate in technical advancement and heralded as the next great thing. Oh well. It’s not as if our generation would widely adopt new technology without thinking hard about the implications and the effects on people using it..

Deep Jellyfish

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Pesky weather. We had all kinds of plans for today. We were going to head over to Sewerby Hall and look at the penguins and do all kinds of fun outdoor things which are no fun in the rain. But it was raining. So instead we went to “The Deep” and looked at some different penguins. Pro Tip 1 for visiting The Deep: Get there early. Preferably when it opens. You will have a blissful 45 minutes or so to explore the place before everyone else turns up.

Pro Tip 2: Don’t miss the jellyfish. Around half way round you get to an inviting white tunnel entrance which looks really good (it is). But to the left of the entrance is another one to the Jellyfishes. These are awesome and great fun to photograph.

Pro Tip 3: Go to the café and get a seat at “the pointy end” with views all the way up the estuary to the Humber Bridge one way and across the river the other.

And best of all, the tickets last for a year. Which is how we got to go back for free…

Yellowphant

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Shown with the original white one. I need to work on my brush technique

Got my “black burger” back from the pottery. We went there and painted some pots a while back. I think it came out pretty well. They have a really nice elephant model which I was planning paint with a different colour for each facet.

Like many of my plans, this one collapsed completely when presented with reality. So instead I want for a “yellowphant”. I’m looking forward to seeing how that one comes out.

Hesslewood Car Show

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Today I reaped the benefits of my film testing yesterday. Mostly. I took my instant camera to the Hesslewood Car Show and grabbed some shots. I’m pleased with the results, although I need to learn how to make adjustments for light and dark subjects. The car show was great. It was right next to the Humber Bridge Park and they had loads, and loads, and loads of interesting cars. Along with coffee, pizza, bits and bobs and birds of prey. We had a great time eating pizza and watching the birds go through their paces. I think it is an annual event, so if you are at a loose end in August 2026 and want to support a good cause (Humber Rescue) then you should head along.

Love and Large Language Models

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We went to see the Fantastic Four movie last night. It was OK. Before the film they had a bunch of adverts, including one for Google Gemini, one of the many AI assistants being forced down our throats at the moment. I found this one particularly depressing when it showed the sample query “How do I know if I am really in love?”. Ugh.

This is not what you should use AI for. AI is for things like “how do I unblock a toilet”, or “how do I create a tuple containing only one element in Python”. Not for affairs of the heart. I guess that the creators of AI have decided that most of us don’t need to unblock toilets or create tuples very often (unless our lives have taken a particularly strange turn), so they are moving into other aspects of the human condition.

Please don’t use the tool for things like this. For one thing you need to remember that one of the aims of an AI assistant is to keep you talking as long as possible (a bit like a hostage negotiator) and to do this it will tell you things it thinks you might like to hear. For another, remember that, since you aren’t paying for the service, Google will soon move on to monetising your engagements, so questions about love might well end up resulting in your next searches returning lots of adverts for chocolates and underwear.

I must admit I quite enjoy talking to AI when I’m doing stuff with it, and it is not a huge step to starting to think that the software understands me and cares what I am doing. But it doesn’t and it doesn’t. It just wants to keep me talking.