Notable

Posted 8th Feb 2021 @ 09:09

Posted 6th Feb 2021 @ 09:00

Good explainer on how the new vaccines work (and a primer on the old ones too). What an achievement by the scientific community to be able to create it so quickly. There's still so much to be done before we're out of this pandemic. Having the vaccine might protect you, but we might need to continue with various restrictions until we're sure it's gone. It's already mutated a handful of times and what happens if we let our guard down and it mutates in a way that the vaccines are no longer effective against it?

Posted 4th Feb 2021 @ 09:30

Not really sure how useful this will be to me, but the obvious one is for figuring out what an ambiguous icon does when there's no label attached.

Being able to lock and un-lock the feature is a nice touch too. I even tried dragging an object around the screen with the feature enabled and it worked really well.

Posted 2nd Feb 2021 @ 14:05

Posted 2nd Feb 2021 @ 11:35

This isn't actually good news, it's fantastic news:

Here's the key fact: All five vaccines with public results have eliminated Covid-19 deaths.

...all five of the vaccines — from Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Novavax and Johnson & Johnson — look extremely good. Of the roughly 75,000 people who have received one of the five in a research trial, not a single person has died from Covid, and only a few people appear to have been hospitalized. None have remained hospitalized 28 days after receiving a shot.

Posted 2nd Feb 2021 @ 09:10

I'd encourage any brit to go and listen to this episode. My own thoughts on Britain have changed a lot of the last few years and almost in line with how Sathnam describes his experience.

The Empire was always championed as a wonderful thing that Britain did for the world and yet do Brits really understand how the Empire came to be? To be the nation 'we' think we are, we need to do better and one of the first steps has to be confronting 'our' past.

Posted 1st Feb 2021 @ 19:49

Good to see that America isn't ignoring the obvious anymore. It's a real shame that the UK hasn't officially mandated masks yet, almost a year into the pandemic.

A brief family walk to get some fresh air yesterday was quite surprising and disappointing for us as we were the only ones wearing masks. Both common sense and respect for each other are sorely lacking in this country.

Posted 1st Feb 2021 @ 18:18

Posted 1st Feb 2021 @ 16:07

I've commented on the apparent lack of interest in the iPhone 12 Mini a few times since it launched but this point from Rene Ritchie is one we actually wrestled with before opting for a Mini and I had completely forgotten about it!

Rene Ritchie said, “Splitting low cost from small size with separate iPhone SE and iPhone 12 mini models is going to take a while to process, and 5G seems to be as much dead weight as accelerant right now, but overall the 12 series is a solid, steady update.”

Back when my wife's phone first had issues in the middle of the year, we held of buying until September and made do until then. Of course the phones were not available until later and the Mini itself even later still. The question was always do we go for the current iPhone SE (released early 2020, same spec as the iPhone 11 range internally but single camera and Touch ID), or an iPhone 12 model?

The price difference is huge, I mean the SE is almost half the price after all. We went with the iPhone 12 Mini so that we had the latest camera hardware, the phone should last a number of years (at least one more than the SE we would hope). But because the price saving was so significant it wasn't a straightforward choice at all. Combining the sales figures for the iPhone 12 Mini and the 2nd-gen iPhone SE could be a better indicator of the 'small phone' format's success.

Posted 1st Feb 2021 @ 13:40