2026-02-26 01:29:31
On Software Quality is a very fine article by Nick Heer I suggest you read. There’s a passage I don’t fully agree with:
There was a time when remaining on an older major version of an operating system or some piece of software meant you traded the excitement of new features for the predictability of stability. That trade-off no longer exists; software-as-a-service means an older version is just old, not necessarily more reliable.
I have several older Macs I still use, some on a daily basis (like my 2017 21.5‑inch 4K iMac and my 2010 17-inch MacBook Pro), some on a frequent-enough basis (like my 2013 11-inch MacBook Air and my 2015 13-inch MacBook Pro), some others just occasionally (like my 2008 13-inch black MacBook or my 2009 15-inch MacBook Pro). The two main factors that contribute to their obsolescence are:
Typically, for how I use all these computers, №1 is more disruptive than №2. I very much enjoy using older Mac OS versions, but not being able to browse the Web properly and securely, not being able to correctly sign in to check a Gmail account, not being able to fetch some RSS feeds because you can’t authenticate securely or establish a secure connection is very frustrating. Not having Dropbox work on my 2009 MacBook Pro running OS X 10.11 El Capitan is a minor annoyance and means I just won’t have access to certain personal files and that I’ll have to sync manually whatever I do on this other machine.
But if I put these two factors aside, there’s nothing about those older Macs, nothing about the older Mac OS versions they run that makes them less reliable. The crystallisation of the operating system they use and the software environment I find on them is exactly what makes them more reliable than the newer stuff. Just because an application has been discontinued by Apple — like Aperture — doesn’t mean it has stopped working or has stopped being reliable. Just because a third-party app has moved on from supporting a Mac OS version (or even a whole Mac architecture) doesn’t mean I can’t keep using the previous version of such application with that older Mac OS version. I’m aware this isn’t exactly what Heer was arguing — I’m just saying that when I use these older Macs with older Mac OS versions, it’s like entering a snowglobe-like environment where everything that still works by current standards or demands, still works reliably and predictably. And what doesn’t work, well… just doesn’t work. It really doesn’t make the Mac or its older Mac OS version less reliable.
Now I’ll admit, one important thing that works to my advantage is that I have been using for years more or less the same bunch of core third-party tools made by Mac developers who:
So yes, I’ve tailored my software experience around predictability and stability for quite a while now, favouring these aspects over ‘needing’ to update just because a piece of software promised some fancy new features. The proliferation of subscription-based software — or software as a service, as Heer says — has clearly made things a bit trickier in recent times. If you, unlike me, heavily rely on subscription-based apps for work and leisure, then yes, remaining on an older major version of an operating system or some piece of software can present an issue and may end up being unwise in the long run. But I wouldn’t frame the issue in terms of ‘reliability’ — more in terms of ‘availability’ or ‘compatibility’.
I think the trade-off of staying on an older major version of an operating system or third-party application to pursue stability instead of buying into an increasingly mindless update cycle still exists. And that while an older software (or system software) version may not necessarily be more reliable than a newer one, it doesn’t mean it is necessarily less reliable or stops being reliable altogether.
Nick Heer concludes:
What I expect out of the software I use is a level of quality I simply do not see. I do not think I have a very high bar. The bugs in the big paragraph above are not preferences or odd use cases. They are problems with the fundamentals of the operating system and first-party apps. I do not have unreasonable expectations for how things should work, only that they ought to work as described and marketed. But complaints of this sort have echoed for over a decade and it seems to me that many core issues remain unaddressed.
People buy hardware, and it shows. People subscribe to services. But people use software. This is not solely an Apple problem. Many of us spend our time fighting with tools that feel unfinished and flawed; it seems to have become the norm. But it is particularly glaring when the same attitude is taken by Apple, a company that ships some of the nicest hardware in the business. I would love to see the same tolerances for what is shown onscreen as Apple has for how the screen is made.
What’s really sad in all this is that many of those “problems with the fundamentals of the operating system and first-party apps” aren’t structural; that is, they’re not derived from historical faults or shortcomings in the fundamentals of the operating system. They often are the result of more recent bugs breaking something that used to work or a solution that had already been found, and said bugs have been allowed to fester thanks to an unsustainable yearly release cycle that forces engineers to work on new features instead of fixing what broke down in previous iterations. This core issue in software’s ‘cardiovascular system’ is equally felt at the major arteries’ level and at the capillary level, which is that ‘fighting with tools that feel unfinished and flawed’ that Heer talks about.
By the way, the ‘software as a service’ model, in this scenario, does nothing but exacerbate these functional issues. The perennial, flawed, beta state of software is maintained at the OS level because this system software — instead of being designed to achieve a final, self-supporting state — is designed to be continually patched, retouched, refined on an asymptotic line (a process that creates a lot of baggage and technical debt). And when it comes to third-party apps, having software that is considered a service and not a product means, once again, that it is not designed to achieve finality, but to remain available in a usable state for an indefinite amount of time. We can debate exceptions, good intentions, and finer points ad nauseam, but I maintain that this progressive departure from viewing and structuring software as a product has been severely detrimental to the nature, quality, and usefulness of software applications for the end user.
It has disincentivised a lot of big and small companies from striving for excellence and releasing truly great products, instead opting for software that is decent enough but always has some room for improvement, a gap that is never really filled because otherwise the updates would stop coming and it wouldn’t make sense to pay a subscription fee anymore. In the best-case scenario you may have developers who genuinely strive for releasing great apps but their work is disrupted by Apple’s update cycles, forcing them to rewrite code and update their apps so that they keep working after a major Mac OS release. This is why I was using the ‘cardiovascular system’ metaphor before: the flow at the operating system level (major artery) affects the flow at the third-party app level (the capillaries). I really hate this kind of entropy because it feels largely avoidable. But reversing the course needs significant efforts, and such efforts have to come from Apple; they theoretically have the resources to shoulder these efforts and lead by example. I’m not holding my breath.
When technology was kinder to its users, and when someone like Steve Jobs was still alive and had Mac users’ interests at heart, keeping my Macs updated was a pleasure. When a new Mac OS X version was presented, I knew Apple had been at work to genuinely improve on the previous version, so for me updating was a matter of when more than if. And up until probably Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, ‘when’ usually meant ‘as soon as possible’.
But then, the ‘new cool features’ promised by the newer Mac OS version started feeling less important or groundbreaking. More cosmetic. Or more tied to a vision of the ‘Mac experience’ that has progressively felt more detached from the regular user’s reality, concocted by executives from their ivory towers at Apple Park who don’t seem to actually know how people work with their Macs in their day-to-day.
So there was a moment where upgrading to the next version of Mac OS turned into something I did reluctantly, often waiting two or three minor version updates because the .0 releases were getting buggier and broke more things. I even skipped OS X 10.10 Yosemite entirely because the visual changes were just too jarring for me and Neue Helvetica as new system font was really working against my eyesight — and against common sense, from a design/UX standpoint. OS X 10.11 El Capitan felt better in many departments, so I jumped back on the update bandwagon.
Anyway, to make a long story short, over the past 10–15 years my attitude towards Mac OS and software in general has shifted and has become more self-centred. I ask myself more questions. What can this new update do for me? Is there anything that the previous iteration can’t keep doing? No? Then what’s the point of upgrading? Does this app have some groundbreaking feature I was really looking for or missing from my tools that makes it worthwhile to start a subscription and rent software I’d really prefer purchasing? No? Then I don’t need this app.
Today more than ever, technology wants to put you in a river where you flow from update to update unquestioningly; a river where you keep flowing forward because the ‘new’ is always better than the ‘old’. I went along with this until it stopped ringing true. Today more than ever, technology and tech companies feel like entities that don’t work for us and don’t have our interests at heart; they just want us to depend on them utterly and continually. So I have to look out for my needs.
That means making difficult choices sometimes. That means questioning convenience (convenience for whom?) and reintroducing friction. I can’t use the term minimalism with a straight face anymore, that’s why I prefer frugality. I can’t provide a set of ‘rules’ or a list of tips & tricks here. This is the classic situation where your mileage really may vary a lot. What I can do is share an attitude. You should have already gleaned it from the previous paragraphs, but I’ll reiterate.
Put yourself and your needs first. Anything that works against that is not worth your time, energy, money, or obsession over it. A piece of software that is ‘nice to have’ but in exchange keeps you hostage through some form of lock-in or yet another subscription that further erodes your budget (especially if you don’t have money to burn)… is it really nice to have? An operating system that forces you to adjust your habits and workflows on a yearly basis… what does it really have to offer that makes all that hassle worthwhile? That new app that does the same thing as that old app you trusted… do you switch to it because it’s actually better or just because it’s new and ‘looks fresher’? If upgrading to Mac OS 26 means you have to also update a bunch of apps and all these now have worse usability — because Mac OS 26 is the worst usability regression in all Mac OS history — is that upgrade working for you or against you? If you reach a point where the entire software ecosystem you’re using is constantly thwarting you in a big way or even in a myriad of smaller ways, where do you draw the line? Do you even draw a line? Is the constant acceptance of the compromise of convenience, still convenient?
When you think in terms of ‘your needs first’, in terms of ’none of these tech companies is your friend’, and you build your software toolbox around the concept of ‘essential tools’, migrating to another platform isn’t as daunting or traumatic as it feels when you start imagining it. You do a bit of homework to prepare yourself. You ask yourself what kind of applications you need to look for if you change platforms, and evaluate the best candidates. Sometimes you get lucky and you find that the same company that made one of your favourite tools has also made a version of such tool for Windows or Linux. In this case you don’t even have to adjust to the new tool. In other cases, you might have to do additional work to become as productive in the new platform as you were in the old. But if you’ve answered ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Is it time to leave this platform behind because it takes from me more than it gives me?’ then you’re willing to do the additional work of forming new habits.
Where am I now in all this? I’m at a point where I’m not upgrading to Mac OS 26 or any other 26 software release from Apple. If the poor state of Mac OS user interface, user interaction, and usability is not radically addressed in future versions, I will keep using older Mac OS versions until the resulting friction is no longer sustainable. My main Mac is still on Mac OS 13 Ventura, and I’m planning to upgrade to Sonoma very soon. Considering how I use my Mac and my tools, the impact of staying on this older version of Mac OS has been non-existent so far. Everything I need to work still works without issues, and I’m still enjoying the benefit of working with a Mac OS version that — while not as perfect as Snow Leopard, or as stable as El Capitan, High Sierra, and Mojave still feel today — is way, way more legible, usable, and ‘out of the way’ than Mac OS 26 with its Liquid Glass UI.
I’m already using Windows and Linux as secondary platforms on other hardware. I don’t think I’ll ever remove any trace of Mac software and hardware from my daily life. The beauty of not needing ultra-specialised software that has to be constantly kept up-to-date means that I’ll be able to hold on to older, trusted Mac apps for a long time. But if I ever need to move away from the Mac as my main computing platform, switching to Windows or Linux won’t be much of a culture shock as it often felt in the past. And if my day job, as I fear, dictates that I’ll have to keep upgrading to newer, worse Mac OS versions, then I’ll make sure to do that on a dedicated machine where I don’t do anything else but work.
2026-02-13 19:19:19
Welcome to the thirteenth instalment of my annual overview of my most interesting discoveries made during the previous year. A few months ago, a friend of mine remarked that the title of this series of posts should be updated, because instalment after instalment, my list of things to actually read has become shorter, and the list of resources to watch has become longer. Maybe you should just say, “People and resources added to my watch list”, they suggested. But ‘watch list’ gives me bad surveillance vibes, and discovering and suggesting new blogs always has priority for me, so ‘reading list’ it is. Or perhaps I should go back to the wording of the first post of the series, published in early 2013 — Some interesting resources I discovered in [year]. We’ll see.
Apologies for the slightly navel-gazing introduction. 2025 was another ‘difficult’ year if you hadn’t guessed from articles like My 2025 in review, and Not fatigue, but disconnection; a year where I began to revisit older habits that used to stimulate me more and kept me from looking at screens all the time. Among these, reading physical books and engaging in more active music listening by actually sitting in my other studio (where I keep the bulk of my library and my hi-fi stereo), and listening to whole albums while keeping a notebook handy in case this activity triggered some new ideas or inspiration for my creative writing.
This and the promise I made to myself to be more selective in what I actually decide to add to my repository of resources-worth-keeping, resulted in yet another short overview.
What these two websites have in common is that they’re designed to look, feel, and be navigated like books. I’m a bit jealous of such designs, because that’s how I always viewed my own website, but my limited coding knowledge has always prevented me from reaching these lovely results. (Suggestions of using ‘AI’ tools for this purpose will lead to excommunication; you’ve been warned).
After last year’s intervention, the situation with my excessive number of YouTube channel subscriptions has normalised and returned to healthier numbers. As you’ll see below, I did indeed add a dozen new subscriptions, but a lot of the following channels have a somewhat relaxed publishing schedule, so things rarely get overwhelming.
Two very different approaches to technology here:
Another year, another round of copying-and-pasting the same quote from a few years ago:
In 2019 I unsubscribed from all the podcasts I was following, and I haven’t looked back. I know and respect many people who use podcasts as their main medium for expression. My moving away from podcasts is simply a pragmatic decision — I just don’t have the time for everything. I still listen to the odd episode, especially if it comes recommended by people I trust. You can find a more articulate observation on podcasts in my People and resources added to my reading list in 2019.
If you’re wondering why I keep the Podcast section in these overviews when I clearly have nothing to talk about, it’s because to this day I receive emails from people un-ironically asking me for podcast recommendations.
Yet again, nothing new to report on this front. I’m still using the same apps I’ve been using on all my devices for the past several years, and I haven’t found better RSS management tools / apps / services worth switching to. In my previous overviews, I used to list here all the apps I typically use to read feeds on my numerous devices, but ever since I broke my habit of obsessively reading feeds everywhere on whatever device, I’ll only list the apps on the devices I’ve used over the past year or so. If you’re curious to read the complete rundown, check past entries (see links at the bottom of this article):
In reverse chronological order:
I hope this series and my observations can be useful to you. Also, keep in mind that some links in these past articles may now be broken. And as always, if you think I’m missing out on some good writing or other kind of resource you believe might be of interest to me, let me know via email, Mastodon, or Bluesky. Thanks for reading!
2026-01-31 04:54:33
The other day, YouTube’s algorithm struck again. It suggested a video podcast episode from a creator with a still small channel, Josh Allan Dykstra. The title, while sounding moderately clickbait‑y, still made me curious to check out the video:
The Real A.I. Problem No One Is Talking About (Who Buys Your Stuff, Robots?)
I’m always interested in intelligent analysis debate around ‘AI’ topics, and Dykstra isn’t someone who’s profiting from ‘AI’, so his analysis doesn’t look biased to me.
Conveniently, Dykstra also provides transcripts of his podcast episodes on his site. Here’s the one for this video.
He poses the question right at the start:
Today, let’s start with the wrong question.
Everyone keeps asking: “Will A.I. take our jobs?”
I get it. That question is terrifying because it’s personal. But it’s also incomplete.
There’s a better question than if A.I. will take jobs — because, spoiler: it will, and it’s already happening (you’re noticing the hiring slowdown, right? [in the US] 2025 was the worst year for hiring since 2009, with the exception of COVID year 2020).
I don’t want to minimize the impact of A.I. taking jobs (it’s just beginning and it’s going to be enormously disruptive) AND there’s actually a bigger question lurking in the background, namely: What kind of economic system tries to eliminate human labor without replacing income… and still expects the world to keep functioning as-is?
I’m not hearing this talked about enough, so we’re going to talk about it today.
Here’s the crux of it: if A.I. works the way capital hopes it will, capitalism won’t break because A.I. fails. It’ll break because A.I. succeeds.
Why?
Because if you’re running a business, you can’t fire your customers and then expect them to buy your stuff.
There’s a simple loop that runs the modern economy: Labor → wages → income → consumption → revenue… and then back around again.
A company pays labor (that’s you) in wages which become your income. You have some left over so you buy things (consumption) which is another company’s revenue, which they use to pay their labor. Feels familiar, right?
In the way that modern life currently works, this loop is NOT optional. It’s what we might call “load-bearing” — it’s holding up the house. We break or pull out one part of the loop and things will NOT function the way they do now. Period.
[…]
Losing our jobs wouldn’t be so scary, of course, if we had another way to get income. The problem is most of us don’t. Our labor is what we trade to get to income. […]
As in all technological disruptions, capital is going to use A.I. to eliminate labor because labor is… inconvenient.
I get it — we humans are dreadfully biological — but without labor people don’t have income which means they can’t participate in consumption… which means Capital is also automating itself out of relevance. Because this time, the goal of the technology is quite literally to do everything a human can do (this is probably the most generally accepted definition of AGI).
We all see the problem, right? If no one has any money, who actually buys the stuff your robots make, Capital?
The strange irony here is that this happening wouldn’t actually be capitalism failing, it’d more be like capitalism completing its own logic — like the snake that kills itself by eating its own tail.
I’ve tried to summarise Dykstra’s argument the best I could, but I suggest you watch the whole podcast episode (it’s just 20 minutes long) or read the whole transcript. The question he poses is something I’ve been pondering myself ever since this ‘AI’ craze began to propagate.
I’m still not sure whether the doom-and-gloom scenario of ‘AI’ is coming for our jobs is really going to materialise in full-dystopian mode, bringing that high level of disruption Dykstra talks about. But even if we talk in hypotheticals, this is a problem worth considering. If entire categories of workers lose their job, they stop gaining money. If they stop gaining money, they stop spending money, and that means that other people or companies will stop earning revenue. That whole loop Labour → Wages → Income → Consumption → Revenue → Labour, etc. is going to fall apart.
I can’t wait to hear the ‘solution’ from some sociopath techbro.
2026-01-22 23:57:03
In recent years, the term digicam has come to indicate more than just ‘a digital camera’, as it was first used to refer to digital cameras as opposed to film cameras. Now the term also references a specific type of device: compact digital cameras produced from the late 1990s to the late 2000s, typically using older CCD sensors. This has been fuelled by a general rediscovery of the vintage, imperfect, more organic look of the photos these cameras produce.
As someone who has been into photography since the 1980s, and who has used these compact cameras when they were the latest and greatest in digital photography, this ongoing trend is more than just a fad or just another excuse to achieve originality or to look, well, trendy. And it isn’t fake nostalgia either. This type of photography brings back real memories.
The serendipity of rediscovering digicams and the digicam æsthetic as a personal endeavour slightly before this became a trend on Instagram, YouTube, and elsewhere is what essentially spared me from wasting a lot of money on 20-year-old cameras that should cost just a few bucks second-hand, but whose prices have been horribly inflated thanks to a bunch of photography ‘influencers’ babbling about ‘the film look’ these old, little CCD cameras supposedly give you.
I currently have more than 30 of these digicams, and I had a lot of fun taking street snaps around the city between 2021 and 2024. In mid-2024, however, my wife and I finally bought an apartment and for a few months were busy with everything related to buying and moving to a new home. In short, my digicam collection has mostly lain neglected for most of 2025. Further, last year my creativity in general took a hit also because of the stuff I talked about in My 2025 in review.
But during the Christmas holidays, as I finally finished reorganising hundreds of family slides to show more about my family and childhood to my current family (my wife, and her brother and sister), a renewed yearning for getting back to photography as a whole, and for dusting off my digicams again, returned in full. These days I’ve been busy recharging many camera batteries and taking out a couple of digicams each day with me as I went out and about.
The first two cameras I revived have been the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-L1 and the Olympus FE-250. The DSC-L1 is a very small, mostly metal, camera, that is rather comfortable to use despite its size. It has 4.1 megapixels and was made in 2004. The Olympus, another very pocketable camera, is from 2007 and has 8 megapixels instead.
I tried to capture the same scene with both cameras, but honestly, this is not a great sample of what these cameras can do.
Sony Cyber-shot DSC-L1
Olympus FE-250
The Sony DSC-L1 is rather capable at handling difficult light (a mix of natural and artificial, like in the first photo) and has a good auto white balance (the lighting in the second photo looks very similar to what I was seeing).
The Olympus FE-250, like all the (many) Olympus cameras I own, delivers very nice colours.
The second pair of cameras I took out shooting have been the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W370 (14.1 megapixels, 2010 — above) and the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T77 (10.1 megapixels, 2008 — below).
That plastic tab attached to the T77’s strap is in fact a mini stylus, as the T77’s back is entirely taken up by a 3‑inch 16:9 capacitive touchscreen. The only physical controls are the shutter button, power button (you also turn the camera off/on by sliding the front panel), review button and zoom rocker.
Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W370
Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T77
The DSC-W370 cost me almost nothing, as it was part of a box of 12 assorted cameras I got on eBay for €30 or so, sold as ‘untested, spares or repairs’ — and 11 of them turned out to be working fine, either needing new batteries or chargers. This Sony just needed its charger.
The DSC-T77 was purchased at a second-hand shop for the princely sum of €12. Both purchases were made in 2021. This camera was originally available in a few colours. The promo image gives iPod vibes (credit: DPReview).
It comes in colours…
At the moment I have the third pair of digicams in my bag: the Canon PowerShot G2 (4 megapixels, 2001) and the Fujifilm FinePix E550 (Super CCD HR sensor with 6.3 megapixels, 2004). Both these cameras have taken many very good pictures in the past, and it’s been great getting back to them these days. Maybe I’ll show more sample photos in a future ‘Elephant Memory Systems’ entry.
2026-01-15 03:41:55
2025 has been the year where something broke in my long-standing relationship with technology. That something could be summarised with the word trust but ‘trust’ is just the core of it. Much like an earthquake, its effects aren’t just limited to its epicentre. In November I already wrote extensively about this feeling of progressive disconnection from tech, but that didn’t come out of nowhere, and the general sense of fatigue I repeatedly experienced before it can’t be disregarded.
This accumulation of discomfort, fatigue, disconnection that culminated in my fracture with tech, did turn 2025 into a strange year. A year where I’ve felt unfocused, inward-looking, and in need of a restructuring, so to speak. This vague feeling of unease and unrest affected pretty much all of my interests. It’s been like when you stop and finally take a hard look at all your habits, your routines, the things you’ve been taking for granted, the direction you’ve been inertially following, and start really re-evaluating everything.
For someone with many different interests and a constant intellectual curiosity such as myself, this internal grinding to a halt for a long-overdue in-depth check-up has been anything but easy. But it had to be done, and it’s still ongoing.
I feel it’s a painful, yet important stage where you start questioning your identity — not in a psychological sense, but more like in terms of what defines you, and what you allow to define you. What are the interests that take up most of your time and energies? Do they deserve to be taking up all that time and all those energies? What lies behind these creative blocks? Are there other routines that hamper what you feel should be your main endeavour? Why do priorities suddenly feel all wrong? And so on and so forth.
I have been, for many years, at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, just like Steve Jobs viewed Apple’s position in the industry. I have been in love with writing, with text, and with the tools for writing and handling text for most of my adult life. At first those tools were entirely analogue; then, as technology progressed and computers became powerful, versatile, and ubiquitous as they are today, my creative tools evolved accordingly.
When tech becomes one of your main interests, you start developing an intoxicating fascination with tools — both in the hardware and software sense. And also beyond computing per se. It’s when in photography you start obsessing over gear and get bitten by the ‘Gear Acquisition Syndrome’ bug. To the point that your actual photography gets thrown in the background while you’re searching for the perfect camera or lens or focal length or accessory or post-processing software…
To the point that your actual creative writing is pushed aside to make space for too many attempts at creating the perfect writing workstation or distraction-free writing corner or searching for the perfect ancillary tools for taking notes and writing outlines for your current or next novel, novella, short story, etc.
It is indeed a long story, but for my and your sanity I’ll keep it short and hopefully to the point — in that fracture with tech that opened wide in 2025, together with the fatigue, the broken trust, the disconnection, the definitive realisation that big tech companies are not on our side, not even Apple, there was also the hurtful revelation that tech has been commandeering and monopolising my life much more than I’ve cared to admit to myself. That that famous intersection of technology and liberal arts has actually been a terrible crash at an intersection, where technology has been a big truck obliterating the small liberal-arts economy car.
Mind you, I’m not putting the blame squarely on technology here. I’ve made my share of bad decisions. I’ve let inertia take over when I probably should have taken matters into my own hands. I am solely responsible for the time I wasted caring too much about things that ultimately do not really define me. I got too intoxicated with tech as something to focus on instead of treating it like a means to an end.
But, especially for the past 10–15 years, technology’s sphere of influence has certainly increased, and with it its gravitational pull. Having to stay constantly and reasonably up-to-date with tech — both for my day job and to provide sensible commentary here — meant dedicating to tech a portion of my daily routine that has only been increasing with time. And for a long while I haven’t minded that. I’ve told myself many times that tech is kind of unavoidable today, and after all I have several interests that are closely related with tech, like user interfaces, user interaction, usability and accessibility.
This was all well and good as long as I felt that technology and the tech industry were on my side and had my interests as a user and customer at heart. During 2025 a lot of that came crumbling down. Again, it’s not that something specific happened last year. As I said before, the fracture came as a result of cumulative forces and realisations. When the company making the ecosystem you’ve been enjoying for at least three decades loses its way; when you see a lot of things coming and yet what eventually comes is even worse than you expected, and you just can’t ignore or downplay it anymore, the kind of resulting destabilisation is rather foundational at a personal level.
And how can one enjoy tech when it comes to this? When companies start blatantly pushing their agendas on you, directly or indirectly. When they start filling software you rely upon with crappy user interfaces, useless features, ‘artificial intelligence’ impositions nobody really asked for. When their attitude becomes, directly or indirectly, user-hostile.
I really don’t want to sound overly dramatic, but it’s been a few months now where I’ve felt a nagging question pounding in my head — Where to go from here?
My work and creative headspaces have to be both reconfigured. I don’t see myself purchasing more or new Apple products for the time being, yet at the same time I can’t just leave the whole ecosystem behind. I remember how in the 1990s a lot of people — myself included — had to tolerate Windows at work while taking refuge in the Macintosh platform for creative and leisure-related activities. While today I’ve come to a point (and perhaps you have too) where I tolerate Mac OS and iOS because I need them for my work, while taking refuge in…
In what, exactly? This is another thing I’ve tried to explore in 2025 and I’m still on it at the moment. I’ve looked into Linux a bit more. I have enjoyed using older Macs with older Mac OS versions and older applications that are still very useful to me today. I have enjoyed my Nothing Phone (2a) and don’t regret my switch to Android in the least. But going back to reading more — and reading more physical books — has been especially grand.
And gaming. I shan’t forget gaming and how therapeutic it has been. And not just a bunch of favourite games. The indie game industry as well, where a lot of indie studios and developers have released products that respect their audience’s needs and intelligence, so much more than what the mainstream tech industry has been doing in recent times. Gaming for the most part has felt like a sane environment to dedicate time and energies to, through game purchases, through the support of certain talented creators producing analyses and critical essays on games and the gaming industry, through directly supporting a few indie game developers, through participating in specific forums where I found a surprisingly non-toxic environment (such a rarity in this day and age). And it’s also been kind of ironic to see a company like Valve announcing products that resonated with me more than whatever Apple is doing now.
When I started thinking about this piece, it didn’t look like what you’ve read so far. I thought about neatly structuring it in sections where I would discuss different aspects of my ‘tech life’ in 2025, fun stuff like ‘my most used apps in 2025’, or ‘the cameras I favoured for my photography’, or ‘the tools I’ve relied upon the most in 2025’… But the truth is that 2025 has been a chaotic, confusing year where I felt as if I lost my sense of direction, technologically speaking. And to reiterate, that fracture I’ve been talking about has weirdly affected a lot of other things, even stuff I’m passionate about — like photography or writing — that should really have been immune to that. But it’s been what it’s been.
Perhaps, more than losing my sense of ‘tech direction’, a more appropriate analogy is that last year I finally realised that I didn’t like or identify with the direction tech has been taking, I got off the ride, and found myself in a new and unfamiliar place, unsure of what to do.
In this particular state of mind, talking about my most used apps in 2025, or the cameras, or the tools, truly feels vacuous and inconsequential. It’s been mostly the same dozen apps I’ve been using for years (Acorn, BBEdit, MarsEdit, iA Writer, nvALT, Find Any File, Raskin [for when I’ve needed a more spatial Finder], Instapaper, Mail, Vivaldi and Orion as main browsers, TextEdit, Skim, TextBuddy, NetNewsWire, IINA, iStat Menus, etc.); among the new-ish tools, I found the Affinity suite, CleanShot X, and LocalSend to be particularly useful and well made. Services have been reduced to just Dropbox, while the only utility my iCloud+ plan provides is in keeping the backup of my several older Macs and iOS devices. That’s it, essentially. As for tools, an old Kindle Paperwhite for reading ebooks, an even older Kindle DX for perusing PDFs, a Boox Go 10.3 e‑ink Android tablet for annotating stuff, and too many other computers and vintage devices to enumerate, which I used for spur-of-the-moment activities or exploration. Boring, tried-and-true solutions I kept close to my chest during this prolonged period of uncertainty.
What lies ahead?
I hope 2026 will bring more focus and clarity as I try to concentrate and find some way out of this uninspired, fuzzy mess. As tech becomes more and more intrusive, both in presence and unwanted features, my aim is to get it out of my face; to reduce its gravitational pull; to seek alternative solutions to Big Tech, such as the small but good stuff made by people who are as tired of and disillusioned with mainstream tech as myself; to try to find refuge in what used to work and be beneficial to my creativity — the analogue, the offline, the tactile and tangible. In short, to try reviving an inner garden that’s been neglected for too long. I have no specific goals or resolutions for the new year except doing my best to prevent it from becoming another 2025.
2025-12-30 08:28:49
It was time to do a quick check-up of my vintage calculators, because the last time I did it was before moving and I didn’t remember whether I left batteries inside these or not.
From left to right:
The ‘Wondertopia’ was a regular calculator, but it featured 3 little games: Physical & Mental Reflexes Test, Dice Roll, and Coin Flip.
You could use Dice Roll to roll two virtual dice, which at the time it was very useful since my family lost the two dice we needed to play Monopoly (heh heh). Coin Flip displayed a little ‘coin toss’ animation and then returned heads (○) or tails (●). The reflexes game displayed a series of fast-moving characters/numbers and you had to try and stop them in order to obtain the highest possible number of matches (e.g. 4–4‑4–4 or A‑A-A‑A). Other combinations were rewarded, such as two pairs (e.g. 2–2‑6–6 or 3–7‑7–3), or three of a kind. And there was even an easter egg: by getting the combination E‑L-5–1 (ELSI), the calculator returned: “HAPPY”.
It was basic entertainment, sure, but these were the 1980s!
The three calculators seem fine. The Casio unfortunately had two batteries inside and one leaked, but after a quick scrub with a q‑tip soaked in WD40 everything looks very clean. The Sharp WN-100 didn’t have batteries. I put two LR44 cells I had lying around and it came to life. The EL-540, being solar-powered, turned on as soon as it got enough light.
Not bad for three devices that are 42–45 years old!
By the way, I love the keys on the Casio. Unlike the other two Sharp calculators, they’re not made of rubber, but hard plastic. Much easier to clean and they’ve also stood the test of time rather well.
