Stewart Sims

The bass line Jefferson Airplane's Somebody to Love is quite something

Was a pleasant surprise to find that our boiler has a modular timer system so when the basic analogue rotary timer switch broke I could buy and fit a digital replacement panel which just plugged right in.

Lille 😄

Luxembourg 😎

Freiburg 😃

Amsterdam 🥰

Did a proper inter rail tour of some parts of Europe over last few weeks. Was amazing, well worth the expense and taking time off (not something we do very often). Amsterdam was my favourite I think. Belgium looked nice from the train but was just passing through, maybe one for another trip […]

This creates a dilemma for Google / Apple / Huawei etc. If one such company decides to create a way PWAs can be installed through their store, the whole world of app development changes.

I think something like this will happen in the near future. All it takes is one of those companies to decide […]

On the theme of niche mobile app development trends: one of the big problems with cross platform frameworks is the learning curve for developers and how they tend to be less accessible to designers and editors to modify layouts, styling and content.

Many people have told me PWAs (progressive […]

It fascinates me how underreported mobile tech news like this is. Mobile OSes and app delivery are an important layer of control big tech has at its disposal. It's a way companies can not only occupy the online space but also offline, essentially reaching beyond the divide of internet services […]

Google's recent enforcement that apps in the Play Store support '16kb page sizes' from 1st November will probably be the end of Xamarin for anyone still using it (which I believe to still be a significant number of app developers).

Now they've reached some maturity I think Flutter and MAUI are […]

Car guy life hacks: ball joint splitters make good patio weed removal tools.

1. Choose appropriate size for patio joint
2. Hammer splitter fork into centre of weed
3. Lever weed out of patio joint

A new study from two researchers at the University of Amsterdam looks at what makes social media so terrible — and found that it's not algorithms, non-chronological feeds or humans' tendency to seek out negativity. "Rather, the dynamics that give rise to all those negative outcomes are […]

I have some respect for anyone trying to get to grips with this. But I think it has a lot of potential to go very wrong in a variety of spectacular ways. The risk to benefit ratio is not favourable.

I also would love to see a lot more thoughtful in-house design and development of tech going on […]

There's a lot of 'you must consider this' and 'come up with a strategy for that' going on but also stuff like 'you should work directly with commercial partners in the first instance' [paraphrasing]

I have to be careful what I say now I work in the public sector but it's a public document so I […]

One of the AI news things that passed me by (because I tuned out of the hype some time ago) is that the UK government issued a 'playbook' for public sector AI use earlier this year.

This essentially supercedes previous advice issued to civil servants to never enter anyone's personal data into a […]

More generally I think the tech industry is in for a wild ride in the coming years. I have no idea where this all is going but I do think significant change is inevitable. What we're all using now feels like just a stepping stone towards the technology that will be dominant in an uncertain […]

One consequence of limiting my time online is that if I'm completely honest with myself I'm not sure even Mastodon is somewhere I want to spend much time.

There are some great people here posting interesting things but I am currently missing a lot of that. Although it sounds brutal, even […]

Using the Mudita Kompakt as my on-person device An experiment in digital minimalism

Been trying to limit my time spent online lately. I also went for the minimalist phone (Mudita Kompakt) that I was considering in the end. You can read a bit about that here:

https://ssims.co.uk/personal/blog/Using-the-Mudita-Kompakt-as-my-on-person-device

Really nice long weekend away taking in the MGF 30 year celebrations at the British Motor Museum in Gaydon. Just under 400 miles round trip, managed to avoid motorways and Silverstone Grand Prix traffic. First proper road trip in the TF with no hiccups ✅

This 'Mudita Kompakt' is one of the best minimalist phone designs I've seen recently. For me the combination of a radically overhauled (or should that be underhauled?) version of Android while still being able to install your own software (via USB) is very compelling.

I think I could live with […]

I really want to move to something that is less distracting and encourages intentional usage only.

So I'm much more interested in the overall approach to design of a phone than the specs.

Which is why when I visit most phone manufacturers websites I literally close them in seconds because I […]

Ultimately I believe we need a new challenger operating system that takes a very different approach from the ground up and some kind of independence of app stores and app delivery.

I certainly am not inspired by Apple, Samsung or Google. So it's another cheapish Chinese model or I could give […]

Working hard on an app release for the 'new job'. A few months to go before going live I think but I'm enjoying it so far. Despite the huge issues with. NET MAUI developers have experienced until recently and slow progress from Microsoft on issues, it does feel it is now achieving a level of […]

Did a charity car run thing a couple weeks ago

Photograph tilted down and to the left of a black rubber-bumper 1976 MGB next to a white 1974 Jaguar XKE (aka E-Type) in a strip mall parking lot. Several other small British cars can be seen behind them.

A fun picture of my little black rubber-bumper MGB next to a V12 1974 Jaguar E-Type at last night’s MG club meeting. It would have been easy to give up on my little B as I struggled through a bunch of repairs over the last couple of years. But now it’s […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]

So I'm thinking about how I can rig up a more permanent and accurate coolant temperature gauge. The problem is the sensor is connected to the ECU so would need to piggy back off that arrangement. Probably another idea I won't get round to figuring out, but it would be a nice little project. Any […]