Productivity

I started writing this piece at lunchtime, well, speaking it, that is. Recently getting a trial subscription with Whispr Flow which can mostly understand my Brummie accent better than Samsung or Google (I have tested!). Has meant that my MSN based typing speed now pales in comparison to the wonder of me talking at length instead. At the start of the year I think I might have fallen into the new years trap. It’s time to finally master all those things I said I was going to learn and this time i’m not going to make any excuses. Shockingly, every year that has happened, life has found a way to make excuses possible. The perfect example for this was setting up a website. I knew all the component parts required: ...

I finally opened one of the tabs I’d left sitting since I started studying for the AWS recert, a trigger.dev post on Claude Code tips I’d flagged months ago as worth coming back to. Of the ten tips, two were things I didn’t already do, and a couple of the others described features that had changed or gone entirely since it was written. The post wasn’t wrong when it was published, it had just aged, and I’d saved it at the point where saving it felt close enough to reading it. ...

My Mac went in for a screen repair last week, a burn-in issue known on the 2024 model, so I pulled my old Windows laptop off the shelf. It was my workhorse before the Mac, and being back on it properly meant I could verify the experience from the Windows side, which mattered given I’m developing something their users will be testing. The repair was the forcing function: old Windows laptop back into daily use, not as a nostalgia exercise but as the machine I actually had. ...

The biggest change in chat models over the last two years is not the one most articles focus on. It is that they can now actually look at things. Image input went from a feature you would test once and forget about to something I use weekly without thinking about it, and the gap between describing a problem in words and just showing the model what you are looking at turns out to be much bigger than I expected. The first time it really landed for me was a few years ago when I started feeding ChatGPT photos of error screens and bits of hardware I could not be bothered to describe. By the time photo-based questions felt routine I had built up enough trust in ChatGPT specifically that vision tasks became one of the things I would default to it for, even as Claude took over for almost everything else I do. ...

I avoided the new Outlook for over a year before eventually giving in, and the feature that kept me on the old version wasn’t anything complicated. In a previous role where my calendar was packed with recurring internal meetings and customer calls, I had a rule in classic Outlook that automatically colour-coded any meeting I created as purple, so I could see at a glance which ones I could move and which were fixed. When I switched, that rule was gone. ...