Productivity

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. ...