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June 1, 2025 | Comment

In the UK, the average adult reads approximately three books per year, according to a recent poll by YouGov. However, 40% of Britons haven’t read a single book in the last 12 months. That I have read on average 19 books a year puts me very much in the upper echelons of readers in the UK. My wife, on the other hand, averages 126 a year (that’s one every three days) and very much puts me in the shade with her average!

Too Many Books

I suffer from a couple of problems where books are concerned. Firstly, books (that … Read the rest

WhatsApp for iPad

May 28, 2025 | Comment

Well, that’s a surprise. Meta has (finally) released a version of their popular messaging app WhatsApp for the iPad. It has only taken then some 15 years to do so but I for one am glad that they have as using it in a web browser wasn’t a great experience.

In a quick test this afternoon, it worked seamlessly (as it should after a 15-year wait!), including Split View and Slide Over. I have no idea why it has taken so long to deliver, and Meta hasn’t said, but suggestions have been in the past that the end-to-end encryption … Read the rest

👨‍💻12 Apps in 12 Months

January 28, 2025 | Comment

It seems to be en vouge at the moment to challenge yourself to develop an application a month and do so in public. These apps tend to be AI driven, very slick, with their own landing pages etc. I wanted to stretch myself this year and increase the cadence of my development and so a 12 Apps in 12 Months challenge sounded like a good idea.

But not like that!

While a challenge seemed like a good idea, I didn’t want to be producing apps just for the sake of it. I felt that for it to be worthwhile, I … Read the rest

Where’s Santa?

December 10, 2024 | Comment

I had an unusual request from my friend John recently – could I help him map the location of Santa as he goes about his deliveries? Ok, it wasn’t quite like that. He is a member of the Lions, and every December they take out a sleigh with Santa on the back through the streets to the delight of lots of excitable children. The issue was that parents didn’t know exactly when he was going to appear in their streets and were constantly looking and waiting for his arrival. If there was a map of the live position, this would … Read the rest

Sending messages to Pushover from PHP

July 24, 2023 | Comment

One of the things that I regularly bake into my own applications is notifications of when things go really bad and need my immediate attention. For this, I use the excellent and simple Pushover service which allows me to send a push notification to my mobile device. In this post, I run through how to set up your application in Pushover and then send a notification via PHP.

Setup Pushover

I am assuming that you have already created your Pushover account. You get a 30-day trial and after that, it is just $5 as a one-off purchase.

From your dashboard … Read the rest

Querying the Day One Database

June 14, 2023 | Comment

WARNING! Make a copy of your database before trying any of this!

Why do it?

I have been using the Day One journaling app to keep a daily personal diary for many years now. I have been recording my mundane thoughts there for over seven years and have transcribed five paper diaries too giving me a total of 14 year held there.

That’s currently 4,267 entries and counting of which I know very little about other than the text itself. I wanted more detail than Day One offered and had ideas of how I could mine my entries in … Read the rest

How to Restore Twitter to Something Useful

January 16, 2023 | Comment

Since the takover of Twitter by Elon Musk changes have been coming thick and fast. Some, such as Twitter Blue, have been well reported and endlessly debated. Others, such as the change to the timeline, less so. It is the latter that I am going to concentrate on today.

Twitter has long tried to encourage behaviour that it wants rather than what the consumer might want. This means pushing tweets from people that you might not follow but others you follow do, in the hope that you will build your own followers. The problem with this is that you end … Read the rest

Here’s a Question that Pains me… Is Evernote Dying?

July 26, 2018 | Comment

It really pains me to say this but I am worried about the longevity of Evernote, a tool that I have been using for many, many years. So long in fact that I now have well over 30,000 notes stored in it.

Evernote co-founder Phil Libin always said that his aim was to create a “100-year startup” meaning that it’s “a company that’s around in 100 years, which means Evernote’s product needs to be durable.” Right now I cannot see them achieving that aim. Of course that aim could have been ditched when Libin left in 2016.

Why have … Read the rest

Why I Dropped Drafts for Edit on iOS

July 9, 2018 | 1 comment

I have been a happy Drafts user on both my iPhone and iPad for many years. When version 5 of Drafts was launch it moved from being a one-off payment to a subscription model which made me stop and think about whether I wanted to signing up to yet another app subscription. I knew I didn’t.

For me there wasn’t a real reason to upgrade as Greg, the developer behind the app, had said that he would continue to support the old version, but it did make me stop and think whether I was getting the most out of Drafts. … Read the rest

iOS (finally) supports QR codes!

September 20, 2017 | Comment

QR codes are a more modern equivalent of the ubiquitous bar code but hold both more data and more intelligent information – if you can read them. Until this week, if you had an iPhone and wanted to “read” a QR code you needed a third party app but with the introduction of iOS11 the camera now, finally, supports them natively.

The animated gif below shows this in action and how easy it is to use:

Of course you might wonder why this is important given that you don’t see QR codes that often. Well I would counter that you … Read the rest