Sunday update November 5th 2017

They say the hardest part of starting a blog is starting. So I just started.

The second hardest part will be keeping it going. I can’t comment on this part yet.

iPhone (e)X released

The new iPhone was released to the public on Friday morning. The review situation has been interesting at best. It appears most of the “usual” suspects didn’t get their review machines until 24 hours before the embargo lifted, leaving little time for what I would call a “full” review. I really can’t follow the logic on this at all, but it’s Apple’s call on this, and I’m sure a multi-billion dollar company knows more about marketing then me. Good reviews so far at The Verge and some roundups at John Grubers Daring Fireball.

I got a chance to play with a good friend of mine’s space gray model, and my quick summary would be:

• Screen is typical Apple (ie, looks great)
• Can’t really see the OLED difference between it and my 7+, but I’m told outdoors it’s better
• It’s effectivly iPhone 7/8 (non plus) screen size. Even though there are more pixels lit up, the wierd top and bottom stuff they do means your effective screen real estate is about the same in 90% of instances.
• The notch is fine
• It feels hefty, in a good way

I’ll probably hold off getting one for little while, as I’m interested in battery life, which of course no-one can firmly comment on yet. Plus my 7+ handles 95% of what this phone does. (I’m happy to be audience to animojii, not a performer.)

@realdonaldtrump’s twitter account deleted.

It seems someone on the way out at twitter decided to go out in style, deleting the Tweeter-in-cheif’s account as his last act of “see ya later”.

Twitter responded:

A lot of people had a good laugh. Some where concerned about an apparently low level employees access to being able to do this. All in all, 3 things stand out here:

• Twitter again doesn’t seem to have the systems in place to deal with the growth the platform has had (it’s bullying/ToS violation dealings in the past give some evidence to this)
• Twitter was never designed to be a source of truth for people in power.
• No world leader should be using it as anything serious.

XBox One X out next week

Microsoft’s new console will hit shelves next week. It’s a strange turn of events that consoles are getting mid-life performance upgrades, but given the fast pace world we are in, it’s sort of not surprising.

Wikipedia has a good roundup of Enhanced 4K games that will take advantage of the new machines grunt. Early evidence points to it being able to load non-enhanced games a bit faster anyway, as you would expect from a significant machine upgrade.

That’s it for my quick roundup this week. I’ll endeavour to complete this each Sunday, with possibly more in-depth coverage.