Recent content on Mark Phillips | Product Marketing, Management and Strategy
Only yesterday I had a grumble about Apple tricking me into upgrading my iPhone and iPad to iOS 26, despite my efforts to avoid it . Today I find iPadOS 26 is even worse than I thought, with UI glitches and poor handling of the simplest of things taken for granted for years (I’ve found rotation from landscape to portrait messes up the screen paint of Messages, for example). I’m finding that…
I am fuming. Apple have today demonstrated they’re no better than any other big tech company with their enshittification. This morning I had a notification that iOS 18.7.8 was available, so I carefully checked the update, as Apple are constantly trying to force you to upgrade to the crappy iOS 26. As you can see from the screenshot above, it all looks like iOS 18. But it isn’t. Both my…
I’ve cancelled my Claude Pro subscription. It wasn’t out of any dissatisfaction with Claude; on the contrary, I still think it’s the leading LLM for general use and especially for coding. No, my choice was more because I realised I was wasting money. I already pay for Kagi , and even upgraded to their Duo plan so I could give my wife a search engine that works for her (versus the other way…
John Gruber has been dropping some bangers this week. On Claude’s awful desktop app (funnily enough, I only deleted it last week after realising it was 800mb, which is stupid): “It’s like wondering why all the screws in a building were hammered into the walls, and then finding out that the guy who oversaw construction founded and co-owns the world’s biggest hammer manufacturer”…
“Don’t make me think”. Steve Krug 1 There’s something I say all the time when advising startups on their product strategy: solve problems for people, and the money will come 2 . It still amazes me that this often comes as a shock. All too often companies try to ‘game’ their customers: bait ’n switches, enshittification , bullshit marketing. These are all…
Matt Shumer’s “ Something Big is Happening ” blog post about AI has caused quite a stir. If you’ve not read it, it is worth a peruse. The TL;DR is “be very worried, but don’t stick your head in the sand” . Dario Amodei…has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years The often discussed point about AI replacing jobs is those…
I don’t mind admitting, I am an unashamed Apple fan. Having bought my first iPod in 2003, followed in early 2004 with my first Mac. I’ve been using macOS as my ‘daily driver’ ever since. But with iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia, I’ve become quite disillusioned with Apple’s approach to OS ‘improvements’. There was nothing better over iOS 17 nor over Sonoma.…
I started meditating many years ago, initially discounting it as ‘woo-woo’. That I am here now, writing about my ninth year of practice, probably tells you how I’ve found it in reality. Although I have stuck to the practice since 2017, I have been through phases where I’ve not shown up for weeks. Last year though, I was determined to stick to more regular sessions. This…
Over the 28 years this website has existed, it’s gone through various iterations with many tools to build it. Static HTML, WordPress, Jekyll, Hugo. Given that my engineering career was grounded in infrastructure, frontend development was mostly a mystery to me. So I’ve often used the excuse of rebuilding this site to learn something the day jobs never exposed me to. A few years ago I…
Whilst rummaging around in a large box of cables (you’ve got one of those too, haven’t you?) the other day I found the first Apple product I ever bought, in 2003. A second-generation iPod. An object of beautiful simplicity, of design elegance not seen since Rams’ Braun of the 1980s. From the moment you unboxed an iPod, the entire experience was like no other — who, up to now, had thought to make…
I wanted to save this somewhere I wouldn’t forget about it. Thank you Adam 🙏 (Picked up via the excellent Weekly Filet newsletter) Thanks for reading this post via RSS! 👏 Reply to this post by email
TL;DR I built a web application using Go , HTMx and TailwindCSS using Claude Code . I wrote zero code myself. I am not a programmer. The longer version I taught myself to program as a kid, in the early 1980s, on a Commodore Vic 20. Fast forward a decade and I’m a year out of university, having quit my Computer Science degree, working in my first tech job. But it’s not a coding role — I’d decided…
Last year I went down a bit of a rabbit hole with trying to add timecode to every camera I film with. One camera that I’ve struggled to get it right with, even just holding up a slate, is the Insta360 One X2 . I’d started to look at replacing the UltraSync Blue TC generators with Deity TC-1s , as I’m also finding bluetooth simply isn’t reliable enough. I already use a Deity…
Well that’s irksome. If you share a link on LinkedIn and your webserver is secure enough to not run less than TLSv1.3, the Open Graph image won’t render. It will look fine if tested on opengraph.dev , but post it on LinkedIn, or test with their preview page , and it will fail. So you can either have boring links with no rich display, else downgrade your TLS . Thanks for reading this…
I’ll admit that most of my LLM use is for coding help . I’ve replaced the daily search engine with Kagi , so tend not to use a chat LLM for general search. I was a software engineer many years ago and wrote code as a day job, but I mostly gave up being hands-on about 10 years ago. I do, however, still enjoy solving problems. More often than not, a bit of code in a shell is far more…
Years ago I used to aggregate all my interesting blogs and sites in an RSS reader. RSS seemed to fade away for a long time, and I thought it was dead. But, it seems to be making a resurgence — and this time around, with the contrast of how bad the rest of the internet is becoming , it feels so delightful to use. Hugo usefully has RSS feeds built in and I’ve long included an RSS version of…
Things by Cultured Code is the best app I own. And I use the word ‘own’ quite intentionally. During a discussion with a good friend a few days ago, he mentioned he organises his todos using the Things app. We’ve been friends for almost 20 years, and I’m surprised we’ve never discussed this before, truth be told. Because I’ve been using Things since 2008! (our…
When Apple Maps was first released it was terrible . Over the following years it steadily got better, but was mostly still inferior to Google Maps. The gap is now pretty small though. Enough to start using it over Google maps? On a recent road trip holiday (the north of England to Sweden , 2,800 miles, since you ask) I decided to try and do all navigation with Apple Maps rather than Waze or…
1Password is a good password manager, relatively speaking. But I’ve got rid of it, and this is why. I’ve lost track of the years I’ve been using 1Password for. It was a great password manager, and there’s been little controversy attached to it, unlike the competition . Managing passwords in a central place always felt like anathema to me, but needs must, and my former…
You’ve most likely heard the phrase “Jack of all trades, master of none” . It’s most often used as an insult, or at least in a derogatory context. But that’s not the full version of the phrase. And the insult isn’t in the direction you think. ONE OF THE EARLIEST recorded uses of the phrase “jack of all trades” as an insult dates to 1592. In the New Latin form…
I used to quite enjoy writing regexs. man perlre is one’s friend. However, sometimes you have to realise there’s a quicker way. This week, a good friend and I have been having a lengthy chat, over texts, spanning a few days. We’ve been discussing the unfortunate ‘dumbing down’ of the tech industry, and how ’environment determines behaviour’ 1 — the more…
Something a little bit different to the usual things I write about here. This post is an aide-mémoire for me as much as anything, but maybe you’ll find it useful too. I’ve recently been trying to utilise timecode on a number of video and audio devices to help with editing in post. After a few false starts, I think I now have the tools, and a process, that works. For the last year…
Along with ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ , I’d recommend How Minds Change as essential reading. The foundations of human behaviour understanding come from Kahneman’s book, and here McRaney builds on it with real world examples. Through meeting various interesting people, McRaney paints a picture that tells a simple truth: For one thing, from writing my previous books, I knew…
I may have ‘retired’ from being a techie a long time ago, but I haven’t stopped solving little day-to-day problems in a shell 😊 So like any self-respecting nerd, whether old or young, one needs a good prompt. It’s a pity that Starship’s setup on macOS seems to fail out of the box though. Here’s how to fix it. Starship is a fast, configurable, prompt for most of…
I decided to try and save some space in my iCloud drive. Looking at the usage, 160gb was being taken up by Photos. I thought that was ridiculous. This turned out to be nowhere near as ridiculous as the ensuing saga to try and delete some files. Just delete the files Naturally I started by deleting every single video in the library. Photos at least makes it easy to find particular types of file,…
Taking screenshots on macOS is a doddle. cmd-shift-4, or cmd-shift-3, or for ultimate control, cmd-shift-5. What could be simpler? Why would you want more? That’s what I used to think, until I tried CleanShot . I’ve often found myself wanting to get a screen grab of, say, a browser window, but in a particular ratio. For the last year I’ve been running marketing for a local…
Jumping on the default apps bandwagon , I thought I’d share how ‘default’ I am (is this the’ normcore ’ of macOS application use?) 📨 Mail Service: Hey 📮 Mail Client: Hey 📝 Notes: Apple Notes (+ Bear ) ✅ To-Do: Things (+ Apple Reminders) 📆 Calendar: Fantastical — fronting Apple iCloud 📆 Calendar bookings: Cal.com 🙍 Contacts: Apple Contacts 🗞️ RSS Client:…
Elaine Moore recently wrote an article in the FT titled “ We might be surprised by our reactions to generative AI ”. It got me thinking about the way we ‘speak’ to generative AI, like ChatGPT. Like many of the tech community, I’ve been using ChatGPT for most of this year. I’ve found it to be the search engine I wish we’d always had, and a fabulous co-pilot in so many tasks.…
After my desk recently featured on Workspaces , its curator, Ryan , mentioned that several people had asked about the teleprompter set up I use for video meetings. I’ve been working from home for 10 years, so video meetings were nothing new to me when the pandemic started. Even by that point, I’d been experimenting with higher quality meeting set ups, using a better microphone and my everyday…
I am of the age that means I was the second year to sit GCSEs (after GCE O-Levels were abandoned). I therefore consider my education to have been relatively poor . That doesn’t mean I’ve spent my life feeling short-changed though. On the contrary, I’ve spent the rest of my life continuously learning . So maybe you’ll forgive me for having only recently discovered Max…
“Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design”. Dieter Rams. When I was growing up I had every intention of becoming a car designer. Something derailed that in my teens, just as I found out I could ‘work’ computers. My career path changed, but my interest in design as a discipline never left me. After…
Why pay for something that you can get for free? I have a feeling that’s been a question on all our minds since the early to mid-1990s. The Internet has given us so much utility for free. It’s amazing how blind we’ve been to ‘free’ ultimately having a cost though. Google, Facebook, et al. — all that freeness has come at a cost. For some time I’ve looked for…
In a word, yes. But the question needs some context. Let’s start with defining “mindfulness”. Wikipedia , the UK charity Mind , and the UK national health service all say a similar thing, that “mindfulness” is awareness , a sense of what’s happening in the moment. Meditation is the tool we can use to bring about mindfulness. As Colm Meaney’s character in…
What should be simple has this week turned out to be anything but. I added a new camera to our home ( Logitech Circle View — pleasant experience so far) but it wasn’t showing up on my wife’s iPhone. So I ended up removing her from the home access and tried to re-invite. The invite sent OK, the notification came up on her phone OK, but clicking accept did nothing. In the Home app itself…
I’ve been moving email off of Google recently to the excellent service by Hey. But the temporary forwarding solution hit a snag with lots of apparently simple “Permission denied” messages. postfix/bounce[26281]: fatal: open lock file pid/unix.bounce: cannot open file: Permission denied Even with my [extremely] rusty tech skills I figured I could fix this one. postfix…
I’ve spent most of the last decade working from home. From 2014 until early 2020 I was working for a US company, where initially I was the only employee in Europe. Inevitably communication was either asynchronous — via Slack — or by video meeting. 2020 has seen a step change in the way we communicate, and we’ve learned a lot about people’s shelving . But mostly, I’m still seeing a lot of scope for…
“Good storytelling never gives you four, it gives you two plus two… Don’t give the audience the answer, give them the pieces and let them conclude the answer” Have you ever read a Michael Lewis book? Liars Poker, The Big Short, Flash Boys? They’re all books about the finance industry. I’m not sure I can think of a duller subject to write about. However, if you have read any of…
“Things are not what they are; they are what we think they are” My wife is a cryptic crossword fan, and she’s very good at them. I’ll confess, I am hopeless at them. The secret to cryptic crosswords is not to take the clues literally . There are patterns and rules that can lead you to the answer, and there are always signatures or cues to the crossword setter . The reasons for an answer may not be…
Loonshot: a widely dismissed idea whose champions are often written off as crazy. If you’ve ever worked in a corporate, I’m sure you’ll have heard somebody at some point say: “that’s not the way we do things around here” . The culture of maintaining the status quo brings about fixed mindsets , yet if there’s one constant, it’s change. To keep up in today’s technology-led, ever…
“Figuring out how to build a sustainable culture … wasn’t a singular assignment. It was a day-in-day-out, full-time job.” Ed Catmull is the retired former president and co-founder of digital animation studio, Pixar. Creativity, Inc. is the story of how Pixar overcame the challenges all businesses face to create and maintain a successful culture as the company grew. A culture that…
“The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.” Following on from the introduction post , if there’s one important takeaway I learned from reading Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel Prize winning Daniel Kahneman , it’s don’t always trust whatever thought first comes to mind. While reading this book I enjoyed the…
“The human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol.” This quote, from Rory Sutherland, has become like a pebble dropped into a pond for me. Having spent most of my career working in the technology industry, logic has led me everywhere. However, I worry logic and data have often blinded me to simple truths. We can solve every problem with logic . Except now I’ve…
When patching Linux machines these days I could forgive you for asking “how hard can it be?” Sure, a yum update -y will sort it for you in a flash… But for those of us working with estates larger than a handful of machines it’s not that simple. Sometimes an update can create unintended consequences across many machines and you’re left wondering how to put things back the way they…
At a recent Ansible London Meetup I was chatting with somebody about automated hardware builds. “It’s all cloud now!” I hear you say. Ah, but for many large organisations it’s not — they still have massive data centres full of hardware. Almost regularly somebody pops up on our internal mail list and asks “can Ansible do hardware provisioning?” . Well yes, you…
It’s been a few months since I sold my trusty MacBook and bought an iPad Pro, with the idea of performing all mobile compute on the latter. How has it gone? TL;DR It’s OK. I’m getting by, with some slight working practice changes. No current need to buy a laptop. The longer story… If you read back through this blog, or you already know me, you know my background is twenty years of being a…
“Just type this invoice up for me will you please?” asked a sheepish looking Malcolm. “I do have better things to do you know” I replied. “Yes, yes, I know. But who else is going to do it?” “Give it here then!” In the beginning, there was a problem That was a fairly common interaction for me as a young lad. I was fresh out of school and working my…
On October 7th I gave a talk at the IPExpo show about getting from legacy IT to the modern idea of DevOps. Mostly I talked about the core idea of DevOps being communication, about breaking down silos. I went on to suggest ways technology can support that idea. Postscript: I received this email from the event organisers a month after the event. The TED Talk mentioned in the slides: Yves Morieux, as…
At an Ansible meetup last week somebody put this question to me: “I’m coming from the Puppet world, and there they have whole structures around testing modules (the same thing as Ansible roles) like Rspec. How do you handle testing roles with Ansible?” . Ah, this is a question I’ve heard many times. So here are my thoughts on it. I, personally, wouldn’t do it. Why…
In May of 2015 I gave a talk about automation at the IPExpo Manchester show. Whilst I was giving a small pitch for Ansible, I fundamentally wanted to talk about simplicity (a common theme throughout this blog, you’ll find, way before I went to work for Ansible, Inc) and its role in enabling longevity to systems engineering. As I’ve come back to this topic in late 2024, I’ve…
There are lots of ways to enable self-service VMs within an organisation - what some might call ‘a private cloud’. However, these usually require layers and layers of complex software. What if you could leverage your existing hypervisor and 15 lines of code to do the same? And what if those 15 lines became an even simpler single click? Ansible Core contains a module for managing…