I added 29 new releases to my music library this week. The playlists below have a selected track from each release, in no particular order.
Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/gb/playlist/ifr-new-music-playlist-8th-june-2025/pl.u-e90pDHzbV1
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4qUVIPy28GPjbFBketVgpl
Apple Music and Spotify players are embedded below.
Here are my favourite TV streaming series from 2022, with links to their respective landing pages.
Severance – AppleTV+
The Marvelous Mrs Maisel – Amazon Prime
Pachinko – AppleTV+
The After Party – AppleTV+
Station Eleven – Lionsgate+ or VOD
Nine Perfect Strangers – Amazon Prime
Hollywood – Netflix
Only Murders in The Building – Disney+
Acapulco – AppleTV+
A Storm for Christmas – Netflix
Here is my exercise data for 2022 as recorded by Apple Watch.Â
Total steps: 2,774,537
Total distance in Km: 2,485
Total distance in miles: 1,544
Charts and tables with the data are below. I only really started forcing myself to exercise more in April. So with the extra time in 2023, I might be able to hit 3,000 Km.
BTW the data for compiling these stats was exported from Apple Health in CSV format using HealthExport. A fantastic app.
Â
Wired has published an article on How to Get Started on Mastodon. In response to the sudden growth of people moving from Twitter. Including me. Mastodon is where you’ll find me posting the stuff I used to post on Twitter.
The article is at https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-get-started-use-mastodon/
Find me on Mastodon dot Social at https://mastodon.social/@ianRobinson
I played cricket for Civil Service NI Cricket Club for a few decades. I wasn’t working in the civil service, but the club was open and the closest to my house in Dundonald, so I joined. I had tried another club slightly further away in East Belfast, but I didn’t like the atmosphere. A story for another time!
I had a great time playing for Service and have fond memories of the time and the people over those decades. Both of my teammates and opponents. Including one memory of being completely stitched up by a fast bowler in a game Service played against Shorts Cricket Club. That’s Shorts sports club associated with the famous aircraft manufacturing firm in East Belfast (not the club I alluded to above).
We were playing Shorts at their Inverary Avenue sports grounds near Belfast City Airport. Like many sports club grounds, this was used for cricket in the summer and football in the winter. The Inverary Avenue cricket wickets at the time had a reputation for being unpredictable when it came to bounce. Balls jumping from a good length or keeping low was common. Generally, they were pitches where it was better to be a bowler than a batsman.
As you probably know, in cricket everyone has to bat. Even the bowlers. I was a bowler who batted well down the order for all of my cricketing career. Not far enough down the order, I’m sure plenty of people I played with thought! If I had to bat, then things were not going well for the team.
On this particular day at Inverary Avenue, I didn’t get to bat for long on the exciting wicket the ground staff had prepared. From memory, I lasted three deliveries from a reasonably quick bowler on the Shorts team.
The first ball I don’t recall. The second I most certainly do. It was a genuine bouncer, not just an erratic bounce from the pitch. This was a time before helmets were compulsory at all levels in the game, and I wasn’t wearing any head protection.
I took guard (middle stump as always) and waited for the delivery. It was pitched short, bounced true, and followed a path towards my head. Rather than duck under it as would be the recommended course of action, I stood up tall and tried to lean backwards to let the ball pass in front of me. But it swung, as cricket balls will, and was still coming towards my head as I swerved backwards and stood on my toes at full height. I still recall the whistle from the spinning ball and the seam as it passed just under my chin. There was a breeze as it passed. Thankfully it didn’t hit me.
There was clapping and encouragement from the Shorts team to the bowler on an excellent bouncer. Fully justified as it was a superb bouncer. One that I would have been proud off If I had delivered it. But at that particular moment, I was technically a batsman, and from that perspective, I wasn’t a fan.
The bowler returned to his mark for the next ball. Given the speed and accuracy of the last delivery, I was expecting something similar again. The bowler ran in, bowled, and I heard the clatter of my stumps as he bowled me with a perfect yorker that I didn’t have time, or the skill, to keep out. It was a ball that was wasted on me. A very skilful bit of fast bowling.
I tucked my bat under my arm (something I had done a lot before) and walked off. I may have nodded at the bowler as I did so in acknowledgement of a job well-done, given the Bowler’s Union and all.
Seven articles and thirteen new music releases in this weeks post. Including details about the spectacular image of the Sun by Andrew McCarthy shown above.
https://www.getrevue.co/profile/ianrobinson/issues/ian-robinson-s-weekly-digest-6th-june-2021-637566
I hit 92 Kg on the scales again last week. I feel sluggish in all areas when that happens. So I’m rebooting my life (dramatic or what?) this morning. Back on several wagons that have been gathering moss for a few weeks or more. Healthy eating (and less eating overall), more walking and exercise bike use, more studying for things that I need to have mastered before I die, and lots more writing. Both for paid technical clients and for my own pleasure in the fiction and non-fiction spaces.
My latest Weekly Digest on things that have caught my eye in the last seven days. Ten items, including two films, a brilliant streaming series, a musical drama, two music pointers, a few science items, and a cybersecurity article.
https://world.hey.com/ianrobinson/ian-robinson-s-weekly-digest-21st-march-2021-39f5254e
Now on HEY World. My Weekly Digest with pointers and commentary on things that have caught my eye in the last week. This week’s post has four items plus six new music pointers! An some of those music finds are song of the year contenders 😊
https://world.hey.com/ianrobinson/ian-robinson-s-weekly-digest-7th-march-2021-9e677954
Â
I ended a 40-year relationship this week. It was a relationship that started in my teens, and over the years it made me laugh, taught me a lot, and on several occasions, made me mad! But circumstances change, and it was time to end it and move on.
I’m talking about my subscription to New Scientist magazine. It was announced this week that the DMGT group was buying New Scientist. The DMGT group is Daily Mail and General Trust, which owns and controls the vile Daily Mail.Â
Of course, the usual assurances have been given about editorial independence. But do you know what? I don’t care if nothing changes at New Scientist as a result of this takeover. I refuse to give the £260 a year the subscription costs to anything owned by the DMGT group.Â
So, after 40 years. My relationship with New Scientist is over.Â
I’m starting a Weekly Digest newsletter tomorrow. The first issue is ready to go. This is a reboot of an idea I had in the middle of last year, but it petered out at the start of August. I’ve decided to start doing it again, but this time as a Twitter Revue email newsletter as well as the blog post. Email newsletters are the new hot thing. What goes around comes around! The blog version will be posted on my site (with RSS feed available), Medium, and LinkedIn. That might change when I see where people are reading it – if anywhere!
I plan to publish a new edition every Saturday. That’s a guarantee – there will only be one email on the Revue Newsletter feed each week. I won’t be spamming anyone who subscribes with loads of emails.Â
Each issue will have links and comments (where appropriate) on the things I’ve found interesting in the previous week. The content will be drawn from across news & current affairs, science, technology, any music, films, books I’ve discovered, and more topics that will be included when they pass in front of my radar and I think they are worth including. This first issue has a section of some COVID-19 articles that are worth reading. Hopefully at some point this year there will be no need for that section!. There will also be occasional longer opinion pieces that I will use to talk about subjects in more detail. When I think they are worthwhile.
Hopefully, this Weekly Digest will be useful to some people. It’ll be helpful for me as a way of marshalling my thoughts on topics, as I discovered when doing the blog only version in 2020.
 Sign up here.Â
I took 1,937,711 steps in 2020. This equated to 1,086 miles walked in total. Surprisingly these figures were very similar to the 2019 totals. The 2020 data is presented in chart and table forms below.
The work that The Good Law Project is doing to hold the UK Government to account is fantastic stuff. It’s well worth reading this piece published in The Observer about its founder and public face, Jolyon Maugham.
My Apple Watch and Activity app on iPhone tell me that I took 1,963,261 steps in 2019. This equated to 1,087 miles walked in total. I think I was hoping to hit 1,200 miles. Setting that target again for 2020.Â
Anti-vaxxers defeated: NY bans exemptions as doctors vote to step up fight | Ars Technica:
Anti-vaccine advocates received a blow in New York Thursday as state lawmakers banned non-medical exemptions based on religious beliefs—and there may be more blows coming.
Brilliant. Progress. More cities and regions should follow suit.
Final 2018 walking stats (as recorded by Apple Watch)
Steps taken: 1,881,343.
Miles walked: 1,013.54.
Charts and monthly data table below. I think my target was 1,200 miles. So I missed it by about 15 miles per month. I will aim for 1,200 miles in 2019 again.
Time flies. It’s 15 years to the day since I first posted that I might have testicular cancer. I did. A pure seminoma it turned out. Which is a good type to get, if you have to get any at all. Very treatable.
So, you should still get to know your nuts!
Let’s all wish my trusty retina MacBook Pro a happy birthday. I purchased it on 22 December 2012 in the Belfast Apple Store with cash from redundancy pay after I left Northgate Managed Services. It’s still the best computer I’ve ever owned or used. Very fast, even today five years later, and I see no need to replace it for the next few years. Assuming nothing breaks to force me to get a new one. The battery is still in good condition. I usually use it with power plugged in, but get four hours plus on the battery when required. The i7 Quad core processor is still more than enough for all the tasks I throw at it; the 8GB RAM has never been a problem. They didn’t sell 16GB models in the Apple Stores in 2012, and I didn’t want to be without a Mac over the holidays by ordering online to get the extra RAM.
It’s no wonder that Mac laptop sales slowed for a few years around 2012 and later. I used to replace my Mac every two years, or sometimes sooner. But the mid-2012 retina MacBook Pro got to a level where it was so good people didn't need to change them so often. They might be the best laptops ever made. When I do have to replace it I might go for a desktop iMac Pro beast and use an iPad Pro for my mobile computing needs. We’ll see.
One final note: the cost for the MacBook Pro in 2012 was £1799. Not cheap. But as the adage goes “You get what you pay for!” Spread over the five years that works out at 99p a day. Bargain. Or as was pointed out to me on Twitter, when the resale value of the MacBook Pro is factored in (about £500) then the daily cost drops to about 71p a day.
I’ve always felt more comfortable buying digital goods outright if I wanted them. But lately, I’ve been subscribing to more and more services to get access to content. I think I’m now at the point where I’m close to being fully in the subscription model camp. It’s been a gradual transition. Much like the (fictitious) slowing boiling a frog metaphor I haven’t noticed until it was over.
The transition started with Apple Music. I subscribed to that when it was launched in June 2015. I first used it as a way to get access to new music in high quality from a safe and reputable source. But for a long time, I was still buying any songs or albums that I liked and wanted to have in my iTunes library.
Over the two years since the Apple Music launch, I’ve subscribed to several other services on an annual or monthly fee basis. My subscriptions list at the end of July 2017 now includes:
• Software subscriptions: 1Password, Pocket, Setapp, Office 365, Evernote, Grammarly, Parallels Desktop, FreeAgent, SocialChess, Chess 24, DropBox, iCloud Storage, RescueTime
• Film and TV Subscriptions: Virgin Media TV Large, NowTV, Netflix
• Other: Audible UK, Apple Music
That’s a lot of software service subscriptions. When you list them out, it shows that this is rapidly becoming the new model for digital sales.
I joined NowTV to get access to Sky Atlantic for Twin Peaks The Return. As a bonus, I also got access to Silicon Valley and Veep. Plus Westworld Season 1 will be available from 14th August. So NowTV is a keeper. I subscribed to Netflix to watch The Circle film as it didn’t get a UK cinema release, and I wanted to see it after reading the book. Discovered lots of other good content on Netflix that is well worth the modest monthly fee.
I think that NowTV and Netflix were the services that tipped me over into the subscription model camp. In the last few months, I’ve noticed that I’ve stopped buying albums on the iTunes Store. Rather I just add them to my library from Apple Music. Not sure this is a good thing for the artists. I wonder if the same thing will happen with films over time. I’ve just bought The Ghost in the Shell on iTunes. Will I stop doing that in future and just wait for films to appear on Netflix? Time will tell.
The one product area in which there hasn’t been a viable subscription model for me to adopt is for ebooks to read. I do subscribe to the Audible UK subscription service that gives a single audiobook of my choice per month. For ebooks, the biggest subscription service is Amazon Kindle Unlimited. I’ve looked at it in the past, but it didn’t have many of the books I wanted to read. I must have another look to see how many of the books I’ve read or bought this year are available there.
It’s been a weird year from a politics point of view. The Brexit vote was a disaster for the UK and the world in general in my opinion. That was followed up by Trump winning the USA Presidential election. Both results allegedly due to people feeling left out of the way the modern world is changing. So they voted for campaigns led by two groups of mostly rich white men who couldn’t be more removed from the people affected by globalisation. The blue collar jobs that have moved from the UK and USA to Asia are not coming back. They will be taken by machines. Irrespective of where they happen to be situated.
It’s striking that many of the hangers-on and fellow travellers of the Brexit and Trump camps are anti science, anti women’s rights, evidence deniers, who promise the Earth then deliver little. They must be resisted.
I’m an internationalist. The Brexit supporters may get the UK out of the EU, but they’ll never get the European ideals out of me. The values of the European project and the Enlightenment are worth fighting for and will triumph in the end. But we must do it by educating people for the 22nd century and the change that ubiquitous smart manufacturing and machine learning will bring in. People will need to do other jobs that the machines will not do better. We should start by giving everyone a good basic income that they can live comfortably on. Then they can work on things that make them happy. Including looking after the planet and other people.