Here’s hoping that an updated version of iAWriter will hit the shelves of the App store in the very near future. It’s been a while since I last used this app – as it has been a while since I wrote to my Chirurgean blog. Stuff happens …
If the needs of keeping up to date with other websites and other pressing needs is paramountm, then other stuff that is arguably more enjoyable will be squashed and trampled underfoot.
The app is nice, but it does not behave well on iPadOS26 and will not be constrained by being put into a smaller window. I have hopes that the authors are busy even now, and tweaking a line of code, here and there as I type. Perhaps, there is a master plan to rewrite this with Swift (maybe it is written in Swift?).

To conclude this thought, I do notice that 1Writer has a similar problem – but it has not been updated in the past 2 years. There is a 1Writer pro app and many, many others.
On the other hand, Editorial (which is almost certainly defunct) will window very happily in the latest OS – obviously well written!

Winter is coming

It’s time to get ready for winter. Tidy the garden, cut the grass (if the rain permits) and get the wood pile ready for the cold weather.
We had 7 Leylandii trees cut down next to our kitchen garden and the neighbour kindly let us have the logs. Many hours of Mark cutting the trunks into bite sized chunks and we had an enormous log pile. The summer rolled on and sap and resin oozed out of the cut ends – eventually to sublimate into water vapour and off-gassing of the resin.

We took a few days to split these into logs suitable for the fire and I do believe that the logs are now ready for burning, having lain fallow in the summer heat and drought for the past 6 months.

Some large branches still remain unsplit – another day. The next job is to cart them up for storage for a final drying and then we will be toasty warm all winter

Well, we said goodbye to Oasis Too and are now moving on. Still not cut all the ties, though the website has been moved off my hosting and on to another, paid for by the syndicate. The web master role went with that too.
Still waiting on the transfer from my banking app of the Oasis Too business account – a matter of a new signature, not being clear – oh well – what are another few weeks here and there?

So, I am determined to not neglect this my own personal site any more, and if I ever move the Gayles site away, then there will be even more spare time.

Yesterday, I upgraded to everything OS26 and therebye hangs a tale. I had attempted to put the beta on my ipad pro on return from Canada, but that was a bad move. The ipad just kept having springboard/kernel panics and kept falling over. A very hard reset and I had to reload everything from a backup, which took me all day.

Now, everything has moved to OS26 without any problems. Some apps are a little flaky and some modernish apps need to be updated. Windowing does not seem to work with 1Writer or iAWriter, but as I am using Editorial to write this – the windowing on this ‘lost’ app is working apparently ok.

Lets try to post this to my website

I have missed MI on the iPad. Time was when all the episodes were available as apps – and then they weren’t. I’m assuming that the apps were not updated in the transition from 32-64 bit apps and are now just a footnote in history.

Steam does ‘sell’ the games – but I found out after purchase some time ago, that not all games had a Mac version. Steam kindly reimbursed me.

So move onto 2024:

I was going to investigate Whiskey (vi) but put this off as I was running an intel iMac at the time, and Whiskey needed Apple silicon. I upgraded to a M2Pro MacMini but forgot about Whiskey…

Time passed…

I read a couple of days ago:

Isaac Marovitz, the developer of Whiskey, a frontend for Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit and Wine, has decided to throw in the towel. The developer is advising users to buy CrossOver instead, which provides the same service. The reasoning behind their decision seems sound, and are actually quite noble and considerate.

So, I am trialling Crossover – using Steam, and I purchased 4 MI old games.

I can now run Escape from Monkey Island on my Mac, using Windows emulation. The photo above is a screen shot of my M4 iPad Pro running MI – by using JumpDesk!

… so far, so good. A few glitches but I can now run all the MI games on my iPad!

I thought I wasn’t going to name names, but I am fed up with our mobile service from Vodafone. It was ok to good until 14 October, when the signal from the mast (shared with O2) failed.
I have had telecons aplenty with the helpline, reset my phone, turned three times widdershins but all to no avail. From a service with up to 50MBS I now get 0.45MBS rising to 6MBS on occasion. What has been the cause of this problem? Well every time I speak to an advisor, I get a variant on the maintenance story. Routine maintenance or ‘fixing’ a problem — come back in a week. We are escalating to the next level, but a call from a manager has been rescheduled.

Solutions

1. Switch to O2. Unfortunately their service was even worse than Vodafone until today
2. Try ‘Quickline’ again with a promise of 30MBS broadband
3. Pay money to Elon for an expensive satellite link

Watching the dark sky last night and observing the satellites racing across the void, I ask myself why here in the UK we have such a poor service for internet connectivity. I can’t honestly call this a 3rd world service – Rwanda has, I am told, excellent broadband. The Canary Islands are blanketed with fast 5G, even in volcanic national parks

Start spending cash on infrastructure new Labour government before we spiral into decay and poverty

It is that time of the year again when the calendar moves to September and by at least one metric, it is now autumn. Some say that it is still summer, but by calling it autumn, one can pronounce any sunny day as a harbinger of an Indian summer (are we allowed to call it that anymore?)

Here is the Wiki about the origin of the phrase:

Later research showed that the earliest known reference to Indian summer in its current sense occurs in an essay written in the United States around 1778 by J. Hector St. John de Crevecœur, describing the character of autumn and implying the common usage of the expression

Great rains at last replenish the springs, the brooks, the swamp and impregnate the earth. Then a severe frost succeeds which prepares it to receive the voluminous coat of snow which is soon to follow; though it is often preceded by a short interval of smoke and mildness, called the Indian Summer. This is in general the invariable rule: winter is not said properly to begin until those few moderate days & the raising of the water has announced it to Man.

So after the first frost, if we have a few mild days (and statistics should predict this reversion to the norm), then we will have our ‘Indian Summer’

It is a shame that Hattons has decided to close all their operations. Change is happening in the model railway world:

more expensive pieces of kit

more individual models and more choice

the removal of pre-release models at discounts from suppliers such as Hornby

the universal use of the internet in buying models – there is no absolute need for a front end physical store and all internet stores appear to be equal – they really compete only on price (a bit on reputation too)

I don’t think that model railways are a dying hobby – but I suspect that there will be yet more change in suppliers to come

The trigger to start this comparison process started with a concern that leaving my quotes collection in the now defunct Quotebook app was not a sensible decision.

I had of course heard of Obsidian and other note taking apps before, but had not investigated further.

So, on to try them all out

Obsidian

A wee bit too vague and Freeform for what I wanted. Powerful, but would the effort in learning this be justified in benefits gained?

Notion

This was more structured and easier to get to grips with than Craft and indeed I initially transferred my quotes to this app. Some niggles remained. I could not alter/remove the title from templates that were provided. Notion also keeps the data on their servers and if the internet goes down (which it does frequently here) then I would have no access to my data.

I also was aware of concerns on Reddit as to the business model of Notion and whether they would make a profit to enable the app to be supported in the future, or would it fold as so many startups have done

Craft

A little more tricksy to get up and running, but I transferred my quotes across to a nice template and all was well. Better looking and perhaps more functional than with Notion. Data is held locally on my machines.

X-callback URL

This scheme is nicely used by Devonthink. It enables a one click access to files in DT when you paste an item link to a suitable app.

Notion does not support this (I suppose that their model of access to centrally held data by many users does not make sense for them – though there is a roundabout fix using Shortcuts and TinyURL). Obsidian & Craft support this well.

The stimulus to do this was to see if I could link to a pdf of a book I had cut up, scanned in and converted to pdf and to epub. The formatting in epub was awful. The pdf version looked like the paper book (I had spent a lot of time ensuring that this would be a good-looking translation). So, I have set up a books section in Craft with sub folders and nice headers with illustrations and each ‘page’ contains these active links. One click and the book opens for reading in DT. I can also have the same book appear on different pages of the Craft app.

Why not just use DT? I have books arranged in different databases in DT (and DTTG) and need to be aware that these books exist!

If I can have a good looking ‘card’ on a dashboard with all my stuff, then I know what resources I hold in DT. Access to any of these books/articles is now instant. All I need do is to set up the pages and populate them with links.

Oh the hens! They keep disappearing. I had 5 Modelu 00 hens that would mirror the real life hens in our paddock. At this scale (1:76) the models are tiny. I had just finished painting the foxes prior to them being planted next to the church yard to stalk the rabbit. Naturally when one of the hens disappeared I thought of foul play.

It turned up on the carpet just after I found the missing loco lamp of my LNER A5.

She (the hen) is called Matilda. after she had been shown off in her resplendent Bowes Moor Blue plumage, she vanished again.

She will turn up – and so she did – on the floor again. They will need to be permanently planted in position – a breath of air never mind the threat of a fox will lead them into a death plummet onto the floor.

Next figures – the farmers pack.

Off on our family excursion to the North Yorks Moors Railway (NYMR) to join the Santa Train at Pickering. 

Hauled by a J27 in BR livery no 65894, the usual mix of coaches awaited. Impossible to see out of the windows due to condensation until a gloved hand wiped the mist away. Then to open the top window between the arrow marks to avoid a draught and off we went. Wrapped up against the winter chill I did not notice any heating in the coach. The J27 I read later, served in the NE up to 1967, hauling freight ie wagons. I hope that the coaches had heating installed, but suspect that heating would not be coming from an engine designed to pull wagons.

Santa came along with his elves and a good time was had by all. Time for the children to be taken into the engine cab and ‘enjoy’ the smoke.