At least we're still Premier League Champions.

But I have to say, the past week or so has killed me. I don't want to get into international comparisons, or try to claim how "intense" British heat is, but I've had to deal with ~30°c (>25°c indoors) heat for about a week, and with very inadequate fans as the only solution to combat our well insulated buildings.

I'm pretty sure I find it worse than most though, I wear t-shirt and shorts in 15°c. There's not much else I can do at 30°c.

However, I remembered the post by my friend, Elliot, who pointed out (among many great points), that a better metric to try and reduce was pickups. I can see that in the past few weeks my pickups have gone from around 80 a day to 120 a day, with the two most common apps used after pickup being X and Instagram.

While I don't plan on stopping using these apps completely, it does feel like they're my goto solutions for any moments of free time.

So the other day, after seeing constant ads on Instagram, I decided to try to use Blank Spaces. If you don't know what it is, it's essentially a set of widgets that you can turn your iPhone into a "dumbphone".

This now means on my Home Screen, I have seven apps I can launch from the Blank Spaces widget, and four from my Docks.

Widget:

• Calendar
• Photos
• Huckleberry (App for tracking baby sleep, nappy changes, etc.)
• Claude (Random questions that come to me)
• Spotify
• NetNewsWire (RSS reader)
• Micro.blog (In my mind, a slower and more human version of a social network)

Dock:

• WhatsApp
• Messages
• Safari
• Music (Purchased music, I'm slowly building my collection)

It's not as restricted as I've seen others, and I don't have any form of notes app. But that's because I want this to be realistic.

The only contender that I can think of as a future addition is Instagram. Admittedly, I can get lost in Explore and Reels, but it's also where most friends and family are.

In case people are interested, the wallpaper is one I took myself while on a boat ride in Guilin, China. I beleive it was the Li River.

I added a widget to every page here that lets anyone in the world immediately send me a notification. Type a message, hit send, and it’ll pop up on my phone, watch, and computer near instantly.

Is this a good idea? No. But it’s a funny idea, and that’s all that counts these days. Scroll to the bottom of this page if you want to give it a try.

I liked the idea so much, I decided to implement it here on this blog! So at the bottom of a post (while I still think it's a good idea), you'll be able to send a message directly to my phone.

For those interested, it uses ntfy.sh to send the messages.

Fountain pens aren't new to me. I used them in school when learning how to write, and then I later used them to write multiple page essays. But for whatever reason^[1], when I left school, I didn't use one again. Until very recently, when I purchased a Lamy Safari Fountain Pen ^[2].

I chose this pen because I wanted a reasonably priced fountain pen, that I could use in my daily life at work and at home. Whether it was taking notes during a meeting, sketching out a few writing ideas, or simply to remember things.

What I thought would be a simple upgrade from a typical ballpoint pen, turned out to be a little nudge toward being more intentional. Not just with what I write, but how.

When I use a ballpoint pen, it feels like I should write a quick scrappy note, something that shouldn't live for very long. When I type on a computer or a phone, it feels fast, efficient, but it can be so efficient, that there's no thought behind any of the words.

But pair a nice pen with a little notebook^[3], and it simply feels nice to write. In addition, my natural writing speed means there are little pauses built in, which means I tend to think more as I write.

The permanence of words on paper also has an effect. Not in an extreme perfectionist way. But that if I am spending the time to write something down, I want it to have some thought behind it, honesty, and if possible I want it to be good.

At the same time, it's also a fun experience trying to write neatly again. There's a sense of writing becoming a little "craft" in itself, rather than a means to an end.

I can listen to any song by itself, and also the full album from start to finish. And it definitely comes with enough nostalgia to make it even better.

On that note, I need to make sure I go to see Paramore when they next perform in Europe. I saw them live for the first time in the O2 Arena in 2023, and it was by far the best gig I've ever been to in my life. I don't know why I waited so long.

Maybe it's the perspective of streaming compared to a curated library of your own music, but I don't get the same feeling with the current Music app.

Looking back at the various iterations of iTunes, I get mixed feelings. Some of the UI components used (even in later versions) would be classed as ugly in modern times, with scroll bars that didn't disappear, repetitive list views, harsh button borders, etc. But I remember it felt great to use.

One of my favourite parts of the iTunes UI over the years was the expanded album view in iTunes 11. You had the artwork on one side, and the colours from it were used to present the tracklist.

Now looking at the current Music app on Mac, it just looks bland in comparison. It doesn't feel like it was made by the same company.

Just to give some raw data, my average screen time for the week before last was around 6 hours per day. This past week it's just under 4 and a half hours per day.

So you could say that's an improvement, and I guess it is. But last week was more about myself noticing trends, and seeing what I could do without any major effect, and just by reminding myself occasionally that scrolling for hours may not be the best use of my time.

I noticed that I have a few occasions where I feel I want to grab my phone:

• When I'm between tasks.
• On my commute.
• When I'm bored.
• When I'm procrastinating.

Essentially, I tend to use my phone to fill gaps in time.

As for what I do on my phone, here is the past week split by category. Including only those which I have spent over 30 mins in the whole week, and only the apps/websites that have reasonable usage

• Social - 9 hours. (X, Instagram, Messages, Threads, Mastodon...)
• Entertainment - 5 hours. (YouTube, Spotify...)
• Other - 3 hours. (Remote, Home...)
• Utilities - 2 hours (Work Chat...)
• Games - 2 hours.
• Productivity & Finance - 1.5 hours. (Mail, Claude...)

I thought about the idea of using my phone less over the week, and I realised that it's not the phone itself that I want to stop using. Because a phone isn't really just a phone, it's a handheld computer^[1]. It can be used for important and useful tasks, such as communication, reading, listening to music, taking photos, etc. You could also say it can be a tool for entertainment, e.g. watching videos, playing games, etc.

The problem I've noticed that I have myself in regards to my phone, is that a lot of the time there's no intention behind how I use it. When I'm at work and I need to wait for something to compile, tests to run, or I'm waiting on a response from an agent^[2], my phone—or social media—is the first thing my mind gravitates towards. I'm now wondering how much time I'm wasting simply with these short bursts of usage.

Additionally, I was a bit torn with my commute time. On the 3 days that I travel to the office, I spend just over 3 hours per day commuting. That consists of some walking, but mostly on a ~35 minute train into London, and a ~15 minute tube ride, both ways.

For those train journeys, I don't have a reliable network connection, and I rarely even get a seat. So what I can do on them is already limited. Right now I resort to music, simple games that can fill time, or maybe catching up on RSS or social media.

I don't want to be too harsh on myself and say that I can't use my phone during my commute, or get annoyed that for these days, my usage is higher. But there's definitely ways in which I can use this time better. I'm going to try and explore a few podcasts that interest me, or books that I can read.

Although, I'm going to potentially have a look at a few ebooks to start off with. I already have a lot of physical books that I want to read, and I've started a few of them. But I can never find a way to build a reading habit. Hopefully I can combine a few things together, and both make better use of my commute time, give me something to do on my phone that isn't scrolling social media, and also help build a reading habit.

All in all, it wasn't a week of big revelations, but I do have a next step of where I want to improve. Next week will be another one of trying to slowly start to use my phone in a more intentional way, and also stopping myself when I'm only getting my phone out to waste time.

• Perfect Days (2023)
• The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)
• Seven Years in Tibet (1997)

Those are my three favourite individual films. But like most, there are many film series that I'm also fond of. Mine are:

• The Hobbit
• The Lord of the Rings
• Twilight
• Harry Potter

I would like to note that none of these are guilty pleasures.

I would also like to note that although these are mentioned as my favourite films, their respective book forms and soundtracks are also some of my favourites.

First I will give myself a week to try and naturally use it less. Which I hope will help me detect where I usually reach for my phone, and also help me identify suitable replacements.

As a start that means X, Instagram, and Mail have been removed from my home screen. I've also added my bank card to my Apple Watch to avoid needing taking my phone out at the train station. And the next thing I want to do is to setup Spotify on my Watch so I can have one less reason to take my phone out of my pocket.

I'll share more updates here as the week progresses. Hopefully by the end of the week I would have both lowered my average screen time, and also identified a few areas that need some attention.

There is a certain kind of computer review that is really a permission slip. It tells you what you’re allowed to want. It locates you in a taxonomy — student, creative, professional, power user — and assigns you a product. It is helpful. It is responsible. It has very little interest in what you might become.

The MacBook Neo has attracted a lot of these reviews.

This is one of my favourite pieces of writing I've read for a while.

It reminds me of my own experience, when I was a teenager, saving up to get my first Mac. A base model 13" MacBook from around 2005/06. That limited machine opened me up to the world of Apple, development, blogging, and what essentially led to my career as a software engineer.

Not knowing what to write about is probably one of the most common blogging struggles. Believing you have nothing interesting to say.

This is a great post. It serves as a reminder that just because you have become accustomed to something, doesn't mean it's not interesting.

However, I can't say I haven't been temped by shiny new things. Every time there's been a new generation of M chip released I wonder what the increase in performance would feel like.

But performance on it's own is unlikely to convince me to upgrade. I usually need three things:

• Some level of base performance. It can't be substantially worse in any area.
• It needs at least one objective improvement. This may be a performance boost.
• Something interesting. A new colour, chassis, display...

itsThe MacBook Neo certainly fits the last point. It's an interesting device, I like the size, the colours, and that it's super cheap and can be used like a travel laptop. But there's no objective reason for this to be an upgrade. It can just stay as an interesting device.

The MacBook Air is also intriguing. I like the 15" model, as I'd get a slightly bigger screen size, and a thinner chassis. Even if it's fan-less, and not a Pro version of an M chip, I think a base M4 chip would perform better than an M1 Pro, so there's an objective improvement. For something interesting,I like the darker grey colour, and I would really like a thinner laptop. But the screen would be a downgrade, so it doesn't meet the first point.

Once I was at this point, I thought I'd check the MacBook Pro. It's the same model, so it definitely meets the base expectations compared to my current laptop. It's the newer model, so objectively every component is better, especially the chip. But it's the same chassis, same colour, same weight... There's nothing particularly interesting about this laptop.

So without anything breaking, or my use case changing, I don't think there's a suitable upgrade available for me. After 4 years.

If I was being negative, I'd say the Neo was rubbish, the Air has a poor display, and the Pro is boring.

But I think the reality is that the base model 14" MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro chip is simply an incredible device. I wonder if after another 4 years, people will still be happily using M1 chips. I suspect so.

But if you could just see a recent blog post, you may be more inclined to have a read.

That's why I've now create the Miniroll Global Feed for Miniroll Pro users..

It regularly goes through each public blogroll and fetches the lastest blog post. Then on the Global page, it will show the 100 most recent blog posts from all of the blogs.

I think it's going to be a better way to help with blog discovery. Personally, I plan on using it when I'm a bit bored and want something to read that doesn't evolve into an infinite social media scrolling session.

But it's not the case. As for the general person, when they use a computer, they're probably doing a very small set of activities. Most people aren't editing videos, developing software, or doing anything particularly resource intensive.

That's why I've long thought the best (Apple) computer for most people was probably an iPad. You can watch TV/movies, browse the web, play games, read emails, etc. It does everything most people need.

But there's still one "problem". It runs iPadOS. And even as far as it’s come, it’s still not macOS or Windows. So there was always some level of adaptation needed, even if minor. As a lot of paradigms on how computers are used are simply different.

Whereas now, if you want an Apple computer, and you either don’t need to do particularly complex tasks, or you’re on a tight budget, then I don’t think the iPad is the best choice anymore.

It's obviously too early to say this for definite, given it's literally only just been announced. However, I think the MacBook Neo will take that role. It's a modest computer compared to the other options, but it does everything that most people need it to do. It's also at a fantastic price point, which makes a big difference. And it's still a Mac, which brings a sense of quality and status.

I think the Neo will become the Apple computer that will be recommended for people that “just need a computer”.

Back in January I launched Miniroll, a way to create, manage, share, and embed blogrolls.

Since then, I also soft-launched Miniship, which lets you create, manage, and embed changelogs for your project. And just last night I shipped Minifocus, which is very niche, it lets you a central "focus" state and then embed elsewhere.

Miniroll

Miniroll was the first thing I shipped this year, and it's doing well. There are over 30 users, some of them paying for the premium features, and over 30 public blogrolls.

It's still very fresh, but it's starting to feel like a relatively complete product. You can create private/public blogrolls, import/export OPML files, embed blogrolls with various styles and options, generate combined RSS feeds, and quite a bit more

I personally like checking the explore page, and using the Random Blog button to find something new.

Miniship

As I was working on Miniroll, I was keeping an updated changelog on the site. Which I then reaised could be a service by itself. So Miniship was born.

I didn't do a big launch, as I'm still working through feature development. But the core is ready right now, and now I'm working on adding a premium level. Right now you can create a single changelog which has it's own RSS feed, and it's own public page, which you can embed on your site directly.

I've already added changelogs for all three Mini projects to Miniship, and I already find it useful myself. So I suspect other people may also find some value in it as well.

Minifocus

Now for the latest experiment, Minifocus. This is a project that I built for myself, and was because I wanted a dynamic "current focus" on my blogs home page that didn't require a full rebuild to update.

I don't expect it to gain much attention, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's only me that uses it.

All you can do at the moment is to set a current focus, and then view it on a public profile or embed it on your site. There's an explore page, which in theoery will show the most 100 recent updates, but it's just myself a the moment.

I may add a few small tweaks, such as being able to see and quickly select recent entries. But I don't expect I'll add too much.

I wish Instagram was 2012 Instagram.

— Chris 💻 (@chrishannah) February 8, 2026

In the good days of Instagram, people shared over-filtered square-cropped insights into their daily life. It was a real social network. You followed people, usually your friends, and you can see what they were up to, they can see what you are up to. And you generally comment on each others posts.

YouTube recommended this 13 year old video from Casey Neistat about how to use Instagram, and that certainly made me feel more nostalgic about it used to be.

There are many reasons why Instagram isn't the same anymore. Part of it is down to the social media landscape, and habits of social media users. As I think we've now become a generation of consumption.

But part of it is down to the evolution of Instagram as a platform. Before you edited and shared photos, viewed other peoples photos, and exchanged likes and comments. Now you've got algorithms dictating your For You feed, Reels, and Explore page.

If you want to share something, you don't use the most prominent button in the tab bar, you tap on a button on the top-right of the screen. Which directs you to share a Story. A fleeting moment, that someone will quickly tap past as they're viewing the stories from all the influencers and brands they follow.

That's where I think it went wrong for Instagram, when brands joined in and "Influencers" started to pop up. For me, that's when Instragram started to become less about people sharing photos with people.

I want to start using Instagram like those days, posting more personal moments, less "perfect" shots, more just general life. And to "the grid", instead as a fleeting story. But I do feel that even if I persevered, Instagram simply may not be the place for that anymore.

If you want to find me on Instagram, you can do so: @lordchrishannah^[1].

It's called Miniroll, and it's a way to create, share, and embed blogrolls. Along with many other things.

It's not just about your blogrolls either, as you can choose to make them public. Which means other people can too! So you can find other peoples blogrolls and find new blogs in the Explore section.

There's a whole bunch of features that Miniroll already supports, which is wild as it's only just "launched" today. But as of right now, every user can:

• Create and manage a blogroll.
• Make the blogroll public, and let others know what you're reading.
• Import and export OPML files to make everything easier.
• Use CMD+K to open the command palette, or use keyboard shortcuts directly for most actions.
• Embed your blogroll on your own site!

And if you're generous enough to sign up for the premium tier ($2 monthly, $20 yearly), you can:

• Have as many blogrolls as you want.
• Use a custom URL for your public blogroll.
• Allow people to suggest new blogs via the blogroll or an embed.
• Customise your embed with custom CSS, removing the Miniroll link, show the title, or add custom footer text.
• Get a single RSS feed for your blogroll. Which is dynamic as your blogroll changes.
• Get some basic analytics on the number of views and clicks your blogroll has attracted.

There's all of that, and a bunch more on the way soon!

If that sounds interesting, check out Miniroll.

You can keep up with development on Mastodon or X.