Author: Ross Wintle

Home from 2 days with 2 kids in London.

My wife had an overnight work trip to city, and I have the kids this week. So we went on an adventure and joined her!

We did Trafalgar Square to Bank on foot via South Bank taking in the Houses of Parliament and Tate Modern (briefly).

We took the Cable Car to Canary Wharf and had epic pizza.

And we had a day at the Science Museum before running like crazy for the train home! 😅

A proper adventure and we're all every proud of ourselves and each other!

OK. The Apple Watch really held up today. I’m half convinced. But I also need to swap for a 44mm case and a fabric band. This rubber is horrible.

So I’m “trying” an Apple Watch SE. Hope I can return it if I don’t get on with it.

First impressions?

1. I really hope the battery life is better on day two somehow!
2. Wake on raise is way too sensitive.
3. Wish I bought the 44mm case. It looks small on me.
4. I really don’t like the sport strap.

I’m here to be convinced.

Amazing. Brett Goldstein (Roy Kent) plays games with Elmo on Sesame Street. This shouldn’t be allowed. Hilarious.

It’s OK. There’s no swearing in the video. But your head WILL fill in the blanks. 😂

https://youtu.be/0xMSrh46H8A

This is a bit sub-Tooty but it needs saying.

There are an AWFUL lot of people in #WordPress who are still happily building with mostly PHP. Many of these are using ACF blocks to circumvent needing to deal with React and complex, fragile build tooling.

I have no evidence (yet) that there’s a mass of people who transitioned to native blocks.

These people are, IMO, a quiet majority who’s keep WordPress at work, but whose needs are often forgotten.

I have a feeling I’ve asked this before but… Nintendo fans… if someone has never played a Zelda game and could play any Zelda game on any platform, where should that person start?

You still should NOT run it. But if you were trying to and failing, my "magic" #WordPress methods using OpenAI are now working again:

https://github.com/rosswintle/wpai

They deprecated the language model that I was using and I had to patch it up!

This is a really impressive physics lesson…

https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/

Remembering the time I added speech-to-text to my command palette and made voice-controlled #WordPress.

I still wonder if this would be awesome…

https://rosswintle.uk/2022/05/raise-your-hands-its-voice-controlled-wordpress/

This story about a girl who was dragged twice around the world on a boat by her crazy father is quite a read!!

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/mar/25/suzanne-heywood-round-the-world-sailing-trip-stolen-childhood

Oh. Lol. This is because I have the Better Twitter browser extension!!

More coffee please!!

Huh. Have been spending some time lurking back on Twitter.

User profiles don't show following/follower counts any more?

That's weird. That was kind-of a key metric for many.

I'm going to take this as huge validation for my work – turns out I was way ahead of the curve in some of this stuff!!

But it does present a dilemma: what to do with Turbo Admin!?

How long will it be until these new things exist?

Will there still be a need for it after an admin redesign?

Should I just open source it now and call it a day?

I'll be figuring these things out.

The #WordPress Gutenberg Phase 3 announcement is very interesting for me.

Why?

Because it will be disruptive for my Turbo Admin product.

An admin redesign (especially if done in React) may make Turbo Admin impossible to run.

Fortunately they are also considering adding their own "global search & command component" so Turbo Admin may no longer be needed (this is a GOOD thing!)

They also want to refine list tables, which I'm currently working on enhancing!

https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/03/24/phase-3-collaboration/

I'm also really on the fence about Bear Notes and Obsidian. Bear is great – I properly love it – but development of it seems really slow. v2 has been in the works for SO long and I don't even know what features it will have and how much it will cost.

In the meantime, the world seems to have switched to Obsidian. Which I feel like I can't properly embrace until I'm all in. But it's way more expensive.

Anyone have thoughts on this? Do I just go all in and accept the cost?

I find myself wanting to look at my phone less, but while still being able to do things. Am actually, finally, considering an Apple watch (partly because some free money came my way). Even though in my head a watch that you need to charge daily is stupid.

Are they REALLY good? So many people seem to have and like them. Is the cost/benefit ratio actually really good?

Convince me…

Ugh. Here I am complaining. But really, I hate it when customer support works like this:

"I found an issue in your software. It doesn’t work as expected. It deleted my data when it shouldn’t. I've looked in the place where the data should be. It's not there, and I can't find it anywhere else!”

Response:

“Please look in the place where the data should be? If it's not there you can restore it by doing this: <instructions>”.

Totally missing the point and ignoring information I've already given.