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Building for One, Part one: a calm iPad display for someone
This is the first part of a build-in-public series about an app we have been thinking about for a year or more, finally started work on, and are still building. It is called Daysome, although the icon reads My Day. It shows one person, on one iPad, what day it is, what is happening now, what is coming next, and what is for tea. That is the whole thing.
We are writing this up as we go rather than after the fact, partly because the interesting decisions are the ones that get forgotten once a product looks finished, and partly because we are looking for a small number of families and care professionals to test it on real hardware. If that might be you, there is a note at the end.
Daysome - a calm iPad display for someone living with dementia
TL;DR – Part one covers the first few days: where the idea came from, why we chose the stack we did, how the requirements arrived, one small development tool that saved more time than anything else we built, and the point at which we put it under version control and pointed it at TestFlight, Apple's app testing system for the App Store.
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- Written by: Angus Fox
Read more: Building for One, Part one: a calm iPad display for someone
Building for One, Part two: what it costs to buy one command
Building for One, Part one: a calm iPad display for someone living with dementia ended with an app that ran. A calm iPad display for someone in the early stages of dementia — what day it is, what is happening now, what is next, and what is for tea. Tested, documented, and living entirely on one laptop. If you are less interested in the tooling feel free to skip to Building for One, Part three: what a real iPad changed
TL;DR – Part two is about the two days spent turning that into this:
git push origin v0.1.0-beta1One command. It runs the audit, builds both platforms, archives and signs iOS against a pinned certificate, signs Android with its own upload key, and delivers to TestFlight and Google Play internal testing. Both stores, from one tag.
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- Written by: Angus Fox
Read more: Building for One, Part two: what it costs to buy one command
Building for One, Part three: what a real iPad changed
Building for One, Part one: a calm iPad display for someone living with dementia built a calm daily display for someone in the early stages of dementia. Building for One, Part two: what it costs to buy one command spent two days turning it into one command that ships to both stores. This part is about the afternoon it finally ran on a real iPad, and how much of the design turned out to be wrong.
Not broken, just wrong in the way things are wrong when you have only ever seen them on a desktop display.
TL;DR – A simulator tells you whether something fits. Only a device tells you whether it reads. And only a person tells you whether any of it was the right idea.
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- Written by: Angus Fox
Read more: Building for One, Part three: what a real iPad changed
Building for One, Part four: £200 tablet just worked
Building for One, Part one: a calm iPad display for someone living with dementia built a calm daily display for someone in the early stages of dementia. Building for One, Part two: what it costs to buy one command spent two days turning it into one command that ships to TestFlight and Play. Building for One, Part three: what a real iPad changeddiscovered, on a real device, how much of the design had been wrong.
This part is shorter and cheaper, and it starts with something that is meant to be a treat in build-in-public writing: a thing that worked first time.
TL;DR – A £200 Amazon Fire Max 11 tablet ran the build with no changes at all. Then we read the real screen numbers off the device, which proved a careful hedge wrong and uncovered a live layout bug in about ninety seconds. The lesson is about the guess, not the bug.
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- Written by: Angus Fox
Read more: Building for One, Part four: £200 tablet just worked
Building for One, Part six: four names for one app
Building for One, Part one: a calm iPad display for someone living with dementia built a calm daily tablet display for someone in the early stages of dementia, and Building for One, Part five: everybody reads it before she does got it into three app stores. This part is a coda, written while we wait for feedback rather than build anything.
It is about the names. There are four of them, and that is not an accident or an oversight.
TL;DR – A name is not a brand, it is an answer to a question, and four different people ask four different questions.
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- Written by: me
Read more: Building for One, Part six: four names for one app
Building for One, Part five: everybody read it before her
Building for One, Part one: a calm iPad display for someone living with dementia built a calm daily display for someone in the early stages of dementia, and Building for One, Part four: the £200 tablet that just worked put it on a £200 tablet. In between, two parts on turning it into one command that ships to both stores and on how much of the design real tablets proved wrong. This part covers the week after that: twenty-five beta builds, and the same app sitting in three review queues at once.
Almost none of that week was spent on the thing the app does. It was spent on the fact that three different people read this app before the person it is for ever sees it (an app reviewer, a tester, and the family member doing the installing), and each of them needs different words.
TL;DR – Getting those words wrong does not produce a bug report. It produces a rejection, or worse, a person reading something about themselves that nobody meant them to read.
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- Written by: Angus Fox
Read more: Building for One, Part five: everybody read it before her
Rotating the root of trust — break-glass key rotation
If you sign your extension’s subscription-validation responses with an RSA key, that private key is the root of trust for every copy you’ve ever shipped. So what do you do when it might have been exfiltrated? You can’t just mint a new one and swap it in — the instant you do, every customer’s extension rejects the new signature and in our case drops to the free tier limiting functionality they paid to subscribe to.
TL:DR – This is how I rotated a possibly-compromised signing key across a live Joomla subscription system without breaking the field, plus the one design idea that made it safe.
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- Written by: Angus Fox
Read more: Rotating the root of trust — break-glass key rotation
Five alternatives to the Google Pixel 10a
The Google Pixel 10a, launched in April 2026 as the latest entry in Google's celebrated mid-range line, has already generated serious buzz — and for good reason. With a brighter display, faster charging, tougher glass, and the same Tensor G4 chip as its flagship sibling, it raises the bar for what a sub-£500 Android phone can do. But the mid-range market in 2026 is more competitive than ever, so before you hit buy, it's worth knowing what else is out there.
TL:DR – The Pixel 10a is the standout choice if you're shopping for a mid-range Android right now in mid-2026. Launched on 25 April 2026, it brings a 6.3-inch P-OLED display hitting up to 2169 nits peak brightness, Gorilla Glass 7i front and back, a 5100mAh battery, and 30W wired / 10W wireless charging — all powered by the Tensor G4 chip with full Gemini AI support. At £499 it sits well below the Pixel 10 (£799) and Pixel 10 Pro (£999), and Google's enhanced trade-in promotion runs until the end of June 2026, so if you've got an old Pixel or iPhone gathering dust, now is the time to cash it in.
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- Written by: Angus Fox
Linux Formally Embraces AI Code Contributions
Linux Kernel's Official AI Guidelines: What the Rules Actually Say
The Linux kernel project has formalized its stance on artificial intelligence in software development, adopting a policy framework that charts a deliberate middle course between outright prohibition and unregulated acceptance. Rather than banning AI tools or treating them as a free pass for unreviewed code, the new guidelines establish a system of human accountability at every stage of the contribution process.
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- Written by: Angus Fox
Gitea with Let's Encrypt on macOS via Homebrew
Gitea is a lightweight, self-hosted Git service that runs happily on a spare Mac. Installing it through Homebrew with Let’s Encrypt HTTPS takes an afternoon — and then, weeks later, a routine brew upgrade breaks every git push with a baffling “Internal Server Connection Error” while the web UI carries on as if nothing is wrong. This is the full setup, plus the one failure that cost me an evening and the one config line that fixes it for good.
TL;DR – The short version. this is a single line fix in app.ini. The rest of this article is how to get there in the first place.
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- Written by: Angus Fox
New rules to protect children online in the UK
The UK Government Draws a Line in the Sand on Social Media for Under-16s
On 15 June 2026, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that the United Kingdom will ban children under the age of 16 from using a range of social media platforms. The move follows one of the largest public consultations ever conducted by the current government.
TL:DR – The ban raises profound questions not just for parents and policymakers, but for anyone involved in building digital products.
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- Written by: Angus Fox
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