Trending Articles, Demos and tech notes
iPhone 18 Pro Max: Which Features Actually Justify an Upgrade
iPhone 18 Pro Max: A Flagship Built for Selective Upgraders
Apple's iPhone 18 Pro Max arrives as one of the most specification-dense handsets the company has produced, yet its headline advances are unlikely to resonate equally for every iPhone model user. For industry professionals evaluating device refresh cycles and fleet investment decisions, the central question is not whether the hardware is impressive, but whether the improvements are substantive enough to justify the cost relative to the iPhone users already carry.
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- Written by: Angus Fox
Read more: iPhone 18 Pro Max: Which Features Actually Justify an Upgrade
Headless Remote Desktop on Ubuntu - working reliable
Setting up GNOME Remote Desktop for headless multi-user RDP access on Ubuntu 25.10 (Questing Quokka) is trickier than it should be. This guide documents a working approach using only the software shipped with Ubuntu Desktop — no extra packages required — and uses openssl to generate TLS certificates. It covers common errors and how to resolve them, and reflects what actually works in 2026.
TL:DR – Getting this right on Ubuntu 25.04 was a frustrating experience. After several hours of digging, headless multi-user RDP on 25.10 finally works reliably, and the approach below is the result of that effort.
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- Written by: Angus Fox
Read more: Headless Remote Desktop on Ubuntu - working reliable
Use and scroll with Apple Magic Mouse on Windows 11 PC
You do not have to abandon Windows just to enjoy the precision, build quality, and touch-surface elegance of the Apple Magic Mouse. I run a dedicated Windows 11 machine for client work and I like my desk accessories to be consistent across every setup, so I set about making the Magic Mouse work properly on Windows. In this guide I will walk you through connecting and fully enabling the Magic Mouse on your Windows 11 PC — including scrolling. Pick up an Apple Magic Mouse in Black or White from Amazon UK and let's get into it.
TL:DR – I resisted the Magic Mouse for years, then got one with a Mac and slowly came round to the feel and the freedom. Now I have that same experience on Windows too.
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- Written by: Angus Fox
Read more: Use and scroll with Apple Magic Mouse on Windows 11 PC
New Cassette deck in 2026
Do you need a new cassette recorder, in 2025?
Can I finally digitise my old analog Compact Cassette tapes to Digital audio?
Last year during the holidays, while unpacking boxes, I found my collection of cassette tapes from the 20th century! I never threw them away it seems, even though I haven't had a cassette player connected to my home audio system for decades. Handling and looking through my tapes evoked many memories of recording and playing them, whether they were concert bootlegs, band practices, or taped off the radio. I remembered too the important process of writing out the track listing and decorating the cassette tape labels and covers.
Vintage cassette players and recorders, are expensive and full of compromises on eBay but seem to have a devoted following among collectors, vinyl enthusiasts, and music lovers who perhaps are nostalgic for the warm sound of analog audio and the hiss of tape. Professional and semi professional restoration shops sell them too, often with warranties. I looked up my old long lost Sony Walkman DC2 and the prices are in the stratosphere for this, the king of the Walkman players and much loved by me. So much so that it made me wonder if anyone makes new cassette players and recorders these days. Even Phillips the inventor of the format has no Cassette players or decks in it's current line up. This to me seems both sad and wrong.
But, there are a couple of decent pro audio and HiFi decks around and this is a little bit of a rabbit hole!
TL:DR — Compact cassettes are making a comeback due to their nostalgic appeal, unique sound quality, and resurgence of interest in physical media. If you have the means theres still one Pro Audio and one HiFi consumer cassette deck available in new condition with USB out. Both have the exact same mechanism with a few styling differences, chiefly rack mount capability and one additional playback function on the Pro Audio version. Both are expensive so shop around. If you're looking for a second hand professional level Cassette Deck in 2024 read my other article Tascam 302 Cassette recorder.
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- Written by: me
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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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
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