2023 has been a pretty decent year for me, albeit there have been a few bumps.
Firstly, it was the start of my second year working at my school, somewhere I enjoy working. There have been one or two times when I have wondered what I am doing working here but generally, I enjoy my job and want to continue to work here.
My mental health has been great this year again, leading to my fourth year in a row where I haven't struggled with any form of depression!
Let's talk about ZPE. ZPE 1.11 has been another incredible release of ZPE with inline iteration, type casting, and compiler directives, the build version has finally returned to ZPE, and improvements to the editor; particularly the editor area now being public, YASS Unfold, powerful new list reference functions, the new string_compare function, which is very useful for sorting lists of strings and finally, more public features through ZPEKit.
Next, let's talk about what I have managed to do with teaching. Further to what I said last year, I have made major improvements to my slideshow engine and DragonDocs Engine. My slides are now all in 16:9 format which took an absolute age to do, but I have finally done it. My slides underwent another style transformation and look even better than before. I cannot forget to mention my new Apple Watch app that I developed for this too! The app allows me to control the slides using my Watch - pretty cool!
I cannot forget that I also got my car in June after a six-month delay and I've loved every moment with it! I'm planning on doing a review of it when it gets to 9 months with it, so keep an eye on my reviews for that.
I also started my Master's Degree which is going well. I'm excited about the next part of my degree!
To finish the year off, I got myself an iPhone 15 Pro (which is great and the phone I've been waiting for for a long time), an Apple Watch Ultra 2 (which is an amazing Watch) and a new MacBook Pro 14" with an M3 Pro (which has replaced my M1 MacBook Pro, which itself was a very capable machine).
2023 has been a fantastic year for me and I'm hoping that 2024 is just as good if not better!
I just wanted to say, Merry Christmas for 2023! Have a great day!
I just read this:
Californians: your right to repair is now law. Thanks to an advocacy coalition led by CALPIRG (California Public Interest Research Groups), individuals and independent repair shops will have more access to the materials and information they need to fix their electronics and appliances. This follows a wave of encouraging right to repair laws across the U.S.!
This is great news! It could change the way we repair devices! As you'll know if you read my blog that I am an advocate for the Right To Repair movement and have been since about 2015.
The latest feature to come to ZPE - YASS Unfold - is a very useful feature. YASS Unfold does just that - it 'unfolds' the code into natural language, explaining what the code is doing. The very first version, which will be released in late October, features only a handful of features such as while loops, if statements and function calls (so far, but may contain more) and will not be the full feature.
This could be very useful for explaining complex code and will be looking at implementing some machine learning to improve and optimise results. I aim to have every feature from ZPE up to version 1.7 by the end of the month as it doesn't take long to write. Further to this is the new directive @unfold which allows you to specify what a subroutine or function does within your own code to help Unfold explain it.
This feature is built on the same code base as the transpiler feature and will hopefully continue to get better as versions progress.
The 'quick alert' feature on my website is used for various different things in order to inform the users of my website of an update to the page or a successful save for example. It's been quite nice to have and I use them regularly across the website, for example when executing code in ZPE/YASS or evaluating JavaScript, a quick alert popups to tell you that the action has been issued.
But now, after a good few years of them. I've decided to make some serious improvements to them.
Everyone is talking about the launch of the iPhone 15 as an important update, which is well overdue, as it will include that USB-C connector and ditch that old Lightning connector. Lightning isn't capable of much by comparison and it's also very easy to break compared with Type C.
That said, there is one reason Apple has avoided it for now - and that's because they are greedy and want profit from us. They make more when your Lightning cable breaks. They make more when you need a new type of Lightning cable that connects to your MacBook Pro via USB-C.
There is a lot of speculation that the iPhone 15 launch will be the one that introduces USB-C to the iPhone. This is great and all, but there's something that needs to be thought through at the same time - the other devices. If Apple goes and ditches Lightning on the iPhone, what about AirPods, AirPods Pro, and AirPods Max? A lot of people are going to be annoyed with using dongles with their devices so they'll continue to use Apple's proprietary Lightning connector. For me, it's just frustrating that I will still have Lightning-based devices to charge when I update my iPhone which means when I go away I will still need to have two chargers with me.
Over the last few days, I have been working on and off with my new project, The Teacher Organiser. The main focus of the recent development has been on the planning side of things. This was the primary goal for a few reasons, but perhaps the most obvious answer is that it was already made.
The planner itself, as well as the timetable, are built upon my own planner and timetable hosted on my own website. This meant that bringing it across was going to be a fairly easy task since I had actually made my own version incredibly portable. But the version of the planner on The Teacher Organiser needs to be very diverse and flexible, so it needed a few changes. As a result, the version on The Teacher Organiser has much more than the one on my website.
It's still not perfect, but it's now fully usable. And users can now sign up as well!
Seriously, forget the old version of 'The Teaching Organiser', the new version is miles better!
The new version of The Teaching Organiser no longer focuses solely on reporting and is now set up for timetable creation. The new version is so fast, smooth and works well (the old version did too actually).
Version 2 is designed with a much more dynamic, app-like look. Several features are going to be built into the new version. For now, I'll provide a little taster of what it's new timetable engine (which is built using the same code as the one I built a year ago for myself):
Meta's Twitter competitor, Threads, goes live in just over five minutes! I'm really looking forward to seeing what this brings! Go to threads.net to see it when it goes live!
After buying my HP EliteBook in December of 2022, I vowed never to buy another desktop computer. Now I can say that this is how I intend to be in the future. My desktop was a large machine, and whilst I loved all the space, the fact I had 10 drive spaces in it and lots of airflow, I don't see any need for any of that any more.
Most of the time my gaming is light enough that my integrated graphics are sufficient for running the games I play, but for those times when I need a better GPU, I've got a nice eGPU.
My next laptop will be the Framework laptop I nearly bought when I bought the EliteBook.
