mostly david ephgrave

Today, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to make the Mac-based slideshow software Keynote do something that PowerPoint does very easily.  (If the above sentence doesn't pique your interest, nothing will.) I switched to Keynote a few years back when I bought my MacBook; Glyn and I have been using it to run our slideshows ever since. For the most part, it's user-friendly, but - like with all computer technology - there's always some little bug or other that gets on your wick. I've lost count of the times a simple task took hours to complete, because some link in the chain wasn't working as it should; if I ever meet the person who devised Apple's infamous colour wheel, I'll punch them square in mush.  All I wanted was for an MP3 to trigger on one slide and then continue under the following slides as I flick through them. Then, when I realised you can only do this on Keynote if the audio file starts at the beginning of the presentation, I tried to ...

This morning I received a text from my mum that simply read, "OM" – and for a second I thought she’d turned Hindu. “Perhaps she’d finally found inner peace”, I thought to myself. Or maybe she’d just been listening to The Beatles song Across the Universe and thought she’d text me some of the lyrics. I didn’t think any of the above, if I’m honest: I’m exaggerating for comic effect. I knew that what she really wanted to say was “OK”; any allusion to mystical Sanskrit was due to a slip of the digits. This is what happens when people of a certain age are faced with modern technology. Over time, you come to expect it. It’s like a few months back, when I was on the phone to my dad, offering him advice before he bought a new computer. He was thinking of getting a desktop PC, but I told him that for the sort of thing he’d be using it for, such as checking his email or internet banking, he might as well just buy a laptop. In...