I am watching the meme.

One for the BBC’s crack pronunciation unit here, I think.

Slow handclap for o2 who have today (17 Sept) sent me a text message with info about an offer that expired two days ago (15 Sept)

So using mobiles on petrol station forecourts is now ok…as long as you’re using their on your phone app to pay for the petrol? Otherwise, using your mobile isn’t allowed?

If you’ve seen that very viral Paris Bohemian Rhapsody video, you can be my friend if you *also* noticed how the lights were constantly flashing such that it indicated they recorded the video at the wrong frame rate.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s an amazing flash mob video, but even so…

How thoughtful of Facebook to push to me a month-old BBC video about new tubes on the London Underground…just as we’re struggling through a tube strike where the network has been entirely shut down for two days, with two more still to come.

Turned my phone off at 2.58 to avoid the emergency alert due two minutes after that. Heard it on loads of other phones at 3.00, so at 3.04 I turned my phone back on. The alert then arrived ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (Took a screen grab but it didn’t save for some reason)

Slightly off my usual beat…but given this headline and photo, who do you think won the game?

Why on earth would anyone design a bag for a loaf of bread that makes it look like it’s all gone mouldy?

It’s the first day of the school year & again the house resounds to familiar cries: “I don’t want to get out of bed!” “Can I have five more minutes?” “Do I really have to?” “Oh this is *so* unfair” And yet again, I’ve finally given in & hauled myself out of bed so I can take the kids to school 🙄

A curious follow-up to this. After setting up my 11 year old son’s account, I had to tweak a setting. Changing a setting is protected behind a maths question. Clearly the brains at Google/YouTube are also unable to add an instruction that the older the child is, the harder the question needs to be.

Google: we are a multi-billion dollar company, employing some of the brightest minds in the technology world. Also Google: when you create a child profile on YouTube Kids, there’ll be a scroll wheel which will let you select an age of your child up to 115 years old.

The NHS is a wonderful institution and I’m not saying this is indicative of wider problems, but have you ever seen any other organisation - public or private - offer a date picker which starts with the LAST date of the month?!

Autumn is coming 😢

A moment that made me wince on the radio just now - the presenter pronouncing the Herefordshire town of Leominster exactly as it looks and not as it should be ie “Lem-ster”.

It’s nowhere near as bad as I remember. (But to be fair, after watching 45 minutes of it with my son, I keep saying to him “I don’t remember this bit…or this bit”)

Wearing an Apple Watch overnight on a cruise ship has led to some…interesting results. Some nights, it hasn’t started to register data until the small hours; others, it’s been WILDLY inaccurate; some nights it has just failed entirely. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Truly blessed to have seen this on our visit to Tromsø, in northern Norway. (alWaYs reAd tHE alT teXT)

If there’s ever a competition for “graveyard with the most amazing views” then I think this one at Geiranger in the Norwegian fjords would win. Contemplating life - and death - from up here would make the hike to get here worth it.

Want to break your brain? Try using false colour in the Black Magic video app to correctly judge exposure… of a screen showing how a thermal camera makes you look…

Farewell Honningsvåg in north northern Norway. See you again in a few years, no doubt.

Hello from pretty much the top of the world.

Doing a walk around the deck of a moving cruise ship seems to confuse an Apple Watch: I was not going at a pace to rival Olympic standard middle distance runners 😂

Morning.

I’m currently in Molde in Norway and just across the way is this place and I really want to go there and then return purely for the lame gag potential.

Full credit to the ad agency for pushing this one through and getting it approved.

Astonishing that I can get a decent 5g signal about 30 miles off the coast of Norway near Bergen when I struggle to get one in central London.

Impressive and slightly depressing that barely a week after getting his own phone & SIM card, he’s already getting spam texts like this

Should ‘pro’ camera apps claim to *increase* photography skills? Only PRACTICE will do that - taking lots of photos, getting better at how to compose & expose. A flashy app might give you “better” formats & a higher resolution image to correct in post. But it won’t give you better skills per se.

Given how the post is written, why on earth would anyone actually click to open this piece?

Why “mirror front camera” should be turned off for selfies, ep 273 The camera in Whatsapp is stuck to ON (no way to change that, AFAICS) so the pub’s name is reversed (upper) Yet in the lower image, I used the iPhone camera with MFC off - the text is the right way around, so more easily understood.

The email options suggested on the sign-up page for a cruise ship’s app says a lot about the demographics of its passengers.

@arseblog.com do you have any say when ads appear in the Arsecast? I was merrily listening to you & him chatting away about release clauses on today’s pod…suddenly mid-sentence, the ads kicked in without so much as a by your leave. (Curiously, there weren’t any at the usual point half-way through)

In the ONS dataset of names for newborns in 2024, three girls were called “Unique”. Someone should put a note in the forward planning diary and get them all in the same room at the same time for the sheer contradictoriness of it all.

I realise that complaining about Facebook is the meme of the old man shouting at clouds, but my feed right now is BONKERS. Usually it’s one or two ads among posts from people or accounts I follow but today it’s ad, ad, suggested account to follow, ad, ad, FRIEND, suggested account to follow, ad, ad.

Be honest: if you were in your local supermarket and saw a sign showing “brassicas”, would you be 100% certain what was being sold there?

Buried deep in the bowels of iOS 26, I found this. It’s not been covered in any of the 317 different review of iOS 26 I’ve already read. Turning it to “always allow” means things like mics will connect first time, every time. In theory.

Glad to have caught this typo before sending this email tbh

Hmmmmm. I’m in Belfast yet when I go to bbc.co.uk on the hotel WiFi, I get redirected to bbc.com - complete with adverts.

You’d think after spending £63m buying him, Arsenal could still afford to spend another £50 on a wireless mic with two transmitters so we can hear Gyökeres better? He’s barely audible - unlike his interviewer who is much louder (because she’s holding the phone 🙄)

Right then. Let’s see (hear) whether or not this lives up to the hype.

Day one of the summer holidays and the kids have been arguing with each other since 0730 😩

How’s your Sunday going?

Always good to see a BBC mojo reporter showing some BTS (behind the scenes, not the South Korean band) of his mojo in action.

Interesting how cautious the BBC is being with the Astronomer/Coldplay story - lots of “rumoured to be” - whereas The Guardian (among others) goes straight up with “it’s them”

I realise that complaining about Facebook is akin to shouting at clouds, but I really hate this kind of notification. It’s contemptuous of its users to flag that I’ve not seen something, when in fact I “cared” it five days ago. Surely their systems should know that and not give me the notification?

Will it be as funny for him as I remember it was for me..?

Yes it might give better results in other circumstances but good luck trying to edit audio on a Mac while walking to the tube station, which is what I’m doing using Ferrite on my iPhone.

Meta AI has really outdone itself here, suggesting questions I should ask that it can’t answer or thinking the questions suggested about the post apply to Meta AI itself ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Showing my son how to pronounce the French for “ironmongery” (as you do, on a Sunday), we’re now both highly amused by how Google Translate pronounces “ironmongery”