Articles

The hardest part of managing someone else's medicines is not remembering the dose. It is knowing whether someone else already gave it.

Motivation gets a habit through the first week. The way the habit is designed gets it through the rest.

A determined teenager can get around most parental controls in an afternoon. The limits that last are the ones they agreed to.

The photographs are only half the archive. The other half is who is in them, and that lives in somebody's memory.

The airline app usually knows about the delay before the departure board does, which is reason enough to have it installed.

Most hiking trouble starts with a route that looked shorter on a screen than it turned out to be on the ground.

Most people do the same five things to their phone every day. All five can be done for them.

The phone can name every star overhead. It can also undo twenty minutes of dark adaptation in one glance.

Customising a phone is a hobby for some people. For everyone else it is one evening, done properly, then left alone.

Tapping the right answer into a blank is not programming. Typing code and watching it fail is.

The dog does not need an app. The person trying to remember the worming date does.

Nobody edits a novel on a phone. Plenty of people have drafted one there.

A phone screen is the wrong shape for a comic page. The right reader makes that nearly irrelevant.

The apps that help in a power cut are the ones already downloaded. Afterwards there is no way to get them.

The application you send from a bus stop is judged the same as the one sent from a desk. Set it up so it can be.

Deleting the app works until you reinstall it on the train. Adding friction works for longer.

The phone is a very good tuner, a very good metronome, and a mediocre teacher. Use it for the first two without guilt.

A phone is a decent spirit level, a rough tape measure and a bad thermometer. Knowing which is which saves a trip to the shop.

The second phone in the glovebox is more useful than the first one on the dashboard.

The seven day forecast is nearly the same everywhere. The next two hours is where an app is worth choosing.

A finger and a phone is a real sketchbook. It is just a different sketchbook from the one a pen and a tablet give you.

Most songs die between the bus stop and the front door. The phone in your pocket is the fix.

Nobody replays a sixty minute recording. They look for one part of it, and usually fail.

Four bulbs, three apps, two accounts and a light switch nobody trusts any more.