I talked about what it would take for me to leave Twitter a couple of years ago, but never followed up when I did leave around a year later. So here we go.

I didn’t quit in one go. I stopped posting. I checked in on my feed less frequently. I switched my account to private. I didn’t go cold turkey, I simply found fewer reasons to return.

I’d like to say that I was high minded and principled, that I quit because of Musk and Nazis and hateful content. But the truth is that the people I followed and blocked meant that my feed was mostly hate-free, an odd mixture of geeky stuff and dad jokes. Though I did leave because of the people and the content.

I wrote my initial thoughts about the Switch 2 announcement a couple of months ago. Against my better judgement, I pre-ordered one. What follows are a few thoughts about it now that I’ve had my hands on one for a couple of weeks.

The best summary I can think of for my initial impressions is: consider the name. The +1 label neatly captures both the good and the bad. It’s a better Switch. Faster. Higher resolution graphics. Generally… just nicer. It’s not a game changer (pardon the pun), but not everything needs to be revolutionary. Nicer is good.

In this piece, Seth Godin argues that understanding something is better than just memorising a process. Understanding is certainly key, but I think that misses something: there is value to in steps.

True, if you slavishly follow the steps, you can’t adapt. But if you don’t document the steps, it’s easy to miss one and get yourself into trouble. The challenge is knowing when to follow the steps and when to improvise.

The clue is in the name. Rather than a significant break from the past, the Switch 2 is an iteration. Bigger. Faster. Better. But not a revolution.

That’s not a bad thing. Why break with a successful formula?

I’m not a big gamer. In fact, the Switch is the first console I’ve bought. Let’s take a quick tour of the original, eight year old Switch and see what it got right and wrong.

Comic books are like ballet.

No, wait! I can explain!

I could go to see an opera or a ballet. I might enjoy it. Unless the performers fell over or were dramatically out of tune, I’m not completely sure that I would understand it or be able to assess it¹. What distinguishes a good ballet from a bad one?

So. A Better World [affiliate link]. I’d heard good things about it. The conceit: in a world where the police also serve as judge, jury and executioner, someone figures out that by diverting funds from security to education they can almost entirely eliminate crime. It’s a clever idea and one that fits perfectly into the Dredd universe.

It’s five years since the first UK lockdown.

Despite that distance, I wonder if there is anything original that can be said about 2020?

Unlikely. Knowing that removes some of the pressure. Instead, I really just want to write something to commemorate the strangest of years¹.

For the most part, personally, 2020 wasn’t a terrible year, just unusual. I’m fortunate in so many ways. I kept my job. I normally work from home anyway, so the challenge when the first lockdown hit was having to work while having two kids running around all day. Not easy, but, equally, churlish to complain when so many others were losing their jobs or having relationship issues.

I don’t have an account on TikTok. I’ve never downloaded the app. Yet I see videos that were originally uploaded there, always in portrait format with the logo in the bottom corner. Even if you’ve not used it, you have likely been impacted by it in some way. And if you follow the news, you’ll be aware of some of the controversies.

So even though I never really had much interest, it is interesting.

Last time, I talked about setting up my Pi Pico by soldering on the GPIO pins and wiring up an LCD screen. Having something work is obviously no fun. I need another challenge.

I decided to update the display to show the current temperature. I’d read that the Pico has a built-in temperature sensor, so how hard could it be?

I quickly took the sample code from the Pico website and plugged it in. It ran first time, which is quite impressive, and said that it was currently… 10º.

It’s been a productive weekend, at least if you consider doing unnecessary things productive.

For reasons that won’t become clear any time soon, I decided that I wanted to get some of my Arduino components working with my new Raspberry Pi Pico. Like the Arduino, but unlike other Pis, the Pico is a microcontroller. In practical terms – for a programmer at least – this means it doesn’t have a “proper” operating system like Linux but it does have lots of inputs and outputs, both digital and analogue.

In my day job as a consultant, I often joke that “it depends” is my default answer to any question, much as Ben Goldacre made a catchphrase out of “I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.”

I’m here today to tell you that it’s both absolutely true, and not at all true.

The truth is that, given a complex problem, the correct answer almost always is “it depends.” Without knowing all the constraints, all the things that have been considered and rejected, and all the things that affect the solution, it’s vanishingly rare that there is one, objectively correct answer that you know from the top of your head.