For a while now, I’ve known that this website was not fully functional on the small screen of a phone. Although there was the familiar hamburger menu visible up top, it didn’t actually work. The menu it was supposed to expose when clicked was permanently visible and it didn’t actually click. But nobody bothered to mention it, and it didn’t bother me that much.

The seasons changed, with a vengeance. We just emerged from a week of cold, torrential rain. I got soaked at least three times, two of them standing obediently in a socially distanced line outside the post office. And one of those was to send my passport off for renewal. At this point, it is a toss-up whether Covid delays my ability to travel until after the new passport returns or whether Covid delays the return of my passport so that I am not able to travel when I would like to. Hey ho.

The Internet Archive recently sent out an email warning that “between 2000-2019, more than 176 open access journals have literally disappeared,” with many more at risk. My first thought was to hope that many of the vanished were titles from predatory publishers scamming academics, gone bust or moved...

Prompted by Ton Zilstra, who has now completed the job, I started making a deliberate effort to move all my text expansions from TextExpander to Alfred, and for simply expanding text it works a treat. Along the way, I picked up a super-useful tip from Vero, Alfred's Mum.

My friend Ton Zijlstra recently wrote about switching from TextExpander to Alfred, prompted by TextExpander's move to a subscription model. I found myself in the same boat a while back, but wasn't entirely happy with the way Alfred handled that kind of text expansion. I replied to Ton, pointing ou...