Bond’s Ice Missions

Ever since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in 1969, some of the most thrilling James Bond action sequences have taken place in the coldest climates. The 007 action unit have found myriad ways to create unique snowbound set-pieces on skis, to aircraft and even a cello case. Here are the behind-the scenes stories from some of Bond’s most iconic ice capades…


Website Updates

In an effort to not completely abandon this website, I have updated some basic stuff behind the scenes to keep it in a state where it can be updated properly.

The updates include:

  • Creating a ‘development’ branch for testing changes
  • Adding a gitignore file to shrink the size of the repo
  • Updating the Gemfile versions where necessary

I had not been using Jekyll or GitHub Pages correctly for a long time. I would usually just create/update posts from within the GitHub website directly.

That is admittedly a useful benefit of GitHub Pages and cuts out a lot of effort, but it leads to loads of unnecessary commits and makes testing any config or library changes more or less impossible.

These changes are minor 1 but they allow me to test changes locally on the website before pushing them, and bring some form of SDLC to the content here.

  1. And about 5 years late. I was doing things right for the first few months! 


WRC teams would welcome a Subaru return

FIA President Mohammed Ben Sulayem revealed at last weekend’s Acropolis Rally that the three-time WRC constructors’ winner (1995-1997) is considering a possible return to the championship.

Subaru has a rich history in the WRC, running Colin McRae (1995), Richard Burns (2001) and Petter Solberg (2003) to world drivers’ titles before exiting at the end of 2008 due to the global financial crisis.

Ben Sulayem’s comments emerged from a meeting he had with Toyota chairman Akio Toyoda, who is actively trying to encourage more manufacturers to join the WRC.

🙏




In 2005, Helios flight 522 crashed into a Greek hillside. Was it because one man forgot to flip a switch?

That day, Irwin had started work at 1am, finished at around 6.30am and was planning to take his children to the beach. It was the school holidays and his family were over from Bedfordshire, where they lived during term time. At 8am, the phone rang. It was the operations centre at Helios asking Irwin to go into the office. He didn’t think much of it. “Sometimes the engineering manager just wanted to chat about the flying programme or shift patterns,” he says.

But Irwin found the operations room in crisis. They had lost radio contact with one of their planes. Flight 522 had taken off from Larnaca for Athens at 6.07am. The flight time was one hour and 45 minutes. It was now more than two hours since takeoff and the plane was still in the air, with 121 people on board. The office had received a chilling report from two jets scrambled by the Hellenic air force to intercept the plane: the captain’s seat was empty; the person in the first officer’s seat was slumped over the controls; the only three passengers visible were motionless, wearing oxygen masks; and masks were dangling from overhead units. “Everyone was thinking terrorism,” Irwin says.


Rediscovering the Mac: An iPad User’s Journey into macOS with the M1 Max MacBook Pro

It’s been a long journey, but the conclusion of the story so far is clear to me. macOS is Apple’s friendliest, most powerful platform for power users. Can iPadOS become as intuitive and versatile for power users, even in new, iPad-only ways that I can’t imagine right now?

Interesting article from Federico Viticci on the difference between the Mac and iPad for getting work done.

As time passes I’m getting less convinced that the iPad will ever get near a PC for professional use. The iPad Pro hardware indicates that there are plans to make the iPad more of a productivity machine than just a casual media device, but maybe expectations need to be more realistic. There is still a place for a traditional PC for getting work done, and probably always will be.