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.

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.

Formula 1 interest has increase by a huge amount in the US since Netflix’s Drive to Survive landed in 2019. The recent addition of a Las Vegas GP is only going to add to this.

I have very fond memories of these games. Hopefully some day The Getaway 3 finally gets a green light!

M-Sport managing director Malcolm Wilson says he made it “very clear” to Craig Breen that his priority on the Monte Carlo Rally was to bring his Ford Puma Rally1 Hybrid to the finish and bank points.

Wilson said the fact Breen’s trouble-free run was rewarded with a podium made it “absolutely the dream start”.

“Craig’s done exactly the job that he needed to,” Wilson told DirtFish.

“He’s going to be our team leader and I was very clear with him, he needed to get some points on the board.

“To get a podium is absolutely the dream start for him, especially if you see that both Sébastiens [Loeb and runner-up Sébastien Ogier] will probably not be doing the whole championship.”

Rock solid start from Irelands Craig Breen and the M-Sport team. Looks to be an exciting year of WRC ahead.

And so ends my first year using Letterboxd.

It took a couple of years to climb to the top of the podium, but once Colin McRae scored his and the team’s maiden victory at the 1993 Rally New Zealand, the programme could really go through the gears.

And going through the gears meant the immediate introduction of the Legacy’s successor: the Impreza 555. This car will always be intrinsically linked to McRae.

The Lanark driver won his world championship in the famous blue and yellow livery in 1995 and the Subaru-Prodrive alliance went on to bag two more titles with Richards Burns in 2001 and Petter Solberg in 2003 with World Rally Car derivatives.

The evolution of the Impreza 555 into Impreza WRC97 was one of the stories of the World Rally Car era. Piero Liatti gave the WRC97 a debut win on the 1997 Rallye Monte-Carlo, the first rally of the new generation, demonstrating that this drop-dead gorgeous car had the pace to back up stunning looks.

Standing staring at the curvy lines and flared-arches at the car’s launch in 1997, the step from farmer’s field to arguably the WRC’s most stunning and successful creation was quite astonishing.

What a difference a decade can make.

The perfect accompaniment to No Time To Die.

Nice overview of iPadOS 15 on Six Colors. iOS/iPadOS 15 may be one of the least exciting updates to the platforms in a long time, but for a platform that is 14 years into it’s life, there are still some great features here.

One feature I have been enjoying is the updates to iPad multitasking. Dan Moren notes that Apple may well be heading towards a more desktop-like system for multitasking going forward ¹:

Apple has made substantial changes to how multitasking works in iPadOS 15. A lot of these changes are more visual than conceptual, but they lay the groundwork for potential expansion of multitasking features in the future.

Apple takes its time and sometimes makes extremely conservative decisions, but it’s hard to believe that iPadOS isn’t headed toward Mac-like multiple window multitasking being an option, especially on larger (and external) displays. Whether the windows will be freeform or follow some strict rules involving tiling, snapping, or some other organizational principle remains to be seen.

Another feature that has impressed is Live Text, which allows you to point your camera at any text, and then copy paste it anywhere you want. As an added bonus, it’s also integrated with Spotlight Search so that, with your permission, it can scan your photos for text and display the results.

Speaking of Photos, you can now view detailed metadata about your photos with a tap from within the Photos app too. On the face of it, these are minor features, but they are ones we will no doubt become reliant on in time to come.

The hype is building for No Time To Die!