While on a recent weekend away in Vienna, I visited some of the locations from the 1987 Bond film “The Living Daylights”.

First up was the Volksoper Opera House, which was the location used for the early part of the film where Bond has been sent to take out a sniper, during the defection of Georgi Koskov. In the film this is set in Bratislava, but Vienna was used for filming due to Bratislava being off limits, as it was part of Czechoslovakia at the time.

Across the road from the Volksoper is a sweet shop, which in the film was used by Bond and his Vienna counterpart Saunders as a stake-out for the shooting. Unfortunately it was closed when I was there so I couldn’t have a look inside.

Once Bond and Kara make it to Vienna, there is a short montage of them in a few locations around the city. Two of these that I wanted to visit were the Maria-Theresien-Platz and the Schönbrunn Palace (which also appears in the end credits). Both of these are part of the hop on hop off bus tour of Vienna, so no issue finding them.

The next location was the one I was probably most excited about - the Prater. The Prater is a permanent amusement park in Vienna that is well worth a visit. In the film, Bond and Kara spend some time here on the various amusements, eventually taking a trip on the big ferris wheel called “Wiener Riesenrad”. In the film they were in cabin 10 - we just missed it! The park has changed a lot since 1987, but the ghost train is still there and looks familiar.

Other Vienna locations include Karas apartment, the tram station and the gasworks. Some of the older trams still roam the city, and look similar to the ones seen in the film.

Thanks to a helpful tutorial and some CSS tweaks, the site now supports Dark Mode. 🤠

The Good:

• Dark Mode - finally!
• Controller support - finally!
• Shortcuts Automations
• Better use of the iPad home screen
• Apple Arcade look promising
• Photos.app revamp is great

The Bad:

• App Updates are hidden in the App Store
• Haptic Touch is replacing 3D Touch

The career of Tiger Woods has to be one of the most interesting sporting stories of all time.

Written by Jeff Benjamin and Armen Keteyian, Tiger Woods is a biography of the golfer from when he was born until the end of 2018, when he had come back from numerous scandals and injuries to win again on the PGA Tour. ¹

What surprised me most was Woods early life, where he was effectively brainwashed into golf from the age of two, watching his father his shots for hours on end. Not only was he learning his craft from an extremely young age, he was also learning how to play like an ‘assassin’, to not only beat his opponents but to beat them by as much as he could. It’s clear to see how he became so dominant in the sport.

The cost of that level of success at such a young age was that he never really had a normal life, which was a big factor in the scandal that broke in 2009.

Any sport fan would enjoy this book, whether or not they follow golf. Well worth a read.

Highlight: The period of 2000-2007 when Woods was unbeatable on the tour.

The most disagreement off my list — the movie that the most readers argued should have been included — was 1985’s “A View to a Kill,” the seventh and final Bond adventure featuring Roger Moore as 007. This did not surprise me at all. “A View to a Kill” is routinely ranked around or at the absolute bottom of every other list of the worst Bond films. It’s been that way for decades.

I’m probably a bit biased, seeing as Roger Moore is my favourite Bond, but I agree that A View to a Kill doesn’t deserve to be at the bottom of the list of Bond films.

I don’t see Moore’s age as being much of an issue here ¹, nor do I find it too far fetched, which many argue Moore’s later films tend to be.

The film has two of the most memorable villains in the series in Zorin and Mayday. It has some great action sequences, (snowboarding, parachuting off the Eiffel Tower, a car getting cut in half, a fire truck chase, a blimp exploding above the Golden Gate Bridge. Am I missing anything?). It even has the whole MI6 gang at the races.

There’s a lot to love in this film.

The latest update to the MacBook line simplifies things nicely, making it easier to choose between models.

The 13 inch MacBook with physical escape has been replaced with an entry level model which includes a Touch Bar, True Tone display and a T2 chip. The MacBook Air is now cheaper, with a True Tone display, while the 12 inch MacBook is no more.

The most interesting decision for most people will be which to choose: the MacBook Air, or the similarly priced MacBook Pro 13 inch base model.

Stephen Hackett sums things up nicely:

Once you start poking around, you can see some differences. Upgrading from the $1,099 MacBook Air to $1,299 MacBook Pro comes with these features:

• A quad-core Intel processor, with twice the cores of the MacBook Air. While the base clock speed is slower on the Pro, its Turbo Boost frequency is higher, and in its higher-TDP application, the Pro should be able to sustain higher speeds for longer.
• A display that at 500 nits is a full 100 nits brighter than the MacBook Air. The Pro’s display supports the P3 wide color gamut while the Air does not.
• The Touch Bar. Your mileage will vary on how useful you find it.
• A slightly more robust Intel GPU. The Pro can push more external pixels, but performance wise, it shouldn’t be a night and day difference.
• Worse battery life. The Pro comes with a 58.2-watt-hour battery clocked at 10 hours on Apple’s “wireless web” test, but the Air’s 49.9‑watt‑hour unit tested at 12 hours. I’d blame that core count.

I think for almost everyone, the MacBook Air is the right notebook. It’s thin and light, with plenty of power for most tasks, but if you need a better GPU or more cores, the MacBook Pro is a logical upgrade.

T3:

Remember those high-resolution renders of the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max successor with the chunky square-shaped camera bump taking up an unhealthy amount of room in the top left-hand corner of the rear panel?

Well, it turns out those renders were probably very accurate.

Ok, there’s no denying that this camera bump is extremely ugly, but that is going to be a monster camera on the iPhone 11 (or iPhone XI..?).

This book is a bit of a blast from the past. I hadn’t read it in a number of years but I’m happy to report that it still brought as much laughs as the first time.

For anyone unfamiliar with the character, Ross O’ Carroll-Kelly is an exaggerated fictional south side Dubliner, coming of age in the Celtic Tiger era.

This is one of the early releases in the long list of ‘ROCK’ books, and follows Ross through his first year in UCD and his summer in the states afterwards.

If you’re looking for an easy read and some pre-recession laughs, it’s worth a read.

Highlight: Any interation with Ross and his doting father, affectionately nicknamed ‘dick-features’.

Big scoop over on 9to5mac about the next version of iOS. Apple are finally adding a system wide Dark Mode!

First, the long-awaited Dark Mode is finally coming to the iPhone and iPad with iOS 13. There will be a system-wide Dark Mode that can be enabled in Settings, including a high contrast version, similar to what’s already available on macOS. Speaking of macOS, iPad apps that run on the Mac using Marzipan will finally take advantage of the Dark Mode support on both systems.