The Lynx was interesting. It had a solid case with a keyboard — a design like the Commodore 64 and Vic-20. In those days most British microcomputers had advanced technology inside, they were rubbish on the outside. This was different.
The Lynx had a better specification than its rivals. Camputers offered a higher resolution than competitors and packed the latest ideas in the box. As my review points out, it was well-suited for machine-code programming. Computer buyers thought this was important in the early 1980s.
Camputers Lynx was late to the microcomputer party
As the Register says, the Lynx wasn’t a success. It arrived too late appearing at the end of the British microcomputer boom. And it was expensive compared with popular models. Camputers failed to attract interest from games developers. That proved fatal.
Camputers included a printer port on the back of the Lynx. I mentioned this in another story I wrote about the machine but failed to mention the printer port didn’t work.
Much to my embarrassment my boss at the time, Jack Schofield, pointed this out to me. My excuse — not a good one — is that Camputers had earlier showed me a demonstration where the machine printed text.
The demo Camputers Lynx unit must have been a non-production computer. I learnt an important lesson: don’t trust product demonstrations, trust only what you test yourself.
Anyone can download this kind of software without paying a fee. It doesn’t break any laws. You have the original developer’s permission to use it.
You can run the software, copy it and pass it on to friends and colleagues.
Free software is only part of the story. It isn’t the most important thing about open source. Yet free software is liberating.
Open source lets you look at code
What matters more is that you can look at the code used to write the software. This means you can see how the developers made the program.
If you have coding skills you can figure out what the developers did. You may be able to understand the assumptions and decisions they made when they wrote the code.
You can tinker with the code and release your own customised version.
Or perhaps you might spot a flaw or an area where the original developers could have done something better. When that happens you can send what you found to the developers and have them fix it, or you can fix it yourself and send them the improved version.
Improving software
This is how software evolves and improves over time. The same process can work with software that isn’t open, but letting everyone interested take a look speeds things up and often means better results.
When you tinker with, improve or fix open source software, you are expected to make your new version as freely available as the
original. That way others can follow your work, improve or fix it.
This is a virtuous circle.
Any piece of code can be open source. There are libraries of code snippets you can use to perform simple tasks or include in your own projects.
There are applications and even operating systems. Some of the best known software is based on open source.
Beyond free
While ‘free’ is an important part of the philosophy, there can be open source paid-for software. That is you can look at the code, but you have to pay to use it. The money is often used to pay for further development.
This approach has many of the same benefits. It means that people and companies can earn a living at the same time.
There are also many commercial and semi-commercial products and services that are build on open source foundations.
The opposite to open source software is often known as proprietary software. You can think of this as closed source. It is where someone, usually a company, owns the intellectual property. In some cases this can include patents.
As a rule you don’t get to see proprietary code and you pay to use the software. Until about 30 years ago all software was proprietary. A lot of enterprise and software used by government still is.
Open source now dominates the software world. Most of the world’s systems run on it. The web is open. Most phones run Android, which is a form of open source.
Windows 11 didn’t get a mention in last week’s look at the HP OmniBook X. That was deliberate. If HP’s, otherwise enticing, laptop has a weak spot, it is Microsoft’s operating system.
This was the first time I attempted to work using Windows 11. My previous encounters with the operating system were fleeting and shallow. I was skeptical of Windows 11 at launch, and this hands-on experience confirmed my concerns.
My next Windows 11 experience was on the Surface Laptop Studio, and once again, even excellent hardware can’t compensate for the OS’s frustrations.
When Windows switched from 7 to 8, my productivity dropped. Then I took the plunge with a MacBook. It wasn’t my first time with Apple, but that’s another story.
To say my productivity soared is putting it mildly, moving from Windows to Mac was like gaining an extra working day each week. That’s important when work pays by the word or by the hour.
Windows does some things better than MacOS. Upgrades are easier, working with third party hardware is easier. It also has a wider range of games and applications, not that any of that matters to me.
But, hear me out, it feels like Windows 11 treats users with contempt.
Notification hell
After a decade with MacOS I was shocked to see an important-looking notification appear in the bottom left hand corner of the Windows 11 display that turned out to be an advertisement. Microsoft literally interrupted my flow to direct me to where I could buy a third-party application.
This is not OK. Not in any conceivable world.
Another notification, sorry “new alert” flashed up. This might be acceptable if, say, World War III had started and I needed to head to a bunker. The ‘news’ story concerned a ‘celebrity’ I have never heard of doing something I don’t even remotely care about.
At some point, I was busy, so I didn’t take notes, a promotion for a game appeared.
This is not the future we signed up for
How can this even happen with a device that is meant to be a productivity tool?
Sure, all this can be turned off.
Actually I don’t know if it can be turned off. I’m presuming it can, but I couldn’t find where to mute these things without Googling… Except it wasn’t Google. It was Bing and Bing wasn’t forthcoming with the information.
Muting is not the point. These alerts are switched on by default. This is the Windows 11 experience Microsoft wants you to have.
Rightly or wrongly it feels as if Microsoft views Windows 11 users as a market to be milked for extra revenue at every possible opportunity.
Culture shock
This is not an Apple is better than Microsoft partisan rant. Well, not entirely. Apple pushes customers towards iCloud, Music and Apple TV among other services, but it doesn’t stop you from working in order to do this.
The point here is that after a decade away from Windows, revisiting the operating system is a culture shock. It wasn’t this way in 2012.
Before I sent the OmniBook X back to HP, I checked to see if it could run Linux as an alternative, non annoying, operating system. The official answer appears to be “not yet”. The correct answer is “Not soon enough”.
This post was written in March 2013 when Google killed Reader. It is a warning about relying on free services from big tech companies has been validated repeatedly since then. Google has killed over 200 products including Google+, Inbox, Hangouts, Stadia, Podcasts and many more. The lesson remains: sometimes free is too high a price. Updated 2025.
The company doesn’t make any money from its free web-based RSS reader, so its death doesn’t come as a surprise. After all,
Google is a business, not a charity.
Google Reader has been the best tool for that job for a long time. It has been so good that it has killed off most of its competition.
Nothing else compares
Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools simply don’t compare for this kind of work. RSS feeds provide comprehensive lists, social media tends to give a fleeting snapshot.
There are other RSS tools, none of them work as well as Google Reader. It has the best interface for quickly scanning large numbers of posts, it has decent search tools built-in.
If Google started charging for Google Reader, I’d happily pay. It would be worth the fee.
There’s a disturbing side to Google’s decision to shut Google Reader. Before Reader there was a healthy set of competing RSS readers. One by one these fell by the wayside because they were unable to compete with the search giant’s free service.
Google entered the space, wiped out the competition and now it is leaving the space.
Jamie Tanna’s post lists many good reasons to have a website. Tanna writes from a software engineer’s point of view. Many of the reasons he offers translate directly to other trades and professions.
Your own place online
A powerful reason is to own your own little patch of the online world, what people used to call cyberspace. As Tanna says your patch can be many things, a hub where people contact you, an outlet for your writing and other creative work, or a sophisticated curriculum vitae.
Now you may be thinking you can do all these things on Facebook, Twitter, Medium or Linkedin. That’s true up to a point.
Yet you don’t own those spaces. You are part of someone else’s business model. You don’t have control over how they look, you can’t even be sure they will be there in the long term.
After all, there were people who thought the same about Geocities, Google+ or MySpace in the past.
Do it yourself
Creating your own site takes time, effort and maybe a little money. It doesn’t have to take a lot of any of these things.
You’ll need to pay for a domain name… that’s roughly $20 a year. If you are hard-pressed financially there are free options with companies like WordPress. You can get a basic WordPress site up in an hour or so.
You don’t need to be a writer to own your own website. If you post things to Facebook or Twitter, use your site instead (or as well as). It could be a place for photography.
One thing you will find is that a website gives you more of a voice than you’ll get on other people’s sites.
“Some storytellers and influencers are also migrating from personal sites toward individual channels on Medium, Blogger, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube. But there’s a risk here — those creating and sharing unique content on these channels can lose ownership of that content. And in a world where content is king, brands need to protect their identity.”
As you might expect, Morrison is keen on changing the downward trajectory for domain name registration, but he has a valid point – why would you put the fate of your business in the hands of a platform owned by someone else? Sure, use Facebook etc to engage with your customers, but why not maintain control over your own brand? It baffles me, especially as creating a website is so much easier than it used to be.
At ITP Techblog Sarah Putt sees the issue of using Facebook or another social media site as a matter of branding.
She is right. Branding is important.
Yet the issue doesn’t stop there.
A site of your own
Not owning your own domain name, your own website, means you are not master or mistress of your online destiny. It’s that simple.
If you place your trust in the big tech companies, they can pull the rug at any moment.
This isn’t scaremongering. It has happened time and again. In many cases companies have been left high and dry. Some have gone under as a result.
The big tech companies care no more about the small businesses who piggyback off their services than you care about the individual microscopic bugs living in your gut.
Media companies learned this lesson the hard way. A decade or so ago Facebook and Google have made huge efforts to woo media companies. They promised all kinds of deals.
Many of those companies that went in boots and all are now out of business. Gone. Kaput.
Pulling the plug
Google pulled the plug on services like Wave and Google+ almost overnight after persuading media companies to sign up.
Big tech companies change their rules on a whim. Some of those whims meant cutting off the ways media companies could earn revenue.
Few media companies ever made any much money from the online giants. Those who managed to survive in a fierce and hostile landscape had nowhere to go when the services eventually closed. Many sank without a trace.
Sure, you may have heard stories about people who have made money from having an online business presence on one of the tech giants’ sites. You may also have heard stories about people winning big lottery prizes. The odds are about the same.
Yes, it can be cheap, even free in some cases, to hang out your shingle on Facebook or Google. But it is never really your shingle. It’s theirs.
The case for your own domain name
On the flip side, starting your own web site is not expensive. You can buy a domain name and have a simple presence for the price of a good lunch.
It doesn’t have to be hard work. You don’t need something fancy. And let’s face it, most Facebook companies pages are nothing to write home about either.
Use WordPress. It is not expensive. There’s plenty of help around to get you started. Depending on your needs you can choose between WordPress.com or WordPress.org.
The important thing is the site is entirely your property.
I often hear one argument in favour of working with Facebook. It goes somewhere along the lines of ‘fishing where the fish swim’. It’s true, your customers probably are on Facebook. There’s nothing to stop you from going there to engage with with them… just make sure you direct them to your independent web site.
For several years now, the trend among geeks has been to abandon the RSS format. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a way to queue up and serve content from the internet.
Geeks might not like RSS, but it’s an essential tool if you monitor news or need to stay up to date with developments in a subject area.
An RSS feed is a way of listing online material. There’s a feed for this site if you’re interested. It sends out a short headline and an extract for each new post. That way you can stay up to date with everything published here without needing to constantly revisit the site to check for updates.
Separate feeds
Some big sites break up their news rivers into separate feeds. At the New York Times or The Guardian you can choose to read the technology news feed. At ZDNet you can pick subject feeds or selected a feed for an individual journalist.
Sometimes you can also roll your own niche feeds from big sites by using a search term to get a list of all stories including a certain key word.
The beauty of RSS is that it is comprehensive. It misses nothing. If you go offline for a week you can pick up where you left off and catch up immediately.
RSS is comprehensive
The alternatives are social media sites like Twitter or Facebook. They are nothing like as comprehensive or as easy to manage.
Tweets go flying past in a blur on Twitter.
All the main social media sites manage your feed. They decide what you see. This means you can miss important posts as they get pushed out of sight. That doesn’t happen with RSS.
In his story David Sparks says you need to be on Twitter all the time to catch news. Make that: you need to be on Twitter all the time AND staying more alert than most people can manage.
Universal feed
The other great thing about RSS is the format is so universal. It can be as simple as raw text. You can read it on your phone, tablet, computer or anywhere at any time. You can suck it out and place it on your own web site, for instance.
There are RSS readers built into browsers, mail clients like Outlook and other standard software. Or at least there were. I haven’t checked again lately. Feedly is one of the most popular readers. This is both a website and a series of free apps. You can pay a little extra to extra features such as an ability to search feeds, tools for integrating feeds into your workflows and so on.
Not long after becoming a technology journalist I met Adam Osborne.
Osborne invented the portable computer. Let’s be honest, his computer was luggable.
We borrowed one for review.
It was obvious a portable computer would change everything. It set us on the path to the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy phones.
Osborne was a visionary, even if he wasn’t a good businessman — the company went bust after two years.
One thing Osborne said struck a chord at the time: “Adequate is good enough”.
No fannying about
He meant engineers should get a product to the point where it was adequate then send it out the door, no fannying about making it perfect.
It’s a philosophy software companies like Google and Microsoft built fortunes on. Apple, on the other hand, fannies about making everything perfect.
Android works on the adequate is good enough premise. Netbooks were adequate for most users. So was Windows. The fuss over Windows 8 comes down to the simple idea that for many users it isn’t adequate and therefore not good enough.
Good enough
If you’re not a power user, a gamer or an Apple addict you can pick up an adequate and, therefore, good enough, laptop for well under $1000. It’ll do everything you throw at it and then some.
There should be enough change from $1000 for an adequate but good enough phone. It may not have the latest features, but it’ll meet the needs of all but the most demanding users.
None of this is an argument against buying great kit. It’s your money: spend it how you like. But remember most of the time, you don’t have to break the bank to buy tech gear.
_This post was originally published in September 2012, so it’s now about events that happened close to 45 years ago. Oddly, I can remember this very well, better than many recent products and launches. _
Jupiter Cantab’s Jupiter Ace has just turned 30. It is a curious footnote in the history of personal computing.
I still remember the Ace quite well, mainly because it was a quirky home computer. We called them home computers in the early 1980s, the term personal computers came later.
Go Forth with Jupiter Ace
While every other home computer used Basic, the Jupiter Ace used Forth.
Early home computers didn’t have disks or operating system in the modern sense – although you could store programs and data on cassette tape. They mainly had a version of the Basic language stored on Rom.
Basic is an interpreted language. Each line of code is processed or interpreted in turn rather than compiled into machine code. This made it slow.
We need to put slow needs in context here. The Jupiter Ace had an eight-bit processor running at 3.2Mhz. That is roughly 1000th the clock speed of a modern PC.
Forth is still interpreted, but it uses a different structure, so it is many times faster than Basic. It was designed to control radio telescopes, so it was idea for building computer controlled-projects. I had just built a synthesizer and had plans to use the Ace to build a drum machine.
However, it was harder to learn and much harder to understand. And, as I now know, I’m not geek enough for that kind of thing.
At the time a friend described it to me as a write-only-language. So the Ace was essentially a computer for serious programmers. That’s not me. I tried to get my head around Forth, but the Ace was soon in a cupboard somewhere collecting dust.
T
hanks to Liam Proven @lproven for spotting my name in The Register story.
“It doesn’t matter what app it is – they all try to get me to turn on notifications, again and again, so that I can come back to their service. Facebook and Instagram are the most aggressive”.
There comes a point where notifications are counter-productive. In my case I first smelled a rat with Linkedin because of the constant barrage of notification mails. The service seemed desperate to get my attention.
Sure, there can be some notifications that should stop you in your tracks. It’s possible to allow family members or important colleagues to cut through. As for the rest… they can go
I killed my LinkedIn account. Nothing bad happened. In all the years I was a member I got maybe, one small freelance writing gig from LinkedIn. Since leaving my work in-tray is as full as it was and I’ve eliminated a time-sink.
Leaving Facebook is harder. There are people who are important to me who I’m in touch with there. The don’t seem to have any alternative online life. So the account lives, but I’ve turned off all notifications. In fact I’ve turned off almost all notifications from every online service or piece of software.
The only exceptions are where I need to react fast for business reasons. And, anything relating to my immediate family.
Here’s the thing. Nothing bad has happened. If anything I’m more productive.
Notifications are often not about serving our needs, but are about someone else’s business model.
There is also a nuclear option. Choose one day a week to turn everything digital off: have a digital sabbath.
More than 20 years on, Macs and MacBooks are still not typewriters.
Yet Apple’s iPad might be.
My iPad links to an Apple Wireless Keyboard and runs iA Writer. This combination gives me the closest thing I’ve seen in 25 years of computing to an old-school manual typewriter.
For a journalist that’s a good thing.
Typewriter easy
Apple didn’t design the iPad with word processing in mind.
On its own the iPad is a poor writing tool. Although the larger on-screen keyboard makes for better typing than using a smartphone.
Yet here I am tapping away and loving the experience more than I have done since my last typewriter ribbon dried up back in the 1980s.
Have I taken leave of my senses?
Let me count the ways I love you
Three things make the iPad typewriter-like:
1. Radical simplicity.
The iPad, Apple’s Wireless Keyboard and iA Writer make for simple and distraction free writing.
There’s no mouse. That’s great because lifting hands off the keyboard to point and click is the number one cause of pain for old-school touch typists working on PCs.
Until you stop writing, the keyboard controls everything.
At the same time, the crisp serif text on a plain screen is the nearest thing to a type on a sheet of paper. Wonderful.
2. Text editor
iA Writer is a text editor. Not a word processor.
There’s nothing dancing on my screen. No pop-ups, no incoming email. At least not the way I’ve set things up.
It is just me and my words. The only word processor-like feature is the iPad’s built-in spell checker, which mainly stays out of the way.
Best of all, iA Writer doesn’t do page layout. I don’t care how my words look because I can’t tinker. That’s one less thing to worry about.
This all adds up to fast, productive writing.
3. Quick on the draw
Typewriters don’t need to warm-up, to boot or load applications. Nor does the iPad.
My normal morning practice with a laptop was to make a cup of tea while waiting for the PC to be ready for writing. The iPad is ready in seconds.
I can get my thoughts down while they are still fresh. The first 100 words or so are nailed on the iPad before I’d get started on the PC.
The best computer bits are still there
While my iPad writing combination kills the bad stuff about word processing, it keeps the best feature: The ability to go back over copy and make corrections. This was always a pain when using a typewriter.
And I send my writing to just about anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds. Try doing that with a real typewriter.
Other iPad typewriter plus points
My iPad and keyboard are a lot easier to carry than my ageing and neglected portable typewriter – and easier than my laptop.
The battery life is long. I can work a whole day without needing to find a power point.
iA Writer uses cloud storage. You can choose DropBox or Apple’s iCloud. This means my work is available to me on any computer anywhere in the world.
The Mac still might not be a typewriter, but the iPad does the job.
PR and marketing people hate it when journalists describe products as ‘cheap’. We get phone calls asking us to change the word to ‘budget’ or ‘affordable’.
That’s because while ‘cheap’ means you can get something at a low price, it has a secondary meaning where the word can be used to mean ‘inferior’.
It’s not as though ‘budget’ doesn’t have a similar implication when the word is used as an adjective. No-one thinks a budget airline is going to deliver a good experience.
Oh yeah?
There’s a “says who?” problem with ‘affordable’.
That $3000 laptop might be affordable to a marketing manager. A bus driver or nurse might not consider it affordable.
Journalists should not use words like that. There’s a risk of making readers feel bad about themselves. There’s a danger we’re acting as unpaid promoters when using the language of marketing.
We’re not perfect. I searched my site and found I have used the word 40 times over 13 years and 1500 posts.
In many cases the word is a quotation.
Guilty of using cheap
Yet, your honour, at times I’m guilty as charged.
I’ve used ‘affordable’ at least a dozen times without stopping to think there could be readers who don’t agree with that word choice.
The same logic applies to the word ‘inexpensive’. My inexpensive might not be your inexpensive.
Much of the time journalists use words like ‘cheap’ or ‘affordable’ to contrast with ‘expensive’ or ‘unaffordable’.
Now there are two words that would get a marketing person annoyed if they appeared in a story about a product.
Although not always. The Samsung sales executives showing off the company’s folding phones a year ago were happy to position the product at the premium end of the range. A high price can be a marketing strategy.
As can ‘cheap’. Yet for some reason marketing people prefer that we don’t mention that.
I wrote this for the Sydney Morning Herald in 2007. It’s now a piece of history.
If smartphones haven’t killed off traditional handheld computers yet, the day can’t be far away. Sales of non-phone Palm and PocketPC devices are stagnant or falling. There’s been nothing much in the way of new hardware for a couple of years.
Sure, but something huge was on the way.
This is a pity. I’ve found my $500 Palm T|X to be one of my most productive tools. It goes way beyond managing my contact file and calendar information.
My word, what low expectations we had in those days.
The T|X has a 3.8 inch 480 by 320 display. While you wouldn’t call it large, it’s half as big again as the screen on most smartphones.
But tiny by today’s standards.
It makes reading text, browsing web pages, viewing photographs and even watching movies a better experience than squinting at a smartphone display.
Which was true at the time.
The 128MB of built-in memory doesn’t sound much by today’s standards, yet I’ve got a dozen or so applications running on my handheld and scores of stored documents. If I need more memory, I simply slot in an SD card.
That sounds even less now.
And we’re not talking about any old documents. The T|X comes with a bundled version of Documents To Go, an application that allows you to read and, in a limited way, edit, Word or Excel files. It can also be used to read .pdfs, making it the nearest thing to an electronic book.
OK, this looks a bit daft today, but at the time the T|X was a realistic ebook reader.
The T|X’s best feature is its built-in WiFi. When I’m travelling around the city, I stop for coffee where’s there’s a free hot spot and catch up on emails. Sure you can do this anywhere with a smartphone – but the bigger screen makes a difference.
WiFi is still wonderful.
I use WiFi to sync my Palm with my desktop before leaving home and then reverse the process when I return.
This was a novelty.
The T|X isn’t perfect, text entry is clumsy and the battery won’t make it through an extended working day if the wireless is switched on. Yet, all-in-all, it manages to better the specification of smartphones in most departments. When I’m on business away from home I carry a smartphone and a T|X.
No doubt a phone manufacturer will marry the features of the T|X with a smartphone before much longer – judging by the announced specifications Apple’s forthcoming iPhone could get there first.
Sir Clive Sinclair, the inventor and entrepreneur who was instrumental in bringing home computers to the masses, has died at the age of 81.
His daughter, Belinda, said he died at home in London on Thursday morning after a long illness. Sinclair invented the pocket calculator but was best known for popularising the home computer, bringing it to British high-street stores at relatively affordable prices.
Many modern-day titans of the games industry got their start on one of his ZX models. For a certain generation of gamer, the computer of choice was either the ZX Spectrum 48K or its rival, the Commodore 64.”
My first brush with Sinclair was as an A-level student in the UK. Before he made computers, Sinclair designed a low-cost programmable calculator.
It fascinated me and, thanks to a well-paid part-time job, I managed to buy one. From memory it could only handle a few programmable steps, but it was enough to make complex calculations.
My second job after university was working as a reporter for Practical Computing magazine. I started in January 1980 and quickly became familiar with the original Sinclair ZX80 computer.
Later that year I went to the launch of the ZX81 and met Sinclair for the first time. Over the next few years he became a familiar face.
That modest, clunky ZX81 computer changed everything. Before 1981 was out, the publishing company I worked for started Your Computer magazine which focused on small, low-cost home computers. For the first few issues I was staff reporter on both titles.
The next two years were a wild roller coaster ride. An entire industry emerged and I was in the centre of it.
ZX Spectrum was Sinclair’s definitive product
For me, Sinclair’s most important product was the ZX Spectrum. It was flawed in many ways, but it could do enough to spawn a generation of entrepreneurs and get thousands of young people into computing. I still have one in my attic.
By the time the later Sinclair QL appeared, low-cost computers with decent keyboards and storage were pushing out the minimal, low-cost options Sinclair specialised in.
By now Sinclair was Sir Clive. My last brush with his business was the ill-fated C5 battery powered vehicle. It failed and Sinclair faded from sight, later the remnants of his computer business were picked up by Amstrad.
My main memories of Sinclair were his enthusiasm and his ambitions to build devices that anyone, regardless of budget, could afford.
I wrote this post in 2009 when spending one day a week offline was far less challenging than it is today. These days I might only get a day away from all digital screens every month or so.
Here’s the idea:
Set aside one day a week when you don’t switch your computer on.
A day when you don’t check mail, update Facebook or tweet.
No firing up the desktop for game playing.
It doesn’t need to be the same day every week. You may have to trim things according to needs and deadlines. You may only be able to manage one day a fortnight.
Go off-line and let the brain rest. Or, if not rest, allow it to change gear.
Take a break instead of constantly responding to incoming messages. Just let them pile up.
There’s always tomorrow.
You can de-stress. And before you say you find it stressful not being in constant touch with cyberspace, think again. You know that isn’t true.
The online world will go on without you.
Read books, chat to friends, play sport, enjoy the sunshine or bake muffins instead.
That way, when you get back online, you’ll be refreshed. It is like a mini holiday. It may sound like a cliché, but I work better after taking a day-long break from my computer.
Digital sabbath not original
The digital sabbath is not an original idea. If you are religious, the first sabbath came at the end of the first recorded week. The Biblical creation story says God rested on the seventh day.
Ancient Jews worked for six days then strictly observed the Shabbat when many everyday things were not allowed. They knew this was mentally and physically healthy.
I
first heard about the idea of a digital sabbath in an online forum – sadly I don’t recall who or where the original idea comes from.
Problems
It is harder to take even one day’s rest from the digital world if you have a smartphone, an ebook reader or if you use the computer as an entertainment hub for music and video. And you may have a job, or some other responsibilities that make going off-line difficult.
Nevertheless, I suggest you do what you can to give it a try, reconnect once a week with the analogue world.
I’m not perfect
I’d like to report I take a full day away from my computer every week. The truth is, I don’t always manage it. Although I try to schedule a full day off each week, I generally only get a couple of full-blown digital sabbaths each month.
Originally published December 2011. Updated January 2026. After 40+ years in technology journalism, this principle remains central to my work.
Why detachment matters in journalism
The percentage may have changed slightly—technology has seeped deeper into everyone’s lives since 2011—but the core principle hasn’t: maintaining distance from geek culture makes for better technology journalism.
This isn’t about lacking technical knowledge. It’s about perspective. Technology journalists serve readers, not industry insiders. The moment you write primarily for other technology enthusiasts rather than the people who actually use technology in their daily lives and work, you’ve failed your audience.
I’m not comfortable when I’m with other technology journalists who want to talk about Star Trek or Dungeons and Dragons.
To say these things don’t interest me is an understatement.
We have science fiction books on our shelves at home. Visitors to our house assume they are mine. They are not. They belong to Mrs B. And apart from her reading tastes, she is even less geeky than me.
Computers do not mean geek
Most of the points I scored on the geek test come from work. After all, I’ve spent years writing about computers and technology, I know the difference between a Rom and a Ram.
Of course, I have more than one dictionary. It’s a journalist thing – they are tools of my trade. And yes, I confess I correct people’s grammar. Editing has been my job for most of my adult life.
In the past, people have commented on my non-geek status making me the wrong person to edit a newspaper’s computer pages, run a computer magazine or write about technology.
Detached
I disagree. A level of detachment means I can make better rational decisions. I’m less tempted to air my prejudices. It means I write for ordinary people, not geeks. In fact one of the skills I’m most proud of is being able to explain tricky things in plain English.
I’m a journalist first, technology specialist second. I can – and have – written about most subjects.
And anyway, most of my work has been writing for non-geek audiences. My lack of geekiness means I can better serve their needs.
This approach proved especially valuable when covering New Zealand’s technology industry. Local companies need journalists who can explain their innovations to potential customers and investors, not just other technologists. Being able to translate technical developments into business and economic terms serves both the industry and the public better than insider jargon ever could.
The same applies when covering telecommunications regulation, business model challenges in media, or the impact of technology on society. These stories require understanding the technology, but they’re fundamentally about people, economics, and social change.
My journalism training taught me to ask “why should readers care?” before “how does this work?” That order matters. Geeks often reverse it.
Journalism first, technology second
This reader-first approach shaped how I’ve covered journalism itself. When publishers struggled with digital transformation, the story wasn’t about the technology—it was about business models, audience relationships and sustainable journalism.
When paywalls and subscriptions became necessary, the challenge wasn’t technical implementation but convincing readers of the value proposition. When ad-blocking threatened publishers, it was fundamentally about the broken relationship between readers, publishers, and advertisers.
Technology enables or constrains these developments, but it’s never the whole story. That’s why detachment from geek culture remains an asset, not a liability.
More on journalism and media:This post is part of ongoing coverage about journalism practice, business models and the craft of technology reporting:
It doesn’t drive much traffic to my website, if any… but it gives me a lot of what Twitter no longer can. Also, it meshes nicely with Mastodon.
My site traffic is down by between 20 and 30 per cent now I’m not active on Twitter. I could make a faustian pact to get that traffic back, but at least I’m comfortable with myself.
My segment on RNZ Nine-to-Noon programme yesterday.