Coming from Malaysia, I have quite the non-standard order of names with my surname being the in the center. It gets more complicated because most Malaysians don’t have a surname, so none of our official documents have a Surname / Firstname field, just a Name field.

Flight tickets always look bizarre because the order is off, and bits of the last part of my name is taken off. Surprisingly this has never been a problem with the airlines in Europe / NA / Asia. The only EU country to give me a grilling about the name was at the Italian border.

As I was holding a visa in the U.K. since 2010s, the home office’s compromise with me was to list my whole name as my last name. Thereby making documents in the U.K. match my passport name. Although since about 2 years ago, they’ve finally relented and recognised my last name as such.

Another odd side effect of this is that I have 2 credit scores, depending on the name order.

As an added bonus, the text that’s taped to the steering wheel tyre reads “Wednesday” in Chinese. Which seems to suggest a different wheel(s) for other days of the week.

Interestingly the $/£5 YouTube app being referenced in the article was whipped up by Christian, the dev of Apollo for Reddit. A post on his website details how’s he managed to get a relatively custom UI and video player using what appears to be browser extensions and the YouTube public API.

Very good explanation of why you should be skeptical online. I just wanted to chime in as someone who does eat dragon fruit regularly, that they are absolutely delicious when ripe. Although the red ones do stain quite bad.

Thanks for the question, it actually made me look for the api. Looks like I misremembered it, and there aren’t actually any exposed APIs for developers regarding attention. Internally it’s used by iOS for checking when you’re looking at the screen for faceID and keeping the screen lit when you’re reading.

There are APIs for developers that expose the position of the users head, but apparently it excludes eye information. Looks like it’s also pretty resource intensive, and mainly for AR applications.

The faceID / touchID api essentially only returns “authenticated”, “authenticating”, and “unautheticated”. The prompts / UI are stock iOS and cannot be altered, save showing a reason.

For what it’s worth, Apple has had an attention API ( for checking if the user is interacting / viewing ) since the debut of their facial tracking sensors on the iPhone X. Although, Apple makes its very clear it’s not to be used for ads and the such. If it helps I don’t know of any developers / Apple abusing that API.

I’ve been using my Tado thermostat for the past 5 years without any issue. It integrates well with HomeKit and home assistant. Its radiator valves are great at separating the heat around my home.

For smoke / CO detectors, I just have dumb ones. But I’ve noticed my HomePod mini has urgent notifications when they sound. Don’t know how accurate these are as they require sound recognition.

Unfortunately IT blocked Access installs because some staff were using it for mission critical processes, and upon leaving IT were required to maintain them. They felt excel was less likely to lead to scenarios like this.

Little did they know excel projects are probably worse to maintain.

I feel you. Working in healthcare, ms office is the only thing consistently installed site wide I can take advantage of to run a db.

Take a look at vinegar / baking soda as an extension for safari. It replaces the non-standard video players on websites like YouTube with a plain HTML5 player. Much smoother and you get all the iOS / macOS features like scrubbing and PiP. Plus it blocks ads as well!

I can really emphasise with Samir. Working in healthcare I’m basically limited to just the Office applications. However in the past few years I’ve been able to cook up solutions by reading / writing to file based databases, and using VBA to generate and bind to HTML contents on the fly for the built in IE11 instance. It’s as close to getting to some kind of web-stack within the confines of IT Sec in healthcare.