Apple Intelligence isn't just an inferior product, it seems to actively make everything it touches worse. Lasted three days before turning it all off. Does time just make everything worse? It seems to.

I bought Forza Horizon 4 on Steam because it was super cheap, and everyone says it runs better than 5 (it does seem to), and it's so fun. I feel like I knew, but it didn't occur to me, that it's set in England and that might mean I would recognise parts of it. It has the Southwick Hill Tunnel (or something that looks a lot like it), and they talk about Broadway, which is a Cotswold village where we used to go and get sweets as kids when we passed our driving test. Is this how Americans feel about every other game?

It does have one thing I hate though. The licensing for all the DLC expired so you can't buy any of it any more. Fortunately, that means that all of the signposting and upselling from the game is gone, too. I mean, it wouldn't make sense to regularly nudge me to buy DLC that I can't buy so it's good that that's all gone.

Of course it's not gone. The game is still full of nags to upgrade, and there's a big LEGO logo on the map that you can't interact with unless you like looking at feature lists for dead DLC, then clicking links to Steam pages that don't exist any more. Personally, that's not what gaming is about.

It's a shame because the game is a lot of fun. I'm hoping that I can ignore the completist side of my brain long enough to play the game until I can't win races any more, then let it fall down my recently played until I fully forget about it like I did with Forza Horizon 5. In fact I should probably get the 5 DLC whilst I still can, so that that can gather digital dust in some database row with my user ID on it.

Licensing is truly one of the worst things about 21st century media. It makes me laugh that a thing designed to curb piracy and preserve ownership actually does neither.

Does anyone have a contact at the EU? If they're going to legislate on cookies, I'm going to need them to step in on share-tracking. Spotify, YouTube, Facebook, probably others; when you share a link, they add an fbclid, si, whatever, unique ID to your link that they can use to track who you shared that link with and associate you with people even if you're not friends with them on that platform.

If you share links from these platforms with people, please strip that crap out before you share. iMessage has added an extremely unhelpful feature that automatically obfuscates these share-tracking links by loading previews immediately so you can't even see that you're sharing these links.

I hate technology and the people who create it. The internet had such potential and we let the scumbag normies in and they've ruined it.

It has taken me about two months to drop Google as my search engine and web browser. The reason it's taken so long is the alternatives suuuck. Oh my god they suck.

I am now using DuckDuckGo as my search engine and the results are bafflingly stupid sometimes. You'll run a search and it chooses completely the wrong word in your query to focus on, and there doesn't seem to be a thing you can do about it. But I'm now just used to it?

I've switched browsers to Firefox because Google are limiting the extent that ublock can block ads, and this is the most difficult one. Stupid search results, I can live with, but Firefox is unbelievably annoying in some ways.

I do a lot of local web development, and I have dnsmasq running the localdev TLD. Both Chrome and Firefox do not like it when I go to clientname.localdev - both search that value in your default search engine. Both require you, first time, to enter http://clientname.localdev. Annoying. Firefox, however, requires you to enter http:// every time you type out a subfolder path on an existing fake domain for the first time, too. Google has figured it out but Firefox just cannot and it makes me scream every time I type out clientname.localdev/path/to/something and end up on a list of search results rather than my local version of that site. As I write this, it occurs to me that I could point one of my real domains to localhost and it might solve that problem, but I feel like I shouldn't have to do that!

That's the primary annoyance but there's loads of other slightly annoying things about Firefox that make me want to jump out of the window (we live in a bungalow). I think I'm now just used to being annoyed all the time.

Is this what it means to be a grumpy old man? I don't care for it.

I think it's maybe a symptom of advancing age but I've been enjoying watching sports a lot lately. Between F1 and badminton, I spend a fair amount of time on this already, but apparently there's always time for more. I like having it on in the background, too. Something about the sound of sport creates an atmosphere that I find comfortable. F1 is good for this; anything with an engine is good background noise.

I wanted to try watching some NBA again; I used to watch it a lot as a kid so I watched a Lakers game. I also had no idea what the format of an NFL game was but I've been super intrigued about it for a long time so I watched a match and loved it. Hugely preferred it to basketball, so I've signed up for a DAZN mid-season pass to watch some more NFL for the rest of the year. Who wants to talk football? I don't know anything about it and I'm going to have questions.

In a game where you can play as a pangolin, how are you going to play as anything other than a pangolin? Don't talk to me about axolotls; have you even seen a pangolin?

I've just used Cloudflare's Under Attack Mode for the first time, and it stopped a Denial of Service within about 10 seconds. I'm so impressed. I don't know why - Cloudflare's stuff usually Just Works, but I don't think I was expecting it to work that well/quickly.

We don't deserve Cloudflare. I don't even mind it being the basket I put all my eggs in.