- Merry Christmas! My parents arrived on Christmas Eve and the cooking marathon began. While the ham boiled I had a couple of pints with my dad in the pub; everyone else visited the local church for its crib service.
- I used my well-honed cooking schedule from previous years, and aside from unexpectedly crumbly potatoes, the main event went smoothly. Next time I need to downsize the turkey: the quantity of leftovers was obscene.
- I received some excellent presents: AirPods Pro 2 (noticeably better in audio quality and noise-cancelling than my borked original ones), clothes, books, a saw, and of course, socks.
- We replaced the boys’ knackered, slow Amazon Fire tablets with 9th generation iPads, discounted heavily in the Black Friday sales. A huge upgrade for the boys. I preconfigured the iPads with new iCloud accounts and locked them down with Screen Time. We enabled iMessage for selected contacts (parents, grandparents and each other) and the boys quickly worked out how to send emojis, animated GIFs and silly messages to each other. The novelty hasn’t worn off.
- We also went all-in with the Premier Apple One bundle. The boys wanted their own Music accounts and because we already subscribed to iCloud storage, Arcade and TV+ the pricing made sense. I really should have Apple stock by now.
- The new bundle meant I needed to switch from my personal Spotify membership. I used the Pro version of Songshift to successfully transfer the playlists and 500-odd albums in my library. I expected a few albums not to be matched, but Apple Music’s catalogue is so large that it all worked seamlessly. I’m not missing Spotify. The UI had become so cluttered with podcasts and audiobooks. Music is just music.
- The boys, and especially C, are obsessed with the Super Mario Bros film. And the Peaches song, which is now my ear-worm.
- Finally, a bug swept through our home at the end of the week, scuppering our New Year’s Eve plans with friends. We instead put the boys to bed, had an Indian takeaway, watched a film and were soundly asleep before midnight. Onto 2024!
