aziraphale

> Neil describes his pre-university education as “High School”. We don’t have “High School” in the UK - we call it “Secondary School”. This might make sense if Neil was American, or trying to communicate with an American audience, but there’s no indication that this is the case.

Many secondary schools in the UK still have "High School" in their name. I've always used the two terms interchangeably, but maybe that's because I went to "<TownName> High School", or maybe it's because I'm old.

15" Retina MBP late 2013 with original battery. System reports 142 cycles (I mostly use it at a desk) and condition Normal.

Unfortunately it's not at all normal, it's swollen to the extent that the bottom of the case is slightly warped and the macbook will no longer sit flat. It's also affected the trackpad which doesn't click very well any more. I noticed these things a while back but didn't realise that the battery was the cause until I opened it up a couple of days ago to clean it out (something I do once or twice a year).

Now awaiting a battery replacement kit from iFixit and not looking forward to removing the old one. Probably going to try the dental floss method someone mentioned above (very, very carefully and far away from anything flammable).

Anyone who did Blackberry development back in the day, before OS 10 and Android, knows why they're now in this state. It was an abysmal experience, and they either didn't care or didn't understand the importance of keeping developers onside once Apple and Google started taking market share. Code-signing servers that were down on a regular basis, sometimes for days, which meant you couldn't deploy your app to real hardware. Simulators that took 5-10 minutes to start up and had no hot-reloading. God knows how many different system configurations that you were expected to support, with different screen sizes, bit-depth, input devices, internet connectivity (they used to offer mobile data plans which would only connect to "approved" services), etc. No official developer support beyond the sparsely-populated community forums. It was just horrible.

Then when something finally did click it was far too late (by at least 5 years) to improve their own ecosystem, hence the jump to Android.

I have very little sympathy for them now. You reap what you sow.