Monthly Archives: August, 2025

Reversing the trend…

The Telo Truck

I’ve never really had the urge to buy an American pickup truck. And I can’t remember a time when I’ve seen a small electric car and wished it would be exported from the U.S. to Europe (rather than the other way around)!

So, for me, the Telo electric truck is a first on two counts. It’s not in production yet, but they have pre-release demo models and production is expected to start before the end of the year.

It can look like this:

Or like this:

Or you can open up the back of the cab and carry this:

You can carry an 8ft x 4ft sheet of plywood in the back without having to get the hardware store to cut it up for you.

All of which is very neat, and looks like just what we want for our boating trips. But the real genius is the fact that, because EVs give you such freedom to rethink the shape and layout of your vehicles, they’re able to make it this size:

I hope they do well. And make a right-hand-drive version.

Lesser-known uses of the Apple Watch

Camera Remote on an Apple Watch

I was doing some electrical work on the lights in our guest bedroom this morning, and wanted to turn the power off at the fuse box before I did so.

However, we have a lot of circuit breakers, and, though I have most of them carefully labelled, the three controlling the upstairs lights were not among them. So I was expecting to do a fair bit of running up and down stairs to see whether the one I had switched off did in fact control that particular light.

“There must be a technological solution to make this less energetic!”, I thought… and then remembered that my Apple Watch has the ‘Camera Remote’ app, which can give you a remote viewfinder for your phone’s camera. So I put the phone on the bed pointing up at the light, trotted downstairs, and flipped switches until my watch showed that the light had switched off. Perfect!

(I was feeling very pleased with myself for this solution, and only rather later did I remember that, since all the lights in the house are under the control of my Home Automation system anyway, I could simply have looked at that to see when the light had gone offline! But perhaps that wouldn’t have happened quite so instantly.)

One man in his time plays many parts…

I did like this article: 27 Notes on Growing Old(er), by the author Ian Leslie.

Excerpt:

Wisdom is meant to be the great compensation for growing older. Though your your knees sound like they’re unlocking a safe when you bend down, and you can’t straighten up without an “”oof””, you can at least revel in the depth of your insights into the human condition. Well, yes and no…

Do read the rest.

Thanks to John Naughton for the link.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser