A few months ago I was thinking of getting a new iPhone SE and then I read that it would go up in price by at least 50 USD and that it would have an Apple modem and more and I lost interest in upgrading. For me the niche served by a budget phone is that it is affordable. By affordable I mean below 500 CHF to buy new, when it’s current.

There was a time when you got an Audible Subscription and you had access to 24 credits per year. You could choose 24 books per year. That’s a new book every two weeks. Eventually, after many years the plan and offer changed. You can now buy books from Audible, or you can borrow others from the Audlbe plus catalogue. In this manner you have access to thousands of books for “free”, as if you had a paying library membership.

This morning I went for a run. During this run I listened to Systems Crash and the discussion about AI, about the US attitude, and the European/International attitude and it convinced me that I much prefer to use EU/International projects rather than American ones for a simple reason. Corporate Social Responsibility. The US wants to move fast and break things, including the law, by hoovering data it has no moral rights to.

Yesterday I walked from Vevey to villeneuve with a stop in the castle for a visit before taking the train home. In the process we walked about fifteen kilometres along the lake. This was an easy pace for me. It was slow enough for my heart rate to be at seventy eight beats per minute, while walking, rather than over a hundred when I walk at my pace. For me this was a stroll but I thought I could hear the others short of breath.

Yesterday I was trolled by three people on Threads because of a comment on dating culture on Strava. I said that for me Strava is about networking rather than dating and for it one person said she friendzoned me, and two others were hostile rather than commenting in a friendly reason. For these three incidents of trolling I deactivated my Threads account and I am considering deactivating my Strava account.

This week I learned that mobile phones use mobile telephony for the emergency call system. This surprises me because I would expect them to use a fixed line rather than a mobile phone signal but also because when Swisscom or another telecom provider stop broadcasting on a frequency range like 3g, then all devices need to be updated to a newer standard. This means that all lifts need to be equipped with new mobile telephony devices.

A few minutes ago I looked at my Apple Watch and it said that I had not stood for the last two hours so I got up and walked around until it said that I had stood this hour. The irony is not lost on me that a watch would tell me that I am not active enough. The Apple Watch wants you to stand for a minute an hour for six to 18 hours per day.

Normally I like to go for a run in the afternoon, after I have had a productive morning. This morning I went for a run first. This afternoon I have to go to an indoor meeting, which doesn’t fill me with euphoria. I feel an e-mail would achieve the same thing within a few minutes. Having said this I have skipped that meeting for three or four years so I feel obligated to go this afternoon.

For a while Whatsapp was a fantastic cross platform messaging tool for friends, families, groups and more. It was cross platform, fast and convenient. Eventually rather than rely on Facebook Messenger and Facebook, Facebook bought Whatsapp to consolidate its monopolistic grasp on the social web. As a result of this I tried to dump Whatsapp but it is hard to do so. The reason for this is simple. Most people have not read Mindf*ck by Chris Whiley so for them it doesn’t matter that Facebook owns Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp, Oculus Quest and more.

I have often had the temptation to dump Audible.com since it was bought by Amazon but I haven’t. It used to be that I had so many books that I didn’t want to lose them. Now that I have my own self-hosting solution, Audiobookshelf, for my own listening of my own books I can toy the idea of sliding to another provider. The first option is Kobo. Kobo offers a plan for about 12 CHF per month for access to unlimited books to be read at once on its own catalgue but the catalogue is a quarter as big as that of Amazon/Audible so it would seriously limit what I can read and listen to.