When we first joined Facebook it was filled with chronological timelines kept active by university friends. At that time algorithms did not affect what we saw or how frequently and there was a sense of community. In the last two or three weeks we have heard a lot about Cambridge Analytica and other companies because they have siphoned off user data and used it to manipulate people in a number of political events.
A few months ago, before the winter months came I was happilly flying the drone up to four times a day. At the time I was running their old app and it worked flawlessly. You turned on the remote, turned on the drone and then you connected to the wifi hotpot and within 30 seconds you could be flying.
At some point in November the cheeky people designing the app decided to “simplify” everything with QR codes which is theoretically fantastic. In practice this locks you out from your own device. The remote and the drone work fine and I can fly the drone without a video display or telemetry and I can connect the phone to the wifi hotspot of the remote.
A few days ago I went towards the lake to take pictures. The wind was strong and cold. The temperature was close to -9°c. The last time we had such cold weather the lake side became beautiful as the porcelain ice formed around boats, trees, over grass and cars. As this only occurs every few years it is a rare treat.
No Swimming sign with ice
A post shared by Richard Azia (@richardazia) on Feb 26, 2018 at 4:25am PST
This morning rather than use the phone, check twitter, look at Facebook, or look at Instagram I took one of my two e-book readers. I have a Kobo and a Kindle device. I have both because I don’t want to lose all of my books if one company goes out of business.
Twitter and Facebook are filled with pushed content that we are not interested in. When we’re browsing our timelines it used to be to see what friends were doing or thinking about. For months now it has been re-shares and other impersonal content.
At the beginning of the year I said that I would prioritise book reading over Social Media because I feel that the disconnect between reader and audience has grown to such an extent that you benefit more from reading books than Facebook and Twitter Timelines.
Abandon : A book about a mining town whose inhabitants disappeared from one day to the next.
Snowbound: About a father and daughter who end up travelling a big distance
Earlier this week Google decided that it would shift from subsidising narrowcasting content makers to favouring “broadcasters”. This was demonstrated with their shift towards rewarding content creators with higher requirements. In order to be a youtube partner, you need people to have viewed 4000hrs worth of content and have over 1000 subscribers.
A few years ago when you browsed Youtube you would easily browse through hundreds of videos before finding content worth watching. You would then browse and find more content. It was organic.
The Gutenburg Press Plugin provides a new way to write blog posts. Rather than write as if a blog post was a single block of text it breaks it up into segments or “presses”
A few weeks ago a Gutenburg Press was brought to the Palais wilson and we had the opportunity to experiment with printing our own Universal Declaration of Human rights as part of the UDHR 70 event. In Gutenberg’s day you would have to typeset every letter character by character but for the sake of speed we just had two slates as you see above. One version was in French and the second one was in English. It made duplicating a single page instant.
For about six weeks I have been trying to do at least one seven-minute workout every single day. I eventually fell out of the habit for a few days because I had to fight a little virus. I’m feeling better again. Time to see if I can beat my old maximum of 36 days.
The Seven-minute app I was playing with is by Perigee. The app provides you with the opportunity to train for fitness, for strength or to lose weight. I tried to last for seven days on the Fitness program and suffered. I managed to stick with the routine for a week once as a challenge. Now I choose the routine that I feel I am most in the mood for. On some days I choose a stretching routine and on others I choose to push myself. I tried a chest workout and I found it hard. Yesterday I went for an animal routine and it was easy.
Sleep is something that we do almost every day and yet explore it only superficially. We either say “I should go to sleep” or “I wish I had slept longer”. Recently I read “Why We Sleep”. It’s an interesting book because it explores the topic in such depth. I learned that birds sleep on power lines and the birds on the right and the left of the group are sleeping with one eye open. Half of their brain is sleeping whilst the other half is awake. Half way through the sleep cycle they hop around and the other eye is opened and that half of the brain takes over. Sleep is a fascinating topic.