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I noticed a drop in traffic to the blog which I would attribute to three things. The main reason is that I went from main-vision.com/richard/blog to blog.main-vision.com. This screwed up all the search engine results, despite adding the redirection order in the htaccess file.

As if that wasn’t silly enough I then redirected my blog back to its original place to see if that would revive traffic and of course I can’t tell. I can’t tell because I don’t know whether the posts I am writing now have less relevance or if the posts I am writing now are no longer showing up in results, due to the twice changed URL.

The Old Scooter and Winter

Winter is coming, and with the arrival of winter comes the need to swap the tyres from summer to winter. In the process of getting the snow tyres out of the cave I pulled out my old scooter. The one that I used when I had a one month driving ban for speeding. I would not have been driving above the speed limit if I was not stuck behind someone driving below the speed limit.

For up to three months I was running my own instance via Masto.host and the experience was good. Setting up an instance is easy. Within a few minutes you can set up your own instance, post and perform administrative tasks such as accept trending hashtags and more.

No DevOps and No Code Required

Masto.host is great for non-technical people because it doesn’t require any specialist knowledge. You create a Masto.host account, and then you choose the cheapest server option. Bring up the instance it and you’re ready to go. It’s as easy as ordering a pizza, or in fact easier, because the choice is “Give me the cheapest option”.

Recently Apple shot its entire keynote on their most expensive mobile phone. Whilst this sounds fantastic and empowering, it isn’t. In my eyes this is a marketing gimmick and a sad commentary on the state of video production today.

Video as Art

Video is an art. Video is a creative pursuit. If you use an iphone to film a keynote then you do show that the cameras are high quality. This is available at a cost of 1750 CHF for the 1 terabyte iphone 15 Pro Max. That’s a lot of money for a phone that you can’t drop, without breaking the front or back pieces of glass. That’s 1750 CHF for a camera where you can’t swap the battery if you run out of juice. That’s 1750 CHF for a camera that doesn’t have a proper lense on the front.

A few days ago I saw that heavy rain was announced for that afternoon so I thought that I would not go for a walk. In the end I did go for a walk in the heavy rain. I was wearing a reasonable rain coat so I could have stayed dry if I had also worn rain trousers.

I didn’t wear rain trousers so for at least half the walk I was okay. I wasn’t too wet. Eventually though I started walking into the wind and my trousers started to get wet. Usually when you walk in the rain it’s not that your coat fails you. It’s that the clothing that is not protected from the rain whicks the water upwards, from your trousers, to your t-shirt, to your sweater, to your fleece. In the end you’re soaking wet.

For those of us living in Europe we now have the option of paying for Facebook and Instagram, not to see ads. In theory this is fantastic and we should be jumping on the opportunity.

I don’t feel that way. I had plenty of conversations, with uni friends, colleagues and more, until Zynga brought Farmville. When Farmville spammed our timelines and killed all conversations the value of Facebook as social network was destroyed because instead of conversing and networking we were taking care of virtual farms. We went from spending time with friends to wasting our online time. Our social bonds degraded and Facebook went from being social to being lonely.

According to Goodreads I am currently reading 97 books but in reality I am reading between three to five books consistently at the moment. I read several books at once because it gives me time to absorb ideas from one book whilst reading a second book, and then a third, and so on.

I, Robot

Although the book was written in 1950 it is still worth reading today. It shows the way people thought about computers back then. It shares the idea of huge robots, because of how big components were at the time, but it also theorises about how robots could seem irrational but have rational reasons for such behaviour. “Why are the robots dancing? I won’t continue down this topic because I don’t want to spoil the book for those that are not reading the book yet.

Four or five years ago I tried to download an audiobook to the Apple Watch and I gave up. I saw that it would take hours so I gave up. At the time we would download podcasts to our laptops or phones, and play them once we had them stored locally. The same is true of audiobooks, especially since audiobooks can be hundreds of megabytes.

A Different Age

That failure, half a decade ago resulted in me never trying to play audio books or podcasts from my watch, and yet it is the most rational thing to do. it’s rational because when you’re at home, walking around, listening to a podcast and going from room to room, having an apple watch and airpods makes more sense than an iphone with a tethered connection. At the time airpods were still young. I don’t remember whether I had them yet.

According to Apple Health I take an average of 14,553 steps per day, over the last year. It doesn’t stop there. Not only do I take fourteen and a half thousands steps per day on average but I run up, up to fourty five floors per day and I walk at six kilometres per hour, rather than the four kilometres per hour that normal people walk.

Articles like this speak about walking pace, number of steps per day, as well as steps climbed in some cases.

With a user like me it takes a year or two for a mobile phone to become depleted. After this period of time I am stuck with the weight of an external battery that I have to plug in half way through the day to recharge the device. This is, in part, due to how many apps are installed and running, on my phone, but also due to how I use my phone for audio books, and news reading. Back in the day I would have said social media, but social media is dead.