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A year ago today I signed up to Duolingo and started studying German on a daily basis, and occasionally played with other languages. I complimented this with listening to podcasts in German almost daily and making other attempts to learn languages.

I went from trying to get fifty experience points a day per day for months before a conference broke my streak as I was too exhausted by the end of the day to continue learning. Life got in the way. It was more important to spend time with people.

Objectified is a documentary about industrial design that has been divided into interviews with individuals about a diversity of designs, from the casing of the Mac Book Pro to chairs, a CD player that behaves like a fan and much more.

On Linkedin, this documentary has been cut up and split into chapters so that you can either watch the documentary in its entirety or you can watch it as video on demand with the designers you’re interested in or familiar with. It’s a contemporary implementation of the documentary genre because it assumes that you have five minutes at a time to devote to this documentary.

Although this article is two years old La Tribune de Genève wrote again about it and it appeared in my Google Newsfeed. I am not opposed to making cities pedestrian because I love to walk more than I like buses, trains, or other forms of transport.

I actually do like trains. When I lived in London I liked to take the tube everywhere. I wish someone had encouraged me to try cycling in London because I would have used a bike to get everywhere. I already walked instead of using buses.

For a few days now I’ve been looking through thousands of pictures to make sure that they’re synced from iCloud to the Photo app before they’re deleted. In so doing I noticed how far in front of a group I was hiking a few years ago. Instead of hiking with the group I was so far in front that I could get group shots without trying. Eventually, they did pose, as if it had been intentional rather than my walking habit.

Suunto and Wear OS is a cultural shame. I like Suunto because it’s a European company with a European OS developed in Europe. It’s nice to buy their products because they’re reliable and hardly ever let me down. They’re also great because it’s European tech developers working together to create something interesting and reliable.

It’s not that I don’t like Google as a company. I do. I have liked Google since I first learned about them on my website’s visitor log. I only went from Android to iOS because DJI hated the Sony Xperia that I was using at the time. Without DJI I would still be an Android user.

While I was cat sitting I spent time playing with a Roomba. Most people set the roomba, and let it clean. I don’t. I watch it and I observe how it works, how it goes from place to place and how it navigates, and gets trapped, and procrastinates in one corner or part of an apartment/studio. Roombas are glamourised but I think they are flawed.

Their flaw is that they start from their dock, back and go beep beep beep beep, then they rotate and they start cleaning. So far so good. The issue comes when they hit an object. They start from the top right of a room and they go diagonally to the other side of the room and they hit an object and they turn right.

Over the last two days, I have been playing with Infomaniak K Drive, Swisscom MyCloud, Apple iCloud and Google Drive. I settled for Swisscom Mycloud because backing up pictures is free with my current contract and it’s cheaper than two terabytes with Apple iCloud. It’s free.

Infomaniak K drive is interesting because you can back up images automatically but when you have over ten thousand images on your phone like I do it cannot work through the backlog without timing out. The only way for me to update would be to keep the app alive for several hours as it uploads images and videos.

Instagram has become user-generated content with adverts every fifth post. We went from following friends and their life to following personalities within our field of passions. I follow climbers, photographers, and friends. By following strangers, the timeline has become less relevant. This is especially true about following influencers.

Influencers don’t share their life. They share adverts. They share an illusion, a dream, an ideal. In so doing their posts lose value because they are no different from adverts. They are cold and devoid of character. They are impersonal. They’re a waste of time.

13 Minutes to the Moon is an interesting podcast dedicated to the Lunar Landings. This podcast, along with audiobooks, is interesting because they allow us not just to read the dialogues that took place but to hear what the controllers and astronauts heard.

At one point in Episode two, you hear two communications loops at once. It’s a shame that they didn’t balance the audio so that loop 1 was in one ear and loop 2 in the other. If they had done this then we could have heard the audio as mission controllers had heard.

What I learned after three weeks with a cat is that they’re easy to take care of. Cleaning up the litter tray takes seconds and providing them with food two to three times a day is simple. It’s also simple to keep them entertained. A ball of string on a string and a laser pointer are great toys. They also enjoy shredding rolls of toilet paper so it’s good to be careful.