France and Belgium have recently banned children and teenagers younger than 15 from joining social media. To me this illustrates that my desire for social media to be social networks that were feature rich is dead and buried. In effect it has been dead and buried since Lockdown got normal people to join social media, including Whatscrapp. (Intentional spelling)

The issue, which I highlighted back in 2008 or so is that social media has always been seen as a tool for marketers, advertisers, PR teams and utilitarian people. For me social networks, and social media, when they came of age, should have been about providing an online third space for communities to come together, meet chat, and then with familiarity and friendship meet in the physical world, rather than just intellectual plain.

In the last two days I noticed several posts speaking about an upcoming tax for electric vehicles that will charge people per mile driven, as there is with petrol cars. In theory people will be charged a flat fee for the first year, and then per kilometre from then onwards.

I don’t see how this would work in practice because of two things. The first is that if you’re on a road trip you’re using public chargers and the price to charge is from 38 centimes to 1.10 CHF per kilowatt/Hour. In other words a scale could already be applied to “tax” people straight from public chargers.

A modern village is one that has parking on the outskirts, so that you can drive to it, park on the perimeter, and walk in, to hike, run, cycle or other. It also includes affordable slow chargers where you can park for as long as it takes to charge to full.

Such a village is modern because it reduces the need for traffic to transit through it. If people can visit the village without driving in, then it becomes like Italian citadelles, but also like carcasonne, Yvoire and other villages and towns. Even Morges has this, to some degree.

The Guardian has an article about Going Offline is Fun. It’s about how “young” people are trying to disconnect from mobile phones and other technology. There was another article about how 61 million CDs have been sold as people buy physical media rather than digital copies.

When the web and social networks were young and built around communities rather than the cult of personality (aka Influencers) it was rewarding because the more time you invested in a community, the more you became a part of it. It was also a time when no one was online, so you had to spread the net very wide, globally, to find like-minded people.

This morning it felt nice and cool so I spent as long as I could ventilating before the sun heated the Southern side of the building to a point where cooling was no longer effective. I went from 30°c down to 26°c very, very fast. The Outside Air Temperature (OAT) was 18-20°c so it’s a shame I didn’t capture more of that fresh air. The Long Tail of the heat wave comes as soon as you close the windows.

Yet again I see an article about children being banned from using mobile phones before they are thirteen years of age and once again I find myself asking, “but what if parents had the required digital literacy to help children and teens?” and “What if teachers had that digital literacy too?” Ireland has yet, again said that it would ban children younger from 13 from using smart phones. In my eyes this is a mistake because it fails to address the technological illiteracy of their parents, and children, handicapping them for life in the 21st century.

Have you noticed how if an event is organised in the evening, long into the night, people see it as normal to participate. Have you also noticed how waking at the crack of dawn, to run, four towns away, is seen as lunatic, and crazy behaviour. We live in a society and age that has normalised being nocturnal, in the evening rather than the morning.

Last night was special because a storm was forecast, and expected. It took a while to arrive and at first it was just a gentle rain. The rain then got worse and worse, until eventually it was a sudden, intense downpour with litres of water being forced down onto the roof. I thought “This is as if a canadair had dumped its load of water on my roof, now that I’m writing about it. I started recording the sound, and I went to check that all the velux were closed, and that the blind was closed on the one that had a blind.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of looking at expensive Garmin watches and thinking that maps are a premium feature, when, in fact they are not. Suunto and Coros offer them on affordable devices, should you require that feature for trail running, hiking, and more.

If you want to use the Coros Nomad for navigation while cycling then it’s bad. I tested it when cycling from Morges to Cossonay a few weeks ago. The problem is that it tells you “straight ahead” or turn left, but not in a cycling/driving context, so it’s unreliable for that.

If I look at Binstagram and Threads, and other Facebook owned sites I notice that conversations are completely dead. I was also looking at Twitter (now X) and I was also struck by how few conversations are taking place. I barely see any conversations. I see people posting, but I see little sign of interaction.

As I look at Facebook, and Twitter, and the lack of conversation I come to the conclusion that we can now delete our accounts on both and lose nothing. Years ago, we would have been isolated, but not today.

Minergie is a fantastic concept for a cold planet, and to keep cool in winter. It traps heat with ease during the morning and radiates it for the rest of the day into the night. It supplements to solar radiation heat with geothermal heat, which it gets from the heat pumps. That heat is then spread across the buidling with hot water pipes.

In winter this is fantastic because it saves on energy and provides a comfortable environment. In reality it’s not unusual for me to notice 25°c in winter, so in effect it might be too warm, for some.