Many years ago, if I took photos with a nokia phone I had to sync them via a memory card. With the arrival of the Android Nexus on and the Apple iPhone our digital photography habits changed. With time we would leave our cameras at home, and carry our mobile phones, and photograph paries and hikes with these.

In the process we had two apps to backup. Google Photos and iPhoto. Both of these were optimal for whether we were on iOS or Android. For a while this was fine because they automatically backed up to our computers. With time though, the backup was more and more cloud centric, to the point where our photos were now either on iCloud or Google Photos.

I grew up in the eighties, and 90s, and so computing, open source software and the world wide web grew up with me. In that time we went from going to magazine shops to buy mags, and cd shops to buy CDs, and book shops to buy books. We also took photos on rolls of films and then took those rolls to La Combe or the Garden Centre to have the films processed, and then we put them in albums.

If you’re like me, you might read “driving to the sun” and think I’m speaking of driving to Spain or to Southern France. This wasn’t the case today. Today, as I saw we were in the fog, or in a layer of cloud I decided that I would drive up to an island above the fog. The island, in this case was Pampigny.

You might say “but Pampigny is a village on a slope, not an island. You’re right, of course. Today though, it was an island. If you looked towards the Léman you saw low lying clouds until the Alps, and if you looked towards Neuchatel then you also saw clouds.

Yesterday I had a chat with Google Gemini about mobile telephony. Specifically I was discussing Galaxus, Wingo and Coop Mobile. I told it that I was interested in a mobile plan in the same price range as Galaxus but using Swisscom as the mobile network rather than Sunrise.

In the process of telling it about the Coop plans it told me go for Wingo, and specific promotion plan, rather than others. It kept insisting that I should go for a certain plan. It also kept saying “but if you go for option A you still have the network coverage issue, whereas if you go for plan B you will not have that issue and you will get precisely what you want, because that plan/promotion is specifically designed to compete with Galaxus.

Recently I drove for 26 hours over two days between Switzerland and France and I used Audible rather than Audiobookshelf to listen. The reason for this is that when I am driving I do not want to fiddle with an app on a phone. I don’t even want to fiddle with apps on Car Play.

I noticed that PocketCasts, the Podcast App, MyCitroën and even TomTom can be quite distracting when you’re trying to set things up when you’re driving. Most of these apps are fine, if you start from a parking above ground with access to data, but if you’re underground you need to fiddle while driving. To be clear, I don’t, and that’s one of my reason for not using most car play apps.

Some people aim to read twenty books per year. Others aim for a book a week. I read 15 or so books last year which doesn’t feel like much, compared to others. Having said that, I don’t read like others. When I read I flit between books. I might start three or four books within a few days, and gently make progress for weeks or months at a time.

Since the books are often not finished I might read hundreds of pages but it doesn’t appear in the reading stats. It appears in the pages read statistic. Many apps do not put that forward, until you dig a little deeper.

I like Garmin Connect and the Garmin Instinct 2. Both the app, and the device are good and they’re reliable for tracking sports on a daily basis. Having said this, I felt the urge to slide back to my Suunto devices and the Suunto app. For many, many, many years I was very happy with suunto getting two dive computers, one feature watch an ambit 2, ambit 3, Suunto Spartan and Peak 5.

It is when you roam with your phone across Europe that you realise how much data an iPhone gets through. In the space of a week I burned through almost 3 gigabytes and 7 more gigabytes before controlling which apps could use data. At the same time I reset the data counters and looked at the option of using dual esims at once.

With the iPhone it is possible to have one sim active for your normal phone use, and a second sim that can be used for data while roaming. In so doing you save money as we will explore shorty.

I was in Spain for three weeks. I had planned to blog while I was there. I didn’t because my mac book pro was misbehaving when I tried to connect to three or for Wifi networks. Last night I tested it with another wifi network and I had similar issues. I think that there is an issue with the wifi device n the machine.

When I tested it using my mobile phone as an access point it behaved as expected, but that’s when there is less than a meter separating the laptop from the wifi hotspot.

Yesterday we were under the clouds for the entire day. Low lever clouds or fog kept us away from the sun. I noticed that someone on Strava had managed to get above the clouds by going for a bike ride. I decided to try to do the same thing, eventually, by running. This is the longest distance I have ever run. It was uphill for the first part.

I ran from the height of Nyon towards Tranchepied, and from there I ran up towards the Domaine de Bonmont before turning to run along the foot of the Jura towards Trelex, before running back down towards Nyon and home.