Recently it has been feeling warmer as spring is making an appearance. I noticed that buds and leaves are getting ready. Orchids are flowering and trees are ready. I also noticed that there is quite a bit of pollen in the air and it’s warmer. Warm enough to start thinking about cycling. I went for a bike yesterday and I felt warm enough for almost the entire bike ride. This feels good.

Yesterday I tried to use a slow charger to recharge the car. After 49 minutes I had charged 8.95 watts for 5.13 CHF. I got to about 63 percent. I stopped charging. I drove somewhere and by the time I got back I was down to 30 percent. I looked to my left as I was approaching McDonald’s and saw that the GoFast chargers were free so I stopped to charge.

As Amazon no longer allows people to download e-books I would like to look at the collection of e-book readers that we could use today. We have Kindle, Nook, PocketBook, Kobo, iOS devices, Android devices, Tolino and more. In effect we could fill a book shelf with e-books if we wanted to. That’s because almost each ebook seller has their own device. Amazon wants us to get a Kindle to read their books.

Creative Bloom wrote about the shift back to personal blogs. They wrote about how people are shifting from social media back to self-owned personal websites. This is good. People are tired of social networks they build up and enable being sold off to people with different moral codes. Twitter is one example, Instagram is a second, and WhatsApp is a third. As each of these sites is sold, and bought, so our investment in time and effort is wasted.

Some people are saying “Rush to download your Kindle Books because after the 26th of February you won’t be able to. My reaction is both neutral and to some degree indifferent. For me Amazon is destroying the reason for which people would buy from Kindle rather than other book sellers, but more to the point why people would pay the same price for an e-book as for a printed book.

Yesterday I had a chromebook, an e-book reader, warm clothes and a coffee. My plan had been to drive to a charging point and spend some time walking, and some time reading or writing a blog post. Instead I drove by McDonald’s and saw that the GOFAST chargers were free so I parked the car, plugged in the 300 Watt charger, swiped the TCS e-charge card and started to charge. Within about 25 minutes I was at 80 percent charge, Within 33 minutes I was at about 87 percent.

For years I saw the Sygic app appear when searching for car navigation apps. Finally I decided to experiment with the app. I drove a familiar route yesterday, and another one today and the experience was good. It has the advantage of being European and it is well designed for people with electric cars. I chose to tell it that I was driving a specific electric car, and the charge state, and it calculated the resulting charge within a few percentage points.

By joining a book club and hearing people speak about borrowing books, rather than buying them I was at once asking myself the question “Why wouldn’t you buy a book when you can afford it?” and “Why wouldn’t you want to own the books you read?” Since then I have changed my mind. Paid for Lending Libraries As I wrote two or three days ago Audible, Kindle, Kobo and other platforms allow you to borrow books.

A few months ago I was thinking of getting a new iPhone SE and then I read that it would go up in price by at least 50 USD and that it would have an Apple modem and more and I lost interest in upgrading. For me the niche served by a budget phone is that it is affordable. By affordable I mean below 500 CHF to buy new, when it’s current.

There was a time when you got an Audible Subscription and you had access to 24 credits per year. You could choose 24 books per year. That’s a new book every two weeks. Eventually, after many years the plan and offer changed. You can now buy books from Audible, or you can borrow others from the Audlbe plus catalogue. In this manner you have access to thousands of books for “free”, as if you had a paying library membership.