Posts

A Dormant YouTube Habit

For months now I have had Pihole running, and other ad blocking solutions working. I said, at the time that I don’t feel bad about using ad blockers because they’re so invasive, especially with YouTube, among other platforms. I also find that when I play games on Android ad blockers work. Ads fail to load so I get blocked. With iOS when you have an ad it plays despite Pihole. Apple have a way to ignore Pihole.

The Unceertain Train Journey

For years I automatically took the car for everything I did, or almost. Over the last seven or eight years that habit has changed as I grew used to walking locally, and catching the train to activities. This shift in habits is due to two things. The first is that I met with people who take trains. If you meet with such people it makes sense to take a train with them.

Thoughts on the Book Blindness

I read Blindness last month and finished it yesterday and although it won a Nobel Prize I was not a fan of the book. I haven’t had time to digest it properly yet but I think that it was at a disadvantage. It explores what it would be like to live through an epidemic, but we have all been through a global pandemic now. The ideas and concepts of this book, are thus theory, rather than life experiences that we have all had.

Ankle Fitness Trackers

The automatic reflex is to wear a fitness tracker on the wrist so that it may measure heart rate but also so that we may look at the data that it is capturing without using an app. The issue with this habit is that we need to stop wearing a classic watch, as a result. Fitness trackers want to be worn non-stop for between 3 days to four weeks before giving proper usable data as is the case with the Epix Gen 2 but also all Apple Watches, Garmin devices, Suunto and others.

Fairphone 4 Impressions

Two days ago I got a Fairphone 4 because the battery on my iPhone SE is still not lasting for a long time and because it’s laggy when I open certain apps. For both of these reasons I was tempted to wait until 2025 for the new iPhone SE to come out. When I read that it would have a bigger screen and cost more the niche reasons for getting the new SE vanished and it freed me to consider the Fairphone 4.

Why I chose to Deactivate Threads

This morning I woke up to people insulting me for not being an Apple fan boy on Threads. Before that I was trolled for several other reasons and the consequence is that I have now deactivated my Threads account. For me the web is a place where, if you agree, or if you want to offer support, but if you disagree, or don’t respect a view, you say so in a separate thread, without trolling people.

NaNoWriMo and Typed Wordiness

November has Arrived. With November so does NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo is the US National Novel Writing Month. This is the month where people spend every day writing 1,667 words per day, so that by the end of the month they have a draft of a novel. I have tried the challenge several times and completed it just once. The challenge is to write, and ignore the inner censor. It’s the idea of thinking “This is crap” and “this is rubbish” and continuing to write anyway.

Web Browsers and Operating Systems

People like to speak about whether they use MacOS, Windows or Linux and I think that for a long time this was a great question because what we did on computers required programs and apps that could run on that system. In 2024, however, I believe that the OS barely matters anymore. The reason for this is simple. Whether you use Windows, MacOS or Linux a lot of what you do is in a web browser and web browsers are standardised so that most websites look and behave the same across platforms.

Epix Gen 2 Continued

Today I went for a run and the Garmin Epix Gen 2 labelled it as unproductive. Yesterday I went for a 5k run and I wore the Garmin Instinct Solar with the HRM-Pro Plus and it was just marked as a wrong. I was curious to see if I would get more running with this belt and the Garmin Instinct Solar and the answer is “nope” so the heart rate strap is not an Epix Gen 2 replacement.

Instagram and Net Neutrality

When videos are older, or are not viewed often their quality will be downgraded until they are either viewed regularly or never at all. This decision showstype: posts that Instagram is forgetting that it should promote net neutrality rather than a two tier system where influencers get the red carpet, and normal human beings are treated badly. The idea of Net Neutrality is that all content is delivered from all sources to all people at the highest available speed and quality available.