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Last night I watched two episodes in a documentary series about a brief history of cars. In the first documentary we see a discussion about the history of cars from the 19th century to modern day with the use of archive footage. In the second we see how the car helped with consumerism. In the third I think they discuss the mental health consequences of cars.

What makes this documentaries series interesting is that it goes into a lot of depth, without any sensationalism. It uses interesting archive footage to see how cars have gone from a village curiousity that appeared every so often, to cities that were built for, and around cars.

In the current day and age moving from Amazon is not unappealing. I wish that Audible.com had never been bought by Amazon because I love Audible but hate what Amazon represents. It represents a monopolisation of the way people shop and by content around the world. Luckily in Switzerland we have Galaxus as a practical alternative.

For several months, by now, I have migrated all of my books from Audible.com to Audiobookshelf via Openaudible. To be clear I am not encouraging piracy. I am encouraging a personal backup for the books that we have bought as individuals, to preserve as individuals. I have used Audible for years and want to preserve what I have invested in, for my own enjoyment.

It’s funny. It is a drive that I have done plenty of times. Tomorrow I will do the usual twelve hour drive from Switzerland to around Alicante, and I will do so with minimal stops.

In essence the drive is easy. I take the motorway from Nyon all the way to Ondara, with a small segment on open roads around Grenoble. It’s long, but easy.

There is a difficulty that I face. I always do this drive alone. Whilst it gives me the freedom to drive at my speed, stop when I want to and more, it also reminds me that I am still solitary. I always feel a little fragile before a trip, especially one like this.

Yesterday morning I plugged the car in to charge at Signy Centre while shopping and for the price of a coffee I charged the car by ten percent. I then went to the lakeside of Nyon to test the Service Industriel de Nyon (SIN) chargers and failed.

They were out of service so I drove towards Chavannes Centre because I thought of using their chargers until I realised that by the time the car is charged I would be driving through rush hour traffic. Instead I drove back to Signy Centre.

Recently people wanted to move from Goodreads to open alternatives to move away from the grasp of Amazon. I wanted to do the same so I moved to two or three apps and used them for a while. I stopped using them for one simple reason.

They don’t have an extensive library of books, so when you start to read a book you can either spend several minutes adding all the information about the book you’re reading into the system, or you can save time and stick with Goodreads. When you’re reading audiobooks and e-books you might not have all of the relevant information.

When I was a child we had paper maps. These maps had to be studied and read to make navigating simpler. You had to know that you would drive from A to B to C to D and so forth. In the age of Google Maps, before phone navigation we had to print out the driving instructions for the entire trip. From A go to B via this road, and that motorway. It was like an Edit decision list but for driving.

As Wordpress grows and as my comfort with Hugo increases I question whether to move my blog from Infomaniak to being self-hosted on a Pi. I know that the Pi is not powerful but my site doesn’t get much traffic so I don’t think that it will be overwhelmed with traffic.

I have slightly less than three weeks to decide whether to make the leap or not. The Hugo part of my blog is easy to migrate because it’s a static site. It’s the WordPress stack that is just a little more fiddly to move. I could start the experiment this afternoon.

I am fatigued by cars and their apps. When I was using the Citroën car twice a week it was working fine but then I let it sit for a month and then it stopped synching correctly. I have done several trips now, and the journeys are either not recorded properly or the date is a month out of sync with the journey.

I tried to pair a Fiat500e with a phone or two via two or three aps and here too I failed. I can only conclude that mobile phone car apps are crap, on android and iOS. I can’t understand that with the most expensive device any of us will pair with our phones, that their apps are so crap.

Yesterday or recently I had a discussion about running. The discussion was about whether I have a favourite time of day to run and whether I can eat before a run and still run.

The answer is that I’m flexible in the time at which I run. I can run as easily first think in the morning at 5am as right before lunch, as after lunch. it really doesn’t matter.

In the golden age of social media I went from tweeting with a pseudonym to tweeting with my own name. This was as true on Twitter as on Facebook. There was a sense of community that meant that we were safe to use our own names, rather than nicknames.

That age ended in 2020 when normal people, isolated by lockdowns, became familiar with Twitter and other social networks. In 2020 I was flamed more than once on Twitter, and eventually became private, after using a pseudonym. I was also flamed more than once on Mastodon instances and dumped them too.