richard - Nov 1, 2021
I have to use whatsapp for the group of people who live in the same building as me, but other than that my use has stopped. If we were out of pandemic I would meet new people, and I would encourage them to use other platforms than WhatsApp. Due to the pandemic I haven’t had the opportunity to say “I prefer this option, to that one.” One day…
I noticed that Facebook has a way of letting you know how badly you are addicted to their website. In the process I learned that I spent zero minutes on their website this week, and one minute last week. I do not spend time on their website because it fails to provide me with a community that I want to interact with on a daily basis. There are a number of reasons for this but the key reason is that they spent so much effort trying to make the timeline more addictive that they made it repulsive.
Blogging one hundred and fifty-two days in a row is an interesting challenge. It encourages you to think of something daily, for months in a row. It also forces you to have the discipline to sit and attempt to write for one or two hours a day, whether inspiration is there or not. Often it isn’t. Add to this that most blog posts get zero views and you have a reason to stop and give up.
KDrive peaks my interest because instead of cost over 100 dollars per year it costs around 64 if you buy directly from their website rather than The Apple App Store, but also because once you send your photos up to the cloud, you can get them down more easily.
With Google One you can store all of your images to the cloud quite easily but because apps like Picasa and others no longer exist, you cannot get them back without spending hours downloading them manually. iCloud is not quite as bad but they are still not ideal. You can upload images to their service, but if you do so, your image gallery must be on a drive with enough storage to take the gallery offline. On mobile phones and laptops this is complicated. In effect your images are stuck until you buy a higher capacity laptop or phone. I know an HD would also work but the issue is that when your image gallery is on another drive you have to keep it plugged in, or sync regularly for it to be efficient.
For two or three months at least I have taken a break from listening to podcasts. I used to enjoy listening to podcasts every single day. I would listen when I walked, I would listen on the commute. I would listen when I cooked. During this pandemic, I found that I could stand fewer and fewer podcasts.
Some of them frustrated me because they treated Brexit as if it was something fun, so I stopped listening. Other podcasts tried to speak about pandemic solitude, but these were married people who were simply choosing to self isolate to keep their loved ones safe, rather than real solitude, where there is no end in sight.
For two days I have played with the Garmin Instinct Solar and I already see a niche for it. If I want to be like every other reviewer I will say, “use the expedition mode for up to 127 days or hours of battery life, but I won’t because I think there is another more interesting niche. Activity tracking, without needing to take off the watch for weeks or months at a time. With Suunto, Apple and other devices you need to remove a watch at least every three or four days to recharge it, which means that you have a gap in heartrate and activity data.
The Sigg Travel Mug Miracle Black flask has a mediocre name but a good niche. Drinking hot, or cold drinks, whilst driving, without worrying about it spilling, and as a bonus, the ability to open it one handed. This is especially relevant in a car, small enough not to have cup holders built in.
If you stand the Sigg Eddy+ 600ML next to the Sigg Travel mug Miracle 0.47ml they are the same size so if you can fit one into your hiking bag you can fit both. On one side you have your water, on the other you have your hot tea, coffee or other.
Just as I was thinking, “I have nothing to write about because I have been walking around in circles for three or four years I find that at least virtually I have almost achieved a big project. Walking 819 kilometres on the Camino De Santiago. I am now four kilometres from the end. By the end of tomorrow morning I will have completed this goal.
In reality nothing special, as I haven’t had to change my routine, suffer or anything else. What does surprise me is how quickly I completed the challenge. I could have accomplished the goal in more time. I have more than 100 days left to complete the challenge. Now we know how long it would take me to complete, in the physical world.
Over the last three or four days I have marked two books as finished despite not finishing for a simple reason. I have plenty of books on Kindle, Audible and Kobo that I need to read, but that to read all these books, would take time. I started to read one book and I stopped within pages, every time for the same reason.
In today’s context my disgust with one book is rational. For decades the web and social media have been treated as addictions, and because they have been stigmatised and seen as illnesses it becomes morally acceptable to abuse users. Look at Meta Facebook and Meta Instagram, and how they are being discussed in the news. The attitude, that social media is a drug enabled marketers, and social media owners to abuse of their addicted users, because they’re addicts, and it is their fault for becoming addicted.