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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. We saw the Reddit protests of a year or two ago and we see the brain drain from Twitter, as well as the pressure to quit X.

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. I find this feature interesting because in theory, on longer trips it could calculate the optimal places for charging along the route. I have not tested this routing option yet.

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. Usually the cost is from 10-12 CHF except for Audible where the cost is over a hundred CHF per year.

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. I saw that some phones are available for 100 CHF second hand,

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.

This morning I went for a run. During this run I listened to Systems Crash and the discussion about AI, about the US attitude, and the European/International attitude and it convinced me that I much prefer to use EU/International projects rather than American ones for a simple reason. Corporate Social Responsibility.

The US wants to move fast and break things, including the law, by hoovering data it has no moral rights to. In contrast, from what I gather, from glimpsing at the Elysée documents about Macron’s projects for AI there is a push for collaboration,for helping humanity and more.

Yesterday I walked from Vevey to villeneuve with a stop in the castle for a visit before taking the train home. In the process we walked about fifteen kilometres along the lake. This was an easy pace for me. It was slow enough for my heart rate to be at seventy eight beats per minute, while walking, rather than over a hundred when I walk at my pace.

For me this was a stroll but I thought I could hear the others short of breath. it surprised me since the walk is an easy one by my standards. The other thing that was curious was how some people were dressed as flanneurs, rather than walkers. They were dressed to be seen. I was dressed to hike.

Yesterday I was trolled by three people on Threads because of a comment on dating culture on Strava. I said that for me Strava is about networking rather than dating and for it one person said she friendzoned me, and two others were hostile rather than commenting in a friendly reason. For these three incidents of trolling I deactivated my Threads account and I am considering deactivating my Strava account.