Whenever you look for something on Google you get an AI summary, and then you can look at websites and web pages for an in-depth human written answer. At the same time there are dozens of apps for Twitter, the Fediverse and more, but there are none for browsing blogs.

If I look up blog on the Apple App store I get minimal notes and ChatGPT as the first results, and then several non blogging apps. The Android app store is a little better but the first results are for Grok, Daynote, a piano app and a few apps like blogger, journiblog, wordpress and blogspace. All of these are apps for writing, rather than reading.

Many years ago we took photos and we had to wait for the roll to be developed and when it was developed we either kept our photos in the sleeve with the negatives, or we put them in photo albums. Later we took digital photos and we downloaded them to our computers and put them in chaotic folders.

With times apps gave the illusion of our photographs being organised into folders with event names and more information. As these albums evolved so they added date, location, facial recognition and more. For a long time everything was kept on our laptop or even desktop. As our photo albums grew and grew so we moved from having photos locally on local apps, to having local apps that uploaded our photos and videos to the cloud.

It’s funny to look at a game like Transport Tycoon, and then to come across a game like Idle Miner because in essence they are the same. Get resources from A to B, and wait for your fortune to grow, to do more.

With Transport Tycoon you build your first railway line between a farm and a factory, or between an iron ore mine and a steel mill, and a factory. You can also build post and bus networks between parts of a town, or between villages and towns.

Some readers pick up a reader and read it cover to cover, without straying into other books. Normal book clubs are ideal for such people. It allows them to commit to reading one book per month, and discussing it with others.

People like me prefer to buy plenty of books, and start reading one book before switching to a second, and then a third, and then a fourth. We read books as if we were watching two or three television series on TV. We watch an episode or two, and then we move on.

Time for something a little different. If you’re like me you’re using a service similar to Galaxus TV. In the good old days when I was younger we had a satellite dish and that satellite dish had a tuner, and the tuner had a PVR. You could record series and more, rather than watch live TV, and we did.

We watched recorded programs rather than live television for a simple reason. WE could skip ads, but we could also shift programs to a time that didn’t dictate our evening.

Friday I had two social runs, one pre-dawn, one, after sunset, and the next day I went for yet another social run. As if three social runs wasn’t enough pressure on my system I went to a MAS training session on Monday which was hard and then on Wednesday I had Garmin telling me to run between 4:55-5:05km and that was too far.

My vision started to play up and I aborted the run. I still walked a little but I was reminded of a single thing. Garmin Coach is not human, and taking rest days is extremely important. My first mistake was to run so fast, within a short time of lunch. Lunch was inadequate so my body didn’t have the resources for such a workout, and it was tired.

Imagine, it’s Monday morning and people are rushing to work or to the shops to get food for the week ahead. You turn up early at the shopping centre. You see that all the chargers are free so you check the price. Thirty Three centimes per kilowatt hour. You see a fantastic opportunity so you park by a charger, plug in the charging cable and start to charge.

This might trigger you to say “Who cares?” and I’d answer that thirty three centimes per kilowatt hour is a good deal. In other places it goes from thirty nine centimes to eighty centimes, if not one franc twenty per kilowatt hour.

As an early adopter it makes perfect sense for me to have played with an Apple Watch but it doesn’t make sense that I would keep wearing it. The reason for it being absurd for me to wear an Apple watch is primarily that I managed to damage a screen on an Apple watch indoor climbing many, many years ago.

The second reason is that I already wore a Suunto watch, followed by Apple, and then Garmin, and then Coros, and Garmin, Suunto and Coros fill the niche I want them for. I want a fitness tracker rather than a smart watch. I want step counting, run tracking, cycling, and more. I rarely use IM functions. I sometimes check the weather but every modern fitness watch offers this, with built in thermometers, barometers and more.

Yesterday the Garmin Forerunner 570 crashed mid-workout while doing MAS intervals at a critical moment. It crashed while I was running at 4:35 per kilometre so I couldn’t reboot the watch with ease and re-start the workout.

I had to stop, type in the code, re-start the workout, and then start running again. This glitch teaches us two things. The first is that beta versions of Garmin software do, sometimes, crash, and the second, is that having a backup watch is always worthwhile.

For years, or even decades many of us backed photos up using Picasa, Flickr, iPhoto and other apps. We’d download photos from cameras and import them to these photo apps and we’d have a local library of all of our photos. With time our libraries grew so we backed up to the cloud and as our needs increased, so they offered more space for our photos.

Eventually they decided that they had trained their models sufficiently to start charging us for using their storage. In the process, because we had gigabytes of data it became hard to recover photos from the cloud so we were trapped. We had to pay more and more each year.