I have been an audible member for years at this point and in that time I have “bought” hundreds of books. I write “bought” because I payed for a Platinum account for years and got credits and got the books with those credits. Over the years I have collected more books than I can read in a year. That library lived in the cloud, rather than my devices, for years. I would download the books I was listening to but not those that I had finished, or would read later.

On the 17th of February I will stop using Google One Drive and I was looking at the smaller tiers. You have 15 gigabytes for free, 100, and 200 gigabyte options, and then 200 gigabytes. At the moment I have 200 GB on Google Drive for documents and three hundred GB for photos. All of those photos are now backed up with Immich, PhotoPrism, and possibly one or two other storage solutions.

When looking at hard disk options I noticed that with the Seagate One Touch Hub they offer six months with Mylio so I decided to try the app, without buying that app. My first thought is that it claims to replace Google Photos and iCloud and yet the cost is similar per month. If you compare it to self-hosting solutions like Immich, PhotoPrism and NextCloud then it’s not that interesting, especially since it is for windows and mac but not Linux.

People want us to see the Apple Vision Pro VR kit as revolutionary but it isn’t, for a simple reason. Several years ago I was going to the World VR conference and loved playing with various VR kits but they almost all had the same problem. They cost an arm and a leg to buy. The HTC Vive was an alluring device because of how well it worked and how good it felt but it was made unreachable by its price.

For years I have worn Suunto, Garmin and Apple watches. During this time I have tracked hikes, climbing, scuba diving, snorkeling, swimming and more. Recently I felt the desire to wear a Casio watch as I used to do when I was a child. Over the years these “watches” have given you live information about barometric pressure, altitude, depth, and other information but with time they gave you the chance to track what you were doing by GPS.

There was a time when I spent eight hours a day transferring footage from Beta SP, DV, DVcam, DVCpro and other tape formats to a digital format to be part of a media asset management system. A 63 minute tape would take at least 63 minutes to digitise. Back in those days we moved video files in real time. When streamling live content I would wait for several hours for the program to end.

Recently my Social Media Life has become dormant. I do visit Facebook every so often but I ignore Instagram, barely touch Mastodon or the fediverse, and in general have stopped looking at social media for a social life. It’s not that my life offline has become vibrant. It’s that online is empty of meaningful engagement, especially in winter. From the nineties right up to around 2018 or so social media was a place to meet and be social.

Recently I have been listening to plenty of Late Night Linux podcasts. I like them because they’re half an hour long, the adverts are half way through the show, and in general I don’t feel that they’re filling time to fill one and a half hours of podcast time. Plenty of other podcasts last for an hour and a half or more, which if you listen to one episode a week is okay, but I don’t do that.

There are several types of people. One of them is youtubers that try and fail until they succeed, and then there are people like me, who also try and fail until they succeed. In one case the individual probably gets millions of views, and earns enough to waste hundreds of dollars per video in microtransactions, to people like me who are experimenting with Pis because it’s cheaper, once you know what you’re doing than getting a synology box.

For two weeks I have been sorting through terabytes of data and it has been a journey through time. It’s easy to collect data and every so often when the laptop is full, move that data to a hard drive until that drive is full, and then onto the next, and the next, until you have a drive or two per year, for several years. What makes this interesting is that these drives have dmg files, iso images and more.