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Threads, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok are social media sites and apps rather than social networks. Their aim is not to promote conversations but rather to encourage likes, re-sharing and the cult of personality. It is for this reason that they have become less ‘sticky’ for normal ‘users’.

In the era of Seesmic around 2007 we had video conversations, and parties, and we met up at LeWeb in Paris and other events. We were a network of friends of friends who kept contact for years afterwards.

A few days ago I was looking at MyAI and I was going to unsubscribe from the “Pro” account before they charged me, before realising that as an early adopter I have a year to play with MyAI for “free”. When I say that I can play with it for free I mean that I have been a Swisscom client for decades by now, so I paid for it through years of loyal custom.

For a long time you could choose between one credit or two credits per month with Audible, and you were limited to that one or two books. With time they increased the price, but they also added plenty of books that were included with the membership. At this point, if you’re not looking for a specific book you barely need credits anymore.

An Audible Plan With Temporary Ownership

Audible has a Standard plan. With this plan you spend 9 USD per month and you have access to one new book per month. You are free to read as much, or as little of the book as you desire. If you stop paying for this plan you lose your collection of books.

Yesterday I turned off iCloud Photo synching, and then I wiped my photos from iCloud Photos but before that I took several precautions.

Triple Backup to Apple Devices with Enough Storage

The first precaution I took was to ensure that the Photos app on a mac was downloading all the original photos locally. While this task was taking place I also got an iPhone 8+ and an older iPad to backup my photos locally to their hard drives.

Many years ago, if I took photos with a nokia phone I had to sync them via a memory card. With the arrival of the Android Nexus on and the Apple iPhone our digital photography habits changed. With time we would leave our cameras at home, and carry our mobile phones, and photograph paries and hikes with these.

In the process we had two apps to backup. Google Photos and iPhoto. Both of these were optimal for whether we were on iOS or Android. For a while this was fine because they automatically backed up to our computers. With time though, the backup was more and more cloud centric, to the point where our photos were now either on iCloud or Google Photos.

I grew up in the eighties, and 90s, and so computing, open source software and the world wide web grew up with me. In that time we went from going to magazine shops to buy mags, and cd shops to buy CDs, and book shops to buy books. We also took photos on rolls of films and then took those rolls to La Combe or the Garden Centre to have the films processed, and then we put them in albums.

If you’re like me, you might read “driving to the sun” and think I’m speaking of driving to Spain or to Southern France. This wasn’t the case today. Today, as I saw we were in the fog, or in a layer of cloud I decided that I would drive up to an island above the fog. The island, in this case was Pampigny.

You might say “but Pampigny is a village on a slope, not an island. You’re right, of course. Today though, it was an island. If you looked towards the Léman you saw low lying clouds until the Alps, and if you looked towards Neuchatel then you also saw clouds.

Yesterday I had a chat with Google Gemini about mobile telephony. Specifically I was discussing Galaxus, Wingo and Coop Mobile. I told it that I was interested in a mobile plan in the same price range as Galaxus but using Swisscom as the mobile network rather than Sunrise.

In the process of telling it about the Coop plans it told me go for Wingo, and specific promotion plan, rather than others. It kept insisting that I should go for a certain plan. It also kept saying “but if you go for option A you still have the network coverage issue, whereas if you go for plan B you will not have that issue and you will get precisely what you want, because that plan/promotion is specifically designed to compete with Galaxus.

Recently I drove for 26 hours over two days between Switzerland and France and I used Audible rather than Audiobookshelf to listen. The reason for this is that when I am driving I do not want to fiddle with an app on a phone. I don’t even want to fiddle with apps on Car Play.

I noticed that PocketCasts, the Podcast App, MyCitroën and even TomTom can be quite distracting when you’re trying to set things up when you’re driving. Most of these apps are fine, if you start from a parking above ground with access to data, but if you’re underground you need to fiddle while driving. To be clear, I don’t, and that’s one of my reason for not using most car play apps.

Some people aim to read twenty books per year. Others aim for a book a week. I read 15 or so books last year which doesn’t feel like much, compared to others. Having said that, I don’t read like others. When I read I flit between books. I might start three or four books within a few days, and gently make progress for weeks or months at a time.

Since the books are often not finished I might read hundreds of pages but it doesn’t appear in the reading stats. It appears in the pages read statistic. Many apps do not put that forward, until you dig a little deeper.