Dear twitter friends…
Dear twitter friends I have deleted my main account due to tired I am with twitter and it’s poor performance. I am in other places. I’ll catch you there.
Airpods are the most comfortable bluetooth headphones I have tried. Over the winter months I tried earphones by Sony and other brands. After months of experimenting I came back to the airpods.
With the Sony WHR 1000 earpods there are a number of issues. The first is that noise cancelling changes noticeably. Several times I felt as if I had changed altitude because it switched from one sound environment to the next.
With all brands I found that I don’t like earphones that are made from rubber in-ear. They feel uncomfortable almost immediately and I did not get used to this discomfort over time. With the airpods it’s easy to wear them for hours without worrying.
Seasonal considerations should be an important aspect of earphone design. Almost all earphones are designed with warm summer weather in mind. They stick out from the ear. This means that you can’t wear hats, rain hoods or other head covers without the chance of either ripping out the earpieces or having the rubber part pressed against your eardrum.
I use my airpods to listen to podcasts via the phone and watch video content on my laptop from Youtube and Netflix. I recently edited a 30 second video using airpods rather normal headphones and it was acceptable.
I need to the noise cancelling features of the Sony earphones on a longer train journey, a car journey where I am not driving or a flight if and when I fly next.
I tend to play a lot with my new phone as a result of which the battery depletse in a short lapse of time. If I’m by a power source then that doesn’t matter because recharging the phone is easy. There are other cases where recharging is a hassle. Â That’s part of the excuse I used for getting a mophie air cover for the phone.
Last night I was at a party and whilst talking to one person I found out that their phone battery was dead so I removed the cover from my phone and lent the external battery/charger/iphone cover to that person. As a result as the party progressed that person wasn’t tethered to a wall waiting for the phone to charge. She had full mobility.
The cover does not recharge the phone fully. Instead it provides you with between seventy to eighty percent of the charge you would normally have. That’s enough to get you home comfortably. In other situations though the back can be used as an external battery. That is to say that rather than recharging your phone it behaves like a primary battery. The cover drains itself of power before the Iphone battery is depleted, therefore making sure that you can have around twice the normal autonomy of such a device. This could be interesting when the device is used on a hike for example.
There are two weaknesses to the mophie that I would like to see rectified. The first is for when you’re using the mophie as a cover but haven’t used the cover’s battery. If you plug it in it will automatically start recharging the battery rather than going straight to recharge the battery. As a result I prefer to remove the cover when it is just the phone battery that needs recharging.
The second problem is the amount of time it takes when you want to recharge the device both by itself and with the phone already in the case. It’s better when you’re recharging both at the same to do it over night.
Apple Phone Show no. 22 is a particularly good episode. Andy Ihnatko and Scott Bourne discuss how to use the iPhone in real-life situations. It’s a precursor of things to come in the near future.
I’ve decided to try Twitter tracking which works by you selecting which words you want to follow. The messages are then sent straight to your phone and you follow any conversations on the topic.
Here are some images from the lac de Joux a few weeks ago. I had not had enough of the frozen landscapes so I travelled further afield. I walked on the ice but there are moments when I could feel it creak as I walked. I didn’t fall through the ice.
[flickr-gallery mode=”photoset” photoset=”72157629184590941″]
Google latitude is the perfect tool for anyone that works and has a life where logging into locations would be an unsightly thing to do. By that I mean that you can’t arrive at work and log into the location. It gives colleagues the impression you are not serious about your work.
Now take this same situation in a social context. You go hiking and the people around you are not necessarily as passionate about technology. They’re walking around with paper maps after all.
That’s where Google latitude comes into it’s own. Location is tracked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week every single day that your device is on.
Why am I doing this? Am I not mad? Do I not have this location information to hide, and no shame? Well of course I have things to hide and shame but with this network only your closest friends can see where you are. And they only know your current location, not your previous locations.
That’s where the service differs from foursquare, gowalla, yelp and all the others. Your location history is private. Only you have access to it.
Then why use it in the first place? Well that’s simple. It’s a lifelog that’s not broadcast. You can keep track of how much time you’ve spent at home, at work and out socialising. Once a week I get to find out whether I was at work for more than fifty hours, whether I was at home for too many hours. More importantly i get to see whether I should not be a little more active in going out, from a personal life point of view. That’s where I’m lacking at the moment. Google latitude’s dashboard will help change that.
Now, how could it improve? First of all automatic location check in. If I’m by starbucks in Geneva airport log me in if I’m seeing that network more than ten minutes. If I’m at the apple store for that amount of time log me in there. If I’m at a bar and I lose signal in that region due to poor network coverage then assume I’m in that bar.
By being automatic and private location information could be quite a bit more interesting. More to the point that data is being collected anyway by mobile operators so why not take advantage of this?
I believe this to be the future of mobile geo-location. With more android phones out there and more devices capable of multitasking this could easily become the norm.
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Thought it was a joke but you really did it!
Impressive somehow…
I was on twitter for two years with an average tweet rate of 72.6 per day. And from one day to the next it no longer exists. Too many superficial people on the site. It was time for me to move on. I am using a secondary account but twitter is going to be a far smaller part of my life. So small that I will only go to check on twitter when I have replies or a new follow.
It's like that relationship you see going nowhere. It was time to break up. I made sure there was no going back and I'm happy for that.
I thought it was a joke at first as well, but I did see this coming.
Sounds like you've been pretty frustrated with Twitter lately. I followed your secondary account, but won't be offended if you don't follow back 😉
Best wishes,
Mark
It's no joke, I did delete that account. I have a backup of my last 3800 tweets on that account and thousands more are backed up on various portions of the web, either through tweetbackup, greader or others.
One of the reasons for my frustration has been how people speak and profess their knowledge of social networks yet are to conventional to actually use them to their full potential.
As a result I am still on twitter, but with a far reduced presence.
🙁 My nights aren't the same without your tweets. I understand your thoughts completely though. How many of your followers ever bothered to subscribe to this feed? [raises hand]
I thought I was better at using the social nets to their full potential, but Twitter and other places have exposed me to so many of them, that I use a lot, but none to full potential, something I will try to address in the coming weeks and months.
I'll be trying to keep up with you elsewhere now, keep us updated on the Twitterless life. 🙂
~Shawn K (@thattalldude)
I still tweet but just warza, rather than warzabidul as a twitter name and I am still following you from that account. Those who were following me, in large part were friends. Too many of them took too long to aknowledge my tweets so they were devalued.
Now it's a new twitter account and friendfeed. On friendfeed I'm one of the two hundred most active users of the site at the moment.
Follow my new twitter account.