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Some people, when dumped, take the hint. They delete your number from their phone, cry into a pint of ice cream, and go on with their lives. Some, however, do not. They keep sending you unsolicited mail: "Come on, babe, we had a good thing going, you know you want me back." You can block their number and change your address, but somehow, they still manage to find you. I got just such a piece of…
I borrowed an energy monitor from my local library. It's a device you plug in to determine how much energy your various electronic possessions consume. The one I borrowed even allowed me to program in what I pay per kilowatt-hour, which allowed it to calculate automatically what I was paying per day, month, and year. I plugged it in with nearly every electrical item in my house. I skipped the…
I bought a bicycle today. As usual, let me back up. I owned a bicycle before today. It was a Shimano my husband bought for me at Costco on the grounds that "it was on sale" and "the box says it fits people your height." Which I guess maybe? some of them? except the box did not account for my exceptionally short wingspan. Trips of more than about a mile were uncomfortable; more than about three…
Sorry about the pun in the title. I am too middle-aged to resist them. I logged into my old Bear blog account to update my home page with a URL to my new blog/gemlog/phlog home . I used Bear obsessively for about a month and a half, but I ultimately left for three quite personal reasons. One: Bear's "Discover" feature, which uses upvotes or "toasts" as part of its calculations in determining…
Apparently Elon Musk has decided he takes issue with basic facts now: "stop donating to Wokepedia" Once again, I am glad I bought a print encyclopedia when I did. And once again, I am astonished that reading it constitutes an act of defiance. But I'm not the one who made facts the enemy.
By far the most common pushback I get when I talk about my recent divorce from Big Tech is "but it's so convenient!" "It" being Google services, Apple services, Microsoft, or Meta, mostly. (Absolutely no one I have talked to claims Twitter is "convenient," even if they're still on Twitter.) I thought so too, once. It's how I ended up in them. The farther I get from Big Tech, however, the more I'm…
Two different people today have sent me screenshots or showed me social media threads in which they got into a pointless online argument with someone who is probably a bot and whose mind definitely will not change as a result of the "interaction." Last week, there was one person who did this. The week before, two. I'm not sure if this is actually becoming more common or if I'm just more aware of…
Yesterday, I read this very helpful piece about how to get started with Lynx, a command-line browser. The piece starts off with a quote that's now stuck in my head: "If you don't perceive using the Internet in the 2020s to be a constant fight, you have absolutely no online privacy whatsoever." (FWIW, avoid the logical misstep of assuming the inverse is true. Even if you do perceive using the…
Like a lot of people, I've been almost surgically grafted to my smartphone for years. But in the last two months, my habits have changed so much that this may be the beginning of the end of that relationship. Since taking the library job, I've rediscovered my preference for print books - and now that I have access to over six million titles through the state's interlibrary loan system, I just…
March really has it out for my family. My spouse died in March. His brother died in March, almost exactly one year later. And today, I got a text message informing me that our aunt Julie died this morning. Julie was a rabble-rousing leftist who was too old to give a single shit what anyone thought of her. In her younger days, she co-founded a union, which is still active in my hometown. As her…