I was an early adopter of twitter; I had a three character user name. I made friends on Twitter, I mourned friends passing on Twitter.
I’ve been elsewhere for a couple of years. I made the twitter account private, but didn’t delete the content. I suppose I was hoping sane hands would take over – similar to how Flickr has developed over the years. I have talks and websites and publications that link to twitter, I can’t edit those. That was my excuse.
Fuck that.
It’s gone.
The sidebar of this website (it’s underneath the posts these days for some reason I don’t understand) has links to websites and comics and things that I like or used to like. I don’t clean it up very often, so there’s still a link or two on there I’d not visit now.
One of the links is to the blog of G4ILO, Julian, a radio amateur who died a while ago. I still dip into his posts on occasion as there’s useful stuff there and his host hasn’t taken down the page yet. Earlier today I clicked the link to Julian’s site and realised it hasn’t been updated in 10 years, clicking though from there took me to his ‘one foot in the grave’ blog – that informed me he died 10 years ago yesterday.
How time flies.
I finally spotted the comet (C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS))
As seen from south Minneapolis.
My mobile phone contract doesn’t include data roaming in the US. I could pay £6 per day for some data, but I’d need to remember account passwords and details I’d long since forgotten.
So I’m experiencing the US on zero bytes per day – out and about anyway.
I’ve downloaded maps of the area I’m visiting, so I can navigate with no data, but I can’t search for anything – I thought this used to be a feature of downloaded maps?
Photos – I can’t search my local photos on my phone with no data connection.
Translation seems hit and miss with no data – it works if I type in text to translate (and have the language downloaded) but live translation from an image doesn’t work. I know that used to work.
It is interesting to see how many features that should be able to work locally on the phone feel the need to call out to the internet and exchange globs of data.
This experience will definitely make me think twice about how much info I’m inadvertently giving to Google every day.
Never tease a post with “report to come” you’ll not get around to writing it.
In the US for family stuff for the next couple of weeks.
