Week commencing Monday, 10 July 2023
Quantified Self
- This week: Stand 5/7; Exercise 4/7 and Move 4/7. (62%, wrong direction). Morning walks: 0/4 (days in the office don’t count). Office days 2/5. Total steps: 53,015
Life
- The iPhone turns 15. I went to the App Store to find a list of the first apps I downloaded. If you’d asked me, I would have said my first was the Carling Tap app because, at the time, I think that showed off some of the phone’s unique screen and sensor capabilities and is the one I remember the most. Also, I didn’t actually get an iPhone until August; I’d been working for Microsoft and it wasn’t until I left that I switched to iPhone. Around this time 15 years ago it was still being put in a blender at MSFT.
- Lovely dinner in Surbiton with family this week. Happy Birthday Christine. A lovely town and the station is always wonderful to look at.
- So, after being introduced last week, it seems that Threads might become a thing. There’s a lot of clamour for Twitter-like features but I really like the algorithm-driven feeds full of people I don’t know. Over the last few days the algorithm has started to tune the feed for me and I like it. Because it’s linked to instagram, I have @curns over there as well.
- I can access threads in the UK. The rest of Europe can’t. Access to technology from the US tech giants before the test of the continent was never a message on the side of a bus.
- The Sun ran a story last Friday which it is now, kind-of, back-tracking on and I am left with a feeling that journalism isn’t doing what I think it should be doing. The tabloids have always set an agenda but, I think, not in the way we had this week. And the slavish following of all other news media seems wrong. Do we have the media plurality we should have in a democracy? We certainly have more voices, but, for those with mass reach, there don’t seem that many.
- Ryde Pride was postponed. Yet The Island was lovely, if a bit windy. We braved sitting outside in spite of the wind.
- The Ryde Transport Hub appears to be more-or-less finished. The mystery of the No. 9 is now solved. Boarded on Sunday. The lady that got on behind us doesn’t like the new arrangements. I am very much of the opposite opinion.
- I wish I could find something online that explains why they are extracting the sand from one part of Appley Beach and depositing it at the other end using two trucks, a digger and something to flatten it out.
Media
- Late to the party? Finished Season 1 of Ted Lasso.
- Back to the party? Binge watched the first three episodes of Queer Eye (Season 7). I’m not crying, I was peeling onions (honest).
- Is John Major a woefully underrated Prime Minister? Certainly, the two either side of him (Thatcher and Blair) continue to get a lot more coverage. A wonderful pair of fascinating interviews on ‘The Rest Is Politics Leading: John Major’.
Archive
To save the links getting lost in the future I checked the Internet Archive to see what they had saved for the posts linked here. If the original source above no longer works, these should.
- The App Store Turns 15 | My first downloads
- Introducing Threads, find me as @curns. But not in Europe: Meta’s Threads app is a privacy nightmare that won’t launch in EU yet. They’re missing out on my Ryde Transport Interchange pics.
- Isle of Wight Pride event postponed due to weather forecast
- Queer Eye Season 7 | ‘The Rest Is Politics Leading: John Major’