Back in October, I posted on office hours and de-googling. I've
decided to continue with some more experiments in the meantime.
The first is app reduction. Since most smartphone apps are really just
wrappers around web sites, I decided to see which ones I could drop
without losing functionality. Proton Mail didn't work so well (web
page does not re-flow correctly on mobile, while the app does), but
the social apps I use all worked fine on the web (Discord, Reddit,
Mastodon). I may have a few more to go, but those were the main ones.
The second (and more entertaining) experiment is to completely ignore
my Junk Mail folder at work for the whole month and see how much piles
up in there. I used to check it several times/day, which is a huge
waste given that I've never had a false positive. I did peek as I
wrote this post, and it's over 40 messages since the 1st of the month!
Other than the above silliness, I'm behind on my reading goals, and
will not hit 26 books this year; I'm only on #19 right now, and while
I will get to 20 or 21, it's rather hard to get reading time when we
head east to visit the family, so it really comes down to airplane
reading (4 hours each way). On the plus side, I'm doing better in my
Duolingo lessons than before, and my daughter and I are doing Spanish
together (she's in Spanish 1 at school now and the bonus lessons seem
to help).
Finally, I've been doing well on the cycling, with occasional runs and
even some yoga added to the mix, but I did get clipped by a car a few
weeks back, fortunately at low enough speed to not do any damage to me
or the bike. The car driver split, though, so I did have to get the
police involved to have a "discussion" with him about his error.
Here's to hoping that was my one and only incident (it's been over 40
years of riding to this one, I could go another 40 and be happy).
