Usable, but only just

Struggling to let go of ageing AirPods despite their limited lifespan.

The image shows a pair of white wireless earbuds sitting in their open charging case. The earbuds appear to be Apple AirPods or a similar style of wireless earbuds. They're placed in their designated slots in the charging case, with the small black microphone meshes visible on the stems. The charging case is also white and shows some signs of wear and minor dirt along the edges. The case is sitting on what looks like a grey surface, possibly a table or shelf, with what appears to be a wall or baseboard visible at the bottom of the image. — Old EarPods

We have a box upstairs for storing broken electronics, so we can take them to a recycling centre at some point. It doesn’t have much in it at the moment: there’s a security camera that the manufacturer wouldn’t fix after about 15 months of service, and there’s the bedside lamp I broke (which got replaced). When there are a few more things, it will be worth making arrangements for their proper disposal.

We also have a collection of electronics like these AirPods. They are not broken and are still usable, but they are past their sensible, useful life. These headphones have batteries, and like all batteries, they have a limited lifespan. I’ve seen reports suggesting that these should last two to three years.

I bought these AirPods from the Apple SoHo store on a work trip to New York in February 2018. I was on my way back to my hotel from the office and had, yet again, left a pair of wired headphones somewhere (they eventually resurfaced in my suitcase). I decided to invest in a pair of (what were, at the time) relatively new in-ear devices. I remember some of this because it was snowing in New York, and the streets still had a dusting of snow, and I thought it was exciting to be in the Big Apple in the snow. I guess the SoHo branch was nearest my hotel because I recall checking to see if it would still be open on my walk back. I paid $159 (plus $14.11 in sales tax). It was pretty pricey, really, but I was getting all my travel and meals paid for on the trip, so I imagine I felt I’d put my usual expense money into something. I immediately liked them, especially once I’d got over the feeling they’d fall out of my ears (they rarely did), but I probably didn’t use them very often for the first few years.

By February 2022, they should have been beyond their quoted life. But the left pod was fine: it held a charge for a useful time. The right-hand pod had all but died. I complained to Apple (because I felt they should have degraded on a similar timeframe), who eventually sold me a replacement right pod for some ridiculous sum that, in hindsight, I shouldn’t have paid. I should have gone back to the wired set. But it meant the lifespan was extended for about another year. Then, the left pod refused to hold a charge for a usable period.

To me, a usable time is an hour minimum, but practically, it should be closer to ninety minutes. That’s time in the gym or a commute. And that’s a minimum as the battery fades. I want them to last hours and hours for the majority of their life. They are a pretty useless pair of headphones if they need charging more often than that. I guessed Apple wouldn’t send me another single pod, and, anyway, I felt the money I’d already paid for the replacement wasn’t good value. Instead, I replaced the entire set.

Yet, these sit on my desk all day long. I look at them. Occasionally, if there is excessive noise outside, I will use them on a short work call. But they are otherwise useless. As I write this, I am charging the case, which seems to have been fine since 2018 but is low on charge right now.

These AirPods should be going to an electronics recycling box, but I can’t quite bring myself to part with something that retains some usability. I feel guilty about the waste. But everything has a battery these days, which means many things are disposable. I know the replacement headphones are better (I love the noise-cancelling features when I am commuting), but I can’t help but feel that $173.11 should get me more than a three-year rental period.

This is how clutter arrives in our lives.

Let’s hang out in the blogosphere

On January 2nd this year, Matt Mullenweg encouraged people to get blogging,

Write for a single person. Share something cool you found. Summarize your year. Set a blogging goal with reminders. Get a Gutenberg-native theme and play around with building richer posts. Start a nom de plume. Answer daily prompts on Day One. Forget the metaverse, let’s hang out in the blogosphere. Get your own domain!

Reading that reminded me that I haven’t written on curnow.org for some time. I used to ‘summarise my year’ pretty regularly – albeit in different ways – on here. In 2021, I tried the weeknotes format, but it didn’t really work for me. In December 2020, I posted a 10-Year Instagram retrospective and, earlier that year, looked back on the handful of tweets I posted in 2019.

I wrote 2018’s Annual Report at the start of 2019 and took a moment to look back on my 2017 Reading Challenge the year before. Previous annual(ish) reviews were photography-based; the last one of those was My 15 for 2015, posted at the end of December 2015.

In the spirit of ‘hanging out in the blogosphere’ and because I have previous writing to point to, on January 4th this year, I gave myself 27 days to compose something to summarise 2021. Clearly, I missed my own deadline, but these are the words I’ve put together since then.

2021

2021 was an odd year. Like many others, I began the year in a London COVID-19 lockdown, dreaming of springtime freedom. I took part in a virtual escape room in March, which was fun but not as much as the real thing. And nowhere near as fun as the summer of normality, which followed a few months later.

I got my first vaccine shot in the early part of the year, but it wasn’t until April 15th that I could go out and see people. I met some friends for an outside meal. I have two memories of that evening: that it was fun to be able to talk to people across a table, but it was cold. I bought a jacket with an in-built, battery-powered heating element to get me through that – and a couple of similar evenings.

This year, I continued a trend from the first months of lockdown in 2020: going on local history walks. On one of them, we tried to find the site of the Craig Telescope, but I am not convinced we ever did.

The year opened up from June, and I was able to get to the Isle of Wight for a holiday, and there was a family trip to the Lake District. Later in the summer, I got to see AFC Wimbledon’s new Plough Lane stadium, which was fun, and I hope to see a few more games this year. By the time the weather was getting colder again, there was a trip on the Caledonian Sleeper to Fort William, which was wonderful, but my overriding memory is of rain.

All the socials

I didn’t really tweet much in 2021. I think I was trying to avoid doom-scrolling about the pandemic. I appear to have enjoyed The Masked Singer last year (as I am this year). I also noted that I finally killed off a couple of experiments I had been running for 10 years on local tweeting. The local engagement was fun, but it was time-consuming. When I moved house, I gave up, and a couple of accounts just became automatic retweeters. I don’t think it’s a good use of Twitter. I had always planned to write more about those experiments, but I think their time has been and gone. Still, it was a fun side project for several years, but I am glad it’s been put to sleep.

https://twitter.com/curns/status/1423618875007148040

I ended 2021 tweeting about Stretchy Pants, which is a much more relevant topic for this time of year.

On Instagram, there were 16 grid pictures vs 104 stories. So I guess the story format wins. Yet again, the algorithm chose my Top Nine, but I got to pick my story highlights.

If I had to pick my favourite photographs, I’m not sure what I would pick, but I do like these three night shots; my favourite photo didn’t make it to Instagram.

I tried quite hard to complete a full year’s photo journal with Blipfoto. It’s an excellent and, I think, unknown photo-sharing site that I briefly used many years ago but came back to during the pandemic. I started 2021 strongly, but my continuous burst really ended in September. I’m not sure what killed it off, but I am back trying again in 2022.

As a result of working at home, I probably listened to more music than I have in previous years. Last.fm says there were 9,456 scrobbles. Contemporary country music is the genre I am listening to most at the moment. It’s interesting to see what the various services say about my top artists:

Last FM says Miranda Lambert was my top artist of 2021, while Famous Friends ” by Chris Young & Kane Brown was my top track. They also say that 59% of my listening was new tracks, which I found surprising.
On Spotify, I apparently played more Luke Combs, while “If I Didn’t Love You” was the most-played song for 3 and a half minutes.
Apple Music agrees that Famous Friends is my most-played song, but makes it way too hard to figure out who my most-played artist is, so I don’t bother with this post.

My 2021 Media Diet only included three films. I can’t choose between them because they were all perfectly passable ways to spend a couple of hours. So, in the order that I saw them (with a short review):

In the Heights (Good, but I preferred the stage show)
Free Guy (Good, but felt a bit familiar)
No Time To Die (Good, but some of the action scenes went on for too long)

Of the films watched on a TV screen, I am finding it hard to pick a favourite. Perhaps honourable mentions for The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Wonder Woman, My Octopus Teacher, and Never Surrender: A Galaxy Quest Documentary.

I went to the theatre five times, but two visits were to see things I’d seen before. I saw Declan Bennett twice; once in his one-man show, Boy Out of the City and once in Carousel at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in August. Both were excellent.

I did write about my failure to meet my GoodReads Reading Challenge as an end-of-year post to Blipfoto. I read two books, 767 pages and listened to five audiobooks. I’m pretty disappointed with that, and I aim to do better this year.

This year, I started listening to the Strangerville storytelling podcast. There are over a hundred episodes to catch up on. It’s really great.

Out and about

Swarm, by Foursquare, doesn’t give me stats anymore about the number of check-ins. I’m guessing it’s way down because of the pandemic, but I’d be interested in comparisons with previous years. If anybody knows of simple tools to query my data, let me know. On the other hand, Google tells me that the total amount of travel in 2021 was equivalent to 19% around the world. I find that quite a surprising number (or perhaps my sense of the distance around the world is skewed). Mind you, Google says I walked a total of 783 miles this year, while Apple thinks that was 1008 miles. The lesson here might be to not trust the trackers.

The pandemic has changed the ways a lot of us have been working. In November, we tried an experiment and spent a month working from an Airbnb on the Isle of Wight to see how well that would work (turned out pretty well, really). I hope to do that again this year.

K9

A detailed K9 model from Doctor Who, displayed on a wooden table, its head tilted upward on an extended neck, with its trademark ear-like radar dishes, red laser-tipped nose gun and tail-mounted probe visible against a warm-lit room. — A K9 model, ready to roll.

This is a remote-controlled K9 toy that sits on the shelf behind my desk. Since I moved into this room to use it as my working office, the model has appeared in the background of all my video calls. There’s also a picture of Tom Baker as Doctor Who on a wall just out of shot.

At first, people commented on K9. Some younger people even asked what it was. Nowadays, they are either used to it or no longer care about the geeky things people have in the background.

When I was a child, I loved the idea of a robot dog—and K9 in particular. One of the things that appealed was that this robot, albeit in dog form, had elements of human speech. Everybody will remember how he referred to the Doctor as “Master”.

I felt the same about Zen, the onboard computer in the television show Blake’s 7. Thinking about it now, Zen feels like a foretelling of the arrival of Amazon’s Alexa. I’m a big fan of those moments when Alexa seems more human than machine.

I still like computers to have human qualities. At work, I was recently writing requirements for some software and wanted the system to log things as though they had been spoken. When somebody read the messages, they could have been written by a person. I rarely get my way in these discussions because better minds focus on how logs should work rather than on making them sound human.

But one day my systems will sound human rather than machine, and I will blame K9 for that.