zimena

So, yesterday's snooker was partly very nice (thanks, Ronnie!) and partly very painful (because Mark lost 3-5 to Neil). I must admit that it took me a few hours to get over the painful match (I love Mark very intensely right now), but I also had a friend over to watch Ronnie's match with me in the evening, so I had to refocus because of him. We ended up having a very nice evening together - not only because of the match, though.

So, about this friend, I haven't talked about him that much in my journal before. We first got to know each other in my former workplace, more than 20 years ago. Only, we didn't really make friends then, we just... knew who each other were, since that time. Our friendship only started about a year and a half ago, when I started attending an exercise group he was already part of. That group is also part of a local activity centre, where I've also become more active since I first joined the group.

Anyway, he's blind, so most of our other friends don't really understand how he is able to enjoy following snooker with me, as it's such a very visual sport. I suppose I also do not truly understand what he gets out of it, but I try to explain a bit about the game and which possibilities are on the table when we watch things. Plus, he picks up on what the commentators are saying, and on my emotional state really well. It seems to me that part of his enjoyment of it is the intensity, the emotional side of things. It's obviously hard for him to appreciate the shots individually - and things change too fast for me to explain these nuances to him while watching a match. Either way, we see each other fairly often, and talk on the phone even more often, so you should know about him now.

Maybe I should start calling people by initial in my journal, like I've seen some of you do. If so, I might make a separate post about who's who soon. But as for this guy, let's call him C.

So, the match finished in... I guess about 90 minutes, so around 8:30pm or something? But he still stayed until past 11pm, so that probably tells you that we had a nice evening together. (Also, before you ask, we are friends and nothing more. He has a girlfriend, HG, who is also a friend of mine, too.)

Then, this morning I was already out at 8:30, because they're starting up a new Morning Dance group at the activity centre. This idea started as a joke between me and a couple of other women back before the summer, and now it's actually being set up. Because I was part of the group that first came up with the idea, I felt that it was important to be there for the first session. It's very informal - we put some music on, and we dance however we feel like. The main point is just to move about and to enjoy the music - it's not a "class" in the sense that the aim is to "practice" specific skills. It was also fun for me to get spun around a couple of times, because with the new active wheelchair that I got a few weeks back, that is now a possibility - whereas it would have been a lot harder to dance in my old one, because was so much heavier to move.

Either way, I stayed at the centre for a little while after the dancing, just to talk with people and be around them for a bit. Went back home when I started to feel like I'd had my fill of social interactions for a while, because I'm still kind of shy and might feel a bit awkward around people, even though I'm working on it, and it's "better" than it used to be.

Now I'm about to go out with my cousin, because we're going to look at the new Google Pixel 9 XL phones that got released recently. I'm looking forward to it, and let's be honest - I find those phones very interesting, and I'd love to buy one. I'm not sure I can justify buying a new phone, though, as my current one still works (apart from being a massive battery eater), and it's only 2 years old. I start putting aside money for a phone soon after getting a new one, though, so I have the money... and there's some resell value in my old one, too. But still - buy a phone? Now? Can I? I need to think it through. But I can definitely look... right?

I lowkey want a Google Pixel phone next time I'm getting a new one. Mostly for the cleaner Android version, of course - less junk apps that I can't delete because they're supposedly used for some tasks in the background, and plus it supposedly has a better screen than my Samsung phone, too.

I shouldn't be thinking of this now, though. My phone works mostly fine - apart from the "couldn't send messages for a few hours" nonsense that it was doing randomly up until a few weeks back. I never actually figured out what that was about, but it's been okay for a while now, anyway. So, I neither need a new one, nor should I be reading up on and looking at the newer models, but I'm of course doing that anyway.

I've been looking through various todo-list apps lately. Unsurprisingly, I'm finding most of them way too feature-rich for my needs. I simply need a list of tasks/stuff, preferably with some way to sort or filter the tasks in simple ways. I don't need sub-tasks, sub-sections, recurring tasks, upcoming tasks, overdue tasks etc. Simply put, I'm not that busy.

What I need is simply somewhere to put those random thoughts that I'm likely to forget if I don't write them somewhere. Like, "oh, I took the last sheet of baking paper, let's remember to get a package next time I'm at the store" or "I had a random thought that could be a fic at some point, let me note that down somewhere." Or even that appointment somewhere down the line that will surprise me with a bang when I suddenly see it in my calendar a few days from time, if I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere since making it.

...as it turns out, there is a neat little thing called todo-txt, and it works from pretty much everywhere - phone, computer, and even the command line, or by editing the file associated with it manually.

For now I'm having quite some fun with this thing, and it does kinda what I want it to do, too.

Why is it that I tend to get excited over simple, old-fashioned tools instead of the more modern and flashy ones?

Also, on a different but maybe sort of related note - while looking for phone apps compatible with this system, I again came across F-Droid, which seems to be an alternative to Play Store, but for free and open-source apps. Needless to say, I found lots of interesting stuff in there - including a proper file manager/storage manager for the phone, and a much better photo gallery app. I'm kinda tempted to install a new launcher as well, but I kept that desire in check for now, as launchers tend to ask for more permissions and I suddenly got worried about the safety of that.

Just a few things:

* I have a new mobile phone! And... I'm not an iPhone user anymore. I went for a Samsung phone this time around, and so far I'm very happy with it. Two things I really love (that are very different from the iOS approach to things) are the fact that I hardly ever need to use the "symbols" keyboard while typing, because you can set the symbols to sit on a long press of a letter character instead. And I also love the notification system on Android. iOS has a habit of filling your lockscreen with little notification cards, while my current phone just shows the icon of the app with a notification, and then I can check the details from the notification center (dunno if that's what it's called, though) when I want to. And everything will be nicely sorted and not taking up the entire screen in there.

I might ramble more about the phone later, when I've had more time to get used to it. But for now: YES, THIS IS SO GREAT!

* We are almost done clearing out mom's flat. Only a few larger pieces of furniture are left, and then we also need to gather the little things that we just somehow missed earlier. I'm hoping to finish everything and have it ready for cleaning during this week, but we'll see.

So... this whole process has been very stressful and painful for me, because pretty much every item I've picked up has triggered feelings and memories. I would absolutely not have made it this far without my cousin near me. While he might sometimes stop and need an emotional break as well, he has also been wonderful with keeping me grounded - as well as amazing at actually helping out with the work.

* Sort of related to the point above: I spent most of today trying to put stuff that I took from her flat in its place here. I have about 5 boxes of stuff, and I've sorted three of them today. Hopefully I'll be able to do the other two tomorrow. (Oh, and before you ask: Yes, I "saved" much more than those 5 boxes from her flat. There is just too much stuff that I want to keep, even though I don't have immediate use for it, other than knowing it's still there. That stuff, I put in the attic - to either sort through or use at a later date.)

* Also, about today: One of the neighbours upstairs invited me over for a meal today. I went there, and we had a nice, good talk while eating her delicious, homemade pizza.

* Genshin Impact is my life at the moment. If I'm not actively doing other things, I'm either playing that or thinking about playing that. Or, you know, searching for Diluc/Kaeya fics and fanart. ❤️💙 The way I'm behaving with them right now is absolutely comparable to what I do when I find new musicians or sportspeople to admire, but I'm not sure it's a normal reaction to have about characters in a game... ;)

So, I've finally turned on the one month test period for Google Play Music. I've been a Spotify user for a long time, so I never really checked out other music streaming services. However, I'm intrigued by services that offer a way to make my own music collection available alongside the streaming catalog.

My first test of that was Apple Music, a few months back. That... didn't go well at all. In short, Apple Music matches my files against their own catalogue. If it finds a match, it replaces the info in my file with the info in the matched result - including cover photo and tags. This quickly makes a complete mess out of everything I've carefully built up over the last 18 months or so, and so it made me 1) fiercely angry and 2) not keen on Apple Music at all.

The Goole Play Music approach to making my own files available across devices seems to be letting me upload them (or, up to 50 000 songs - more than I'll have even when I'm done with the Colossal Music Ripping Project) to the cloud. This seems to also double as a backup, as the Music Manager app also has a way to download my songs - not just upload whatever isn't "matched", like with the idiotic service I mentioned above.

Other Google Music perks include ad-free Youtube and access to Youtube Music. I don't use Youtube enough that I would pay for these things separately, but they're definitely nice things to have if I decide to make the switch from Spotify when the test period is over.

For now, it seems most of my songs are getting uploaded without problems. Once the whole album is uploaded, the cover photo and tags also seem to be what I want them to be. I am seeing some unwanted cover art, as well as some albums completely missing any artwork whatsover, but all of them seem to be incomplete uploads so far, so I won't moan too much about them yet.

Let's see how this goes. For now I'm just looking around while waiting for more of my songs to upload.

Some gaming news today.

First of all, I sold my Playstation 4 system, and also an old Nintendo DS with some games. It's been on my list of things to do for a while, but I just didn't have the motivation to set it up and go through the formatting process just to take it to a store the next day. I guess it's better to do it while I can still get some money for these systems, though, so I simply decided to get it done.

Maybe I didn't get as much money as I would have liked, but it's still better than keeping the consoles if I'm not playing on them anyway. Right now I'm not even sad about having sold them - I'm mostly just happy, because I'm realising that I'm more into other kinds of games than what is typically available on PS4, anyway. And as for the DS - handheld systems were much more useful before mobile games were good. I still have a PSP, too, but it's too old to sell back to a store. I have to try to sell it online instead, but so far I had no motivation to take photos and write about it and do something about that.

One thing at a time, okay?

Then, I set up my Nintendo Switch again instead. We got it when the last Zelda game came out, but so far we haven't played any other games than that on it. However, Nintendo recently released Tetris 99, which is exactly what it says on the tin - Tetris against 99 other players at the same time. So, basically Tetris Battle Royale. That information was of course enough to have me fascinated, so I downloaded the game as soon as I could.

The game works in a similar way to other VS Tetris games. If you clear multiple lines, or even just lines in a row (as in, with different pieces), you send garbage lines to your opponents. Or, if someone already sent some garbage your way, you have a few seconds to clear lines of your own to reduce the amount of garbage you get.

By the way, you can choose a specific opponent to target with the garbage you send yourself, or you can target those who are targeting you, someone who's about to KO, someone with badges (you get badges by KO'ing people, or by stealing them by KO'ing people who have them - having more badges means sending extra garbage each time you send some), or simply someone random. For now I'm unsure if random really means random, or if there is some bias involved - I kind of felt that I got more people targeting me from the off if I did well in the previous game, for example, but I don't know yet how this works, exactly.

So far, my best result is a 7th place (twice). If you are among the last remaining players (so, in the last 10 or so, I guess?), the pieces start to fall really fast, so even though I had a good board on both occasions when I ended that high up the list, I messed it up myself by not being able to position pieces where I wanted them fast enough.

Most of the time I lose earlier than that, though - usually due to dying from the garbage that gets sent my way. Sometimes the garbage can be useful, if it's laid out in such a way that there's an easy Tetris in it as long as you can get an opening for a long piece, but if you have too many pieces in "your own" part of the board, there's simply no easy way to reach the "easy Tetris" that might be in your garbage pieces. And so, your board fills up and you get knocked out.

The good thing is that you can just start a new game immediately after getting knocked out, though - you don't have to wait for the players who are better than you to finish before you can join another game. So far, games I've played have been set up pretty quickly as well. As soon as I click on "new game", it immediately sets up a new game, finds 100 opponents and starts preparing the game for everyone. Typically, it takes 30 seconds to a minute for a new game to start, but it's probably closer to the former than the latter.

In my opinion, the game would have been even better if there had been a "normal"/single player mode in addition to the versus mode, because it would be easier to get used to the layout and the controls in a less frantic setting, but I'm also enjoying the game as it is.

Just so you know :).

Just a quick question for the Android users on my flist: Is F-Droid and the apps from there safe to use, as long as the permissions they ask for are sensible? Or can they be hidden keyloggers or something else scary that I wouldn't want to put on my phone?

I keep seeing recommendations about the Tachiyomi manga reader, and I want to start reading at least some more manga in the new year, so it sounds like something I would want. Besides, I already started reading one manga which is available for free online, but the web reader is kind of clumsy and it'd be nice to have a proper reading app... and there's of course nothing sensible on Google Play, as Google don't like apps that offer things like manga (= copyrighted material) for free.

I use apps from homebrew (= a non-official source) on my computer with no problem, and F-Droid kind of feels like the phone version of the same thing, but I just want to be sure. Would you use it or not?

(

catness, I feel like you have some sensible advice here?)

Also, on a different note, I have all my DW icons back. In other words, I renewed my paid account after staying on a free one for a few months. So, I'm here for another year... yay?

So, I've had my new phone for a few weeks now, so it's finally time to comment on the iPhone to Android switch. I had been pondering the switch for a while, because nice Android phones kept coming out... while at the same time I don't like the newer iPhones. For one thing, they are too expensive, and there's also the fact that there is very little noticeable difference between models. If we look beyond the phones themselves, iOS has also remained similar since iOS 7, when the old (and in my opinion cool) design was scrapped in favour of a flatter, whiter, uglier one... but let's not even go into that too much.

In short, I might have wanted to switch for a while - maybe even before I bought the iPhone I had before switching now - but it's a big step because it means not only learning a new environment when everything about the old one is automatically in your fingertips, but also setting up important things like contacts and messages and photos in a completely new way.

All of that ended up going more smoothly than I feared, though. Contacts and photos transferred easily via Google Drive, while messages needed a third-party app to transfer. Either way, it worked well enough. However, even with all the data transferred okay, it took some time to set up everything the way I want it. Some contacts appeared twice or even thrice, others were in the contact list even though they were obviously supposed to not be there. It took me a bit of time to realize that the phone contact list gets populated from various sources, including contacts that I've sent mail to only once, or contacts from messaging apps like Telegram. Once I found out how to turn off that, the contact list went back to being sensible.

Also, during the first couple of days, the menu system and settings kept confusing me to no end, because it wasn't obvious to me which settings were in which sub-menus, so every time I wanted to tweak something, I was clicking on various unnecessary stuff first. Even with Huawei's nifty little search feature for settings, some of them still feel like they are able to "hide" in some sub-menu I'm not quite familiar with yet.

One more important thing after switching is of course my apps. I have not found any important apps that did not also have an Android version, so I had very few problems here. The only problem was the app for our heat pump at home... but that app is also a pain in the ass to set up on iOS, and it still was so on Android, so it's just that app being stupid, it's not about the OS. For some reason, it refuses to discover the local network (which it needs in order to pair with the pump, and send start/stop signals to it). Once it finds the network, it says "connecting" endlessly, without actually connecting. If you restart the process enough times, it just suddenly works - in a way it feels like one of those old games where you have to battle the boss X number of times, then you suddenly win the battle, even though you're just doing the exact same time you've been doing the whole time. So, after X tries and one deletion and reinstallation of the heat pump app, it paired and now works flawlessly.

Also - the good stuff if you are an Android fan: Android (or in some cases specifically Huawei's version of it) has a few major advantages compared to iOS:

* More control over where you put what if you download something from your phone. There's even a file browser, and more advanced ones to download if you want.
* If you want to transfer files to or from the phone, it's like working with regular folders.
* last.fm scrobbling works, and is as easy as downloading a scrobbler app (Good luck scrobbling from iOS, without using an app that also forces you to play your music through it).
* Many, many more customisation options. App drawer can be turned on or off.
* Different navigation options. Gestures are an option, not a requirement.
* Switkey for Android is miles better than the iOS version. The keyboard itself is just better, and you can have more active languages on at the same time.

There might be a few more things I noticed as well, but I can't think of them now.

Also, there are a couple of features I miss from iOS. I keep tapping the top of the screen to go to the top of the current page, and that doesn't work on Android. Even if you scrolled quite far down, you have to scroll back up if you want to go to the top. And also, the favourite sites list when you tapped the address bar in Safari would have little icons for each site, and I practically never typed any URLs for my most visited sites - I just added them to that list, and tapped where I wanted to go. That also works great as a "reminder" to visit certain sites, because you see the logo every time you go to something, even if you weren't thinking of that site specifically. There's no such thing in Chrome for Android. I know there's a favourites list, but it's text based and not such an in-your-face reminder as the icons were. Plus, I don't really use it, I simply start typing the first few letters of the URL I want, and then it comes up as a suggestion.

Sometimes there are things I miss from iOS, and I definitely miss AirPlay, because I can't cast videos from the web to my TV anymore, but overall I'm very satisfied with the new phone.... and there are some things about it that I really love, that I could never have on iOS in a million years.

I don't feel like writing a long post, but I have a few things I want to mention on here, so let's see:

⭑ My arm is slowly healing. Well, at least they said that the fracture is in a good position during my last check-up, and I'm regaining movement slowly, but surely. Apparently I'm not allowed to attempt any movement that involves lifting my arm above shoulder height for another few weeks, though. Not that I could do that yet anyway, but I can at least type comfortably and normally now, and also move my hand/arm a bit out from my body. I still have to pretend being left handed if I want to hold or lift anything that weighs more than a cup of coffee, and sometimes I get frustrated at that, but.... yeah, it's getting better.

⭑ Winter sports are back on, YAY! Cross-country skiing has been slightly less yay from my point of view so far, because a certain Johannes did not have a great start to the season. He kind of gave away the win in the first sprint of the season, because he did not bother to sprint at maximum speed until the finish line. Then, when he looked to the side to check where competitors were, Alexander Bolshunov sprinted past and won. Two things about this: 1) Bolshunov was really, really fast, and I'm not 100% sure Johannes would have kept him behind even without the idiocy he did. Probably, but I'm not sure. And also 2) I really hope he will learn from this, because he's annoying with the "slowing down before the line" thing. He does it in most races if he thinks he is far enough ahead, and it's scary as a fan... and yes, annoying.
As if this wasn't enough, the next sprint wasn't much better. Let's just say, Halfvarsson stepped on Johannes' ski pole, and Johannes threw a crazy hissy fit on the track because of that.
... and that's just the sprints. There were a couple of longer races as well, but let's not even talk about his performance there.

In nicer news, other skiers I like did well, though. Pellegrino won the sprint this past weekend, and I'm also not sad about Bolshunov winning the first one, because I like him as well - I'm just not as happy as I might otherwise be for him because it happened at the expense of someone I like more, as you saw above. Also, a lovely surprise for me was seeing Didrik Tønseth get his first proper world cup win (I believe he had two from before, but one was a "best time" victory in a pursuit, and the other was awarded late because of Sundby's doping case). I didn't think he would make it when he was coming into the final part of the race with Røthe, because I know Didrik isn't good at sprinting for the finish line in a head to head duel like that... but he was smart and made all the right choices and WON, and I'm really happy for him about that! He smiled so much afterwards, too. So nice to see how much it meant to finally get that victory!

Biathlon has started again, too, but so far only with mixed relays. I'm looking forward to more races. And can I just say "YESSS, winter sports are back on!" one more time?

⭑ I have a new mobile phone. Not an iPhone anymore, but a Huawei Mate 20 Pro! In short, it's awesome and wonderful, and I love it. I haven't found any "missing" important apps yet, either. This deserves a longer post when I've had more time to explore it - I've only had it for a few days. Mom was supposed to get my old phone, because her phone screen is cracked, but right now she's not sure she wants to replace the cracked phone anyway. Resistant to change, much? I guess she just needs more time to adjust to the idea, though... but I wouldn't have got a new phone now if she had not initially said that she wanted my old one.

I've been having fun with the macOS desktop layout lately. Of course, there's only so much you can do about the look of things in macOS (and admittedly the many different possibilities for how things can look is one of my reasons for sometimes checking out some Linux distributions in a virtual machine). However, I found a nice little tool called uBar, and with that in place I could suddenly change more than just the wallpaper.

Have a look at my current desktop:
( Cut for image size )

So, what changed compared to the regular macOS layout? Of course, the default dock has been disabled entirely. There is also an option to stick it on the right side and use auto-hide, but I kind of didn't want it to pop out randomly if I move my cursor over there. Instead, there's an uBar on the left. I quite like that it takes up the whole column (inspired by Ubuntu's Unity desktop), but there's also an option to only let it cover the amount of space you actually have icons in it for. Also, the uB icon on top has a menu of shortcuts that can be customised according to your needs - I'm not even done with that yet.

Other than that, I also changed to a matching wallpaper, and I turned on macOS' dark menu line. It can be either completely black with white-ish icons and text, or semi-transparent as it is here - the transparency setting is hidden in Accessibility settings, though. One more thing that you can't see here, is that I also changed my Chrome theme to something matching these colours.

Oh, and the colours? Are from Ubuntu's official colour palette, so it's definitely possible to "beautify" the macOS environment with more interesting colours. For now this is something fun and unusual, but I guess it might take some time to get used to uBar. It doesn't work exactly like the regular Dock, so some habits and routines will have to change to adapt to the new environment.

Let's see how that goes...?

You know me and my tendency to get fascinated with new software, right? Especially new writing software. Today’s new toy is called Bear Notes App. I’ve had it for a few days now, and so far I’m liking it a lot.

I tend to type up a lot of random stuff on my phone. Sometimes I’ve even written whole fics there, but mostly it’s little snippets of text, info that I need to have easily available, shopping lists and task lists. In the old days before the overly white design of iOS 7, the phone notes app used to be enough for me for these things. However, the white design killed the appeal of that one for me, so I’ve tried out endless notes apps since then. I ended up using Google Keep quite a bit, though. It’s a nice app that does what I want, but I never quite settled on being fully satisfied with it.

Bear is something quite different - it’s simple enough to be a notes app, but also with some cool advanced features. Most importantly, you can tag your notes (and even use nested tags). That way, you can group similar stuff together, and there is a separate sidebar which displays all your tags neatly.

Also, it uses markdown for formatting. Because I mostly care about my notes looking nice and readable on screen, this can be a either an advantage or a drawback, depending on how it’s done. The first markdown editor I ever downloaded would display the markdown coding along with the text, without actually showing me how these codes changed the text. So, not a good solution for reading mainly on screen. Bear does something else, though - it displays the markdown coding in a somewhat dimmed colour, so that you can easily see what does what. Oh, and it also does the thing to your text that you’ve asked for - so, headers and bold text and italics and whatnot all come out looking like you would expect. It looks neat on screen, and it means that you can do simple formatting easily.

Oh, and if you for some reason want more formatting options, just export the note to RTF format and import it into your favourite more graphical piece of writing software, but this is not what I need a notes app for.

Also, the pro version syncs seamlessly between the phone and the desktop computer. Apart from this sync feature, the other differences between the free and the pro version are that pro users get more colour themes, and they also get a few more export options. I don’t care about the export options, but the other Pro features are definitely important.

Oh, and for me another nice feature is that this app actually looks good on the phone as well as on the computer. The phone version seems to have almost all the same features as the desktop version - including the tag list.

For now my biggest problem with this app is the fact that I liked it so much that I feel like doing all sorts of stuff in it, but there’s only so many notes I can think of making right away. I’ve even been looking for screenshots online so that I could see how other people use their tag list, and maybe there would be some cool ideas there. Suffice to say, I found a couple of new uses for notes that I hadn’t thought of before, so yay?

…oh, and I also find it strange that I’m not allowed to choose my own font freely from all the fonts installed. Instead, I can select the font from a pre-set list of 5-6 rather plain and common ones. I guess that’s easily remedied because there is a theme file for each of the selectable fonts. That file seems to be in XML format, so getting some cool font to work is just a matter of replacing the font names in one of those files. If you make sure to not rename the actual file, it should be possible to simply change your least favourite font profile file to use a font you like more, and then pick said least favourite font from the in-app list.

Yes, I actually tried the above trick out, and it works!

…That’s my app squee of the day.

Today has been a very exciting day!

First, I had an appointment at the car workshop in the morning. They needed me to be there while they made some adjustments, so I've seen the new car again, too. This time with the lift and special floor installed, so this time I was even allowed to sit in it. Let's just say it's still an absolute dream. I just wish that my driving skills matched the feeling of being in the car... actually driving still scares me, though. But okay, old news and all that, and this is supposed to be an excitement post, so...

... they also said that the car might be ready in 3-4 weeks' time, depending on when the traffic authorities decide to approve the adjustments. Yes, there is apparently a separate procedure of approval for this.

On a different note, we also did something nice after finishing the car stuff: We bought a new TV. We've had a lot of issues with our old one, so this is something we've been discussing and thinking of doing for a long time already. At the same time, we're also going to change our TV and net provider (back to the company we used to be with before), so I'm excited about that... and a little nervous, because it will mean a bit of stress with having people over, and probably also a bit of stress before everything is set up to work the way it should.

Should work better than our current setup, anyway. Slow net and flawed TV picture (with a lot of short sound/picture failures if you try to watch anything) has been the order of the day for way too long, now.

Finally... this also means one more thing: We will not have a landline phone anymore after this switch.

I'll be honest and admit that it has been hard for me to accept that this is a sensible decision. Of course it's true that I hardly ever use the landline phone, and I haven't been using it for a good few years. The only people who call on it are telemarketers and - until recently - mom's friend who kept living with the misconception that calling someone on their mobile phone is ridiculously expensive, so better use the landline if you can. Even that friend has now cancelled her landline phone subscription, though...

... so why has it been hard for me to get rid of it? Simply because the landline phone number we have has been the same for practically all of my life. That phone number is us, in some way. It's ours, and getting rid of it feels a bit like getting rid of some part of myself; some part of my own history. Does that even make sense?

Now I just need to hear from the TV/net installation folks, so that I know when they're coming by to set things up.

Soon, preferably. Because this should be exciting!

Escaping reality

Snooker from yesterday + dance practice today

Phone?

Nifty little tool

Notes from the last few days

Testing Google Play Music

Tetris 99

Android questions

Some comments on my new phone

A couple of notes

Some fun with the macOS layout

Bear notes app

Big day today

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