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After some trial and error I finally managed to get an electric car to charge at public charging points. The first success was at an evpass charging station where I was able to charge 13.1kW/h in an hour and 14 minutes using the app on my phone and a credit card for 8.48 CHF. The second time was with the TCS eCharge RFID tag that I ordered from the Touring Club Suisse for free. In that case I charged 11.1kW/h for 5.89 CHF.
With evpass the cost is 0.65 CHF per kW/h and with Swisscharge the price is 0.35 CHF per kW/h but with a 2 CHF connection fee for each charge, Without that connection charge Swisscharge would cost 3.89 CHF for 11.1kW/h and be competitive with evpasss. As things stand Swisscharge make you pay an extra 5.7 kW/h per charge. According to perplexity “… the 0.35 CHF per kWh charger with a 2 CHF connection fee becomes more cost-effective after charging approximately 6.67 kWh. In practical terms, this means that if you plan to charge more than 6.67 kWh, the first charger is the better option despite its connection fee.”

Apple push us to get the Apple Watch Series 10, the Ultra 2 or the Apple Watch SE in third place. If you’re a runner, and you don’t feel like spending on the Ultra or the Ten then it makes sense to get the SE instead.

Although the SE is the cheaper option it still provides us with plenty of running metrics. It provides heart rate, pace, power, cadence, vertical oscilation, ground contact time, stride length, workout time, distance, elevation gain, average cadence, average pace, average power, active kilocalories, total kilocalories and more.

It’s easy to drive a petrol car. You fill up, and 500-600 kilometres later you fill up. With Electric vehicles it is the same in theory. In practice it isn’t that simple. The EV charging market is fragmented and each company has a different app and possibly RFID tag. The result is that you can either be loyal and use just one app or you can have two or more apps on your phone.

Recently I have noticed that I like to play Solitaire for many games in a row. It has replaced my social media habit. I know that solitaire is a solitary game but at the moment I enjoy it. I tried several versions on iOS and android but my current favourite is the Netflix version of Solitaire.

I find that I can spend hours playing Solitaire as I watch TV and films. It seems to give more pleasure than social media. Social media no longer brings as much pleasure as it used to because the communities that I have been part of have migrated to other platforms, or given up on social media. The result is that I can spend hours scrolling, or I can play Solitaire.

I have spent the last day or two playing with Bluesky and I believe that it has potential, At it’s base it’s like Mastodon, but with less anarchic user base, and fewer trolls. This could be because I haven’t spent weeks using it yet.

Threads has a good community and good community tools but it’s part of the Facebook empire and within a few weeks adverts will appear and that will drastically feel the look and feel of the social network.

Not a single day goes by that I don’t think that now is the right time to give up on social media networks like Twitter, Threads, Jaiku, Google, BlueSky and Mastodon.

Too Many People

When social networks were small they were on a human scale. You could be on a forum with 20-40 people and with time you developed deep friendships with people. Now we’re speaking to a crowd speaking to a crowd. I see people with a thousand likes and a hundred replies. The chance that I will get seen, in a crowd of a hundred is small. This leads on to the second issue.

I really miss the age of social networks. In the age of social networks our sphere of influence was limited to our friends, and our friends of friends. The result is that social media was a friendly conversation rather than a popularity contest.

Over the last two days I have been looking at Threads and BlueSky and to a lesser extent Facebook and I am struck by how many thousands of posts and likes threads and posts get. In such an ecosystem we are in a popularity contest where some people get more attention than they can handle and deserve, whilst most normal people are ignored and solitary.

For some people the mass X-odus from Twitter to Bluesky is fantastic because it means that the community is growing and that by growing it means that more likeminded people will arrive. The flipside of this is that with a million new users per week, and growing, that’s a huge influx. That influx is bad news because for every decent person there are changes that the amount of trolling will increase.

A few weeks ago Strava decided that it would add AI functionality to it’s app. It is for this reason that I decided to restrict which apps talked with Strava. Now Strava is doing the reverse. It has blocked access to its API so that other apps cannot use its own data.

This, in my eyes is short sighted. Strava is not the primary source of data. Garmin, Sunnto, Apple and others are. This means that if Strava makes it more complicated data from their platform, then they encourage people to bypass it entirely. It gives Garmin, Apple and Suunto to name but three device makers the chance to work directly with those that provide data analytics.

All climbers are familiar with this. You’re on a climb or a via ferrata and you look up but you don’t see what to do so you feel stuck. As a result you try one hold, and then another, and then a third and eventually you stop. That’s when you remember to look down.

If you look down you see that there is a foot hold 10 to thirty centimetres higher that will give you the extra reach that will allow you to climb onwards. The same is true with tech.