Much of what we do, how we dress, where we go, what we eat and what we celebrate is built around or at least partly dependent upon seasons. A season is a period of time during which certain conditions exist or prevail which facilitate, encourage or discourage particular behaviours. Some seasons are designed to fit within a calendar year whilst other seasons can exist for much longer or shorter periods of time.
A classic, acapella
And something more widely known (gotta love that really deep voice, and the others are pretty good, too!)
It’s three years to the day since my father died. Interestingly our society manages death by calling it something else. Years ago people ‘died’, more recently they are said to have ‘passed away’, but these days they just ‘passed’. Does denial make it easier? Perhaps in the short term; but giving it a different name may only prolong the grieving process.
Even though it is three years since the actual day of my father’s death, he really began declining ten years earlier and a few years after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Over a period of 10 years the disease robbed him of some of his character and personality and presence. He spoke less, engaged less, slept more, shuffled around, fell over a few times and was eventually hospitalised and entered full time nursing care where he remained for three and a half years.
Around three months ago I made the switch from Firefox to Brave for my default browser. Brave seemed to offer more rigorous ad and tracker-blocking functionality, and it told me how many trackers it had blocked, how much hadn’t been downloaded, and how much time had been saved by not downloading ads and trackers.
One of the ‘features’ of brave is the ability to view ads and earn points (‘Brave rewards’) for the privilege. Other features are to ability to display sponsored ads and cryptocurrency tools on the new page tab. I have no interest in these features so turned off all options to display rewards, cryptocurrency ads and ‘sponsored images’. Interestingly it wasn’t obvious just how to switch all of these off.
A few weeks ago I came across a milk crate in our shed as I was tidying things up. Upon closer searching I actually found three milk crates that had been obtained (presumably by the previous owner) and secreted away. Milk crates are funny things. They are super-useful for storing and transporting things in; they often appear in yuppie or hip cafes as seats; they are often branded with their owners name, and it is illegal to hold on to them because they are owned by dairies.
It’s now been a little over two weeks since I installed LineageOS on my Samsung A5 phone.
During that time I’ve installed, removed, replaced and set defaults and permissions for the apps I use. I thought it may be useful for posterity to describe what apps I am using (and why).
First off, I didn’t install the so-called Gapps (Google Apps) package on my phone so I don’t have the Play store directly available. The benefit of that is that i don’t need to let Google know what apps I use, or when, or where, or how! But I do need to be able to install apps aside from the stock apps on my phone. I opted for F-Droid for that. I needed to access that site through my browser then download and install the F-Droid apk file.
An Australian classic from the 60s.
After a couple of hours of spinning my wheels going nowhere this morning, my Samsung A5 2017 android phone is now free of all Google and Samsung apps.
After some consideration of both privacy concerns particularly relating to google described here and more general security concerns described here I looked into replacing the Google-provided operating system on my Samsung phone. One of the side benefits is to rid myself of all of the annoying and bloated Samsung apps that can’t be deleted by an everyday user.
^Well, it’s significantly less dramatic than ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’.
As we prepare to relocate from a small rural property that has been home for the past 11 years to a much smaller, domestic house and block closer to children we’ve begun clearing out/throwing away/tidying up what we brought with us 11 years ago and the extra that has accumulated in those same years.
As I’ve been clearing up the shed and carpeted man cave I’ve paused to reflect briefly on some of the items being thrown away or otherwise disposed of.
Another classic. A great song/hymn with an inspiring back story well sung.