My e-book reader (Tolino).

As I got older and had problems with my eyes, this was a game changer. I had basically stopped reading books and now I do it daily. I can choose the font and letter size, background color, and backlighting based on what works best for my eyes that day and the light where I am.

Being able to hold a very light device with a big screen when I would have to balance a heavy weight as a paper book is also great, and I take the reader with me everywhere, whereas a big book would stay at home most of the time.

The reader has a bigger screen than my phone and the battery lasts longer.

The reader works flawlessly with my library, so I don’t have to buy books, which keeps costs down, and I don’t have to leave the house to get a new book.

Calibre helps us share books in our family, which is one reason we’ve stayed away from Amazon’s Kindle, so we’ve all gone to “.epub”.

I tried to replace Twitter by Mastodon but, in the end, I just left Twitter and don’t use Mastodon at all.

This is me, I left Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. I reduced my online time a lot and it is better for my mental health and I have more time for my hobbies.

Mastodon made it clear to me how much algorithms steer me and keep me online, when I don’t need that, don’t profit from it. When I had to search for content on Mastodon that was for me it felt not worth the effort while being fed by an algorithm on Twitter /Facebook / Reddit kept me endlessly scrolling.

So I am very thankful to Mastodon for opening my eyes, but I will not use it anymore. Tchncs (world news, tech news and cat owl pictures) , Grouvee (gaming forum, keeping track of my games) and German Tagesschau ( tv news of my country) is enough to stay up to date and I feel freed from a burden that social media became for me.

Also my phone stays in my bag now and I am more in the moment wherever I am - I have used it 99% less than before and my next smart phone will be a cheap one with the only must haves being the newest Android version and a replacable battery so it will last me for long.

Years ago I had fun with “what if the US never actually went to the moon”. I did not believe it, it was just a nice plot idea, we even made a pen & paper oneshot about it. Nowadays I have no whatsoever fun in thought experiments like this, because the real threat of someone believing it to be true. I want to enjoy “birds aren’t real” or “giraffes do not exist” or … the worst is flat earth. It started out as a joke and now idiots try to proof the earth is flat, proof by accident it isn’t and then question rather their methods than their belief system. We just can’t have nice things.

Not if you have kids or cats or you will be always out of toilet paper.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxAJEHZDIEw Crazy Baby - Joan Osborne

It is more “stuck for a lifetime”, because this song saved my life and will stay on my “emergency playlist” forever. She sings out of my soul, when depression has me and at the same time sings hope into my soul, if that makes any sense, because it is so hard to describe.

I wish that for every human a song exists that can do that for them!

“Früher gab es auch schon so Tage.”

Ist wenn du so alt bist wie ich, korrekt (58). A B E R, je jünger du bist desto weniger korrekt wird es, weil es früher MAL so was gab was aber durch ebenso viele Jahre mit extrem kaltem April kompensiert wurde. Ich habe Kinderbilder aus mehreren Jahren mit Schnee so hoch wie ich groß war an Ostern (~1 Meter), die Kinderbilder meiner Enkel sind alle auf grünem Gras und das wird sich auch kaum nochmal ändern. Es ist das selbe mit den zu warmen Wintern, die gab es früher auch MAL, jetzt gibt es sie nur noch.

Diese Grafik hilft den meisten ganz schnell zu verstehen, wo das Problem liegt und ich empfehle sie Leuten zu zeigen die diesen Satz von sich geben. Natürlich gibt es unbelehrbare Schwurbler aber die meisten alten Menschen haben tatsächlich Schwierigkeiten das Problem zu erkennen. Wir Menschen sind nicht gut Klima abzuschätzen und aus unseren Erinnerungen alleine ein Bild zusammen zu setzen, das führt zu einem falschen Eindruck und den kann die Grafik bereinigen:

https://cs3.wettercomassets.com/filemanager/upload/Bilder/0_700x350_2019_Q3/Temperaturverlauf-deutschland-1881-dwd-wetter.jpg

In meiner Jugend haben sich zu kalte und zu warme Winter fast die Waage gehalten und die Ausschläge nach unten waren größer als die nach oben, jemand der 24 Jahre alt ist hat nur einen überdurchschnittlich kalten Winter erlebt und der war deutlich weniger kalt als die kalten Winter meiner Jugend. Und dummer Weise erinnere ich mich ausschliesslich an die zu kalten Winter und an keinen einzigen der zu warm war, offensichtlich mochte ich die Kalten mehr.