A bit of garden work got done today. It was raining continuously, and my clothing for various parts of my body ranged from reasonable to hilariously unsuitable. We got everything done in a pretty nice way, but I was soaking wet and so covered in mud that I had to do a rough first cleaning under the tap in the garage in order to not leave a trail of mud behind me as I stepped indoors and took the shortest possible path to somwhere, anywhere I could rinse off the clothes some more before actually putting them in the laundry baskets.
Good times!
Follow-up
I had intended to write some more yesterday, but I had an appointment, and managed to somehow get Sublime stuck in overwrite mode, so I decided it was a good time to stop, build and upload. On the topic of surveillance capitalism, I have trouble getting Youtube videos to play in Safari sometimes. Review videos on the Verge work on the main page, but do not appear when I click into the article page. All this is in Safari with 1blocker active. Sometimes I am annoyed, but sometimes I feel a sort of joy in breaking something by doing reasonable blocking. If your solution for providing a feature breaks down when ad blocking is activated, you probably should solve it in a different way, right?
Firefox gets some more exercise whenever one of those broken videos feel interesting enough, and it also provides me the satisfaction of setting my rare Facebook visits in an environment specifically built to keep Facebook's tendrils away from the rest of my world. (I have no doubt they find other sneaky ways of gathering my data, but at least I am not making it easy in that particular way.)
Staring at the app icons on my phone yesterday, trying once more to trim the selection down to some imaginary essence, a great big "duh"-insight struck me: If I want the trimming to make a noticeable difference, I should be removing apps I actually use, rather than the meaningless cruft or rarely-used utilities I tend to focus on. A once-a-year public transit app tucked away in a folder causes no distractions at all, but Twitter or Instagram certainly do wherever I put them. Banking apps do not make my phone heavier in any way, so sitting around wondering if I can decrease their numbers is in itself a total waste of time. The real question is: would I truly miss anything if I purged Twitter and Instagram? Or, could I somehow relegate them, too, to be rare-occasion apps, for those times I am out and about (remember being out and about?) and can actually have meaningful exchanges through them? I made a list of things I do want to use my phone for, and communication was on the list, so it is not like some amount of networking is completely out of place. But treating it more as a tool when needed than as a quick distraction sounds healthy.
Now things are getting interesting.