Cold weather reminder, keep your electronics from freezing in your car and if you leave them there overnight let them warm up. Lithium batteries don’t hold as much of a charge when really cold either.
Before recycling any devices like phones, tablets, or computers, remember to securely wipe or reset your devices to factory shipped conditions. Most tablets and smartphones are pretty easy to reset now in a way that protects you from anyone else gaining access to what you had on them. Old laptops and desktops may take a bit more work, depending on whether you have whole disk encryption turned on or not. But it is still worth the effort, unless you absolutely know you have no sensitive or potentially compromising data stored there.
I can’t resist the sense of spying that watching live traffic cam feeds gives me. If you also like that, see what you find at https://trafficvision.live/
If you are relying on AI assistants to summarize the news for you, you might want to reconsider that. Research from the BBC and the European Broadcasting Union is finding that news summaries from some of the most commonly used AI services like ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity, generate wrong information up to 20% of the time. The researchers do note that accuracy is getting slightly better over time but maybe you should read the real stories instead.
Using a flip phone or dumb phone is a great way to cut down on work distraction. But you may say that you can’t do without X or Y application. The alternative is to “dumb” down your smart phone, mainly by disabling all or as many notifications as you can, uninstalling time-sucking apps, physically distancing you phone from you, and even turning on greyscale mode. You can still use your “smart” phone but it won’t drag you down as much this way.
Last year Canva purchased Affinity, a wonderful desktop graphics and image editor, and we all worried that they would kill it in favor of their online graphic design tools. Instead, they are making it free to use, but hoping that you will really want to use their generative AI features. And, that is where they will make their money. You can download Affinity by Canva for free, you just have to make or use a Canva account.
I remember those kids’ books with cut-away drawings explaining how things work in the real world, and now you can find these on the web at https://animagraffs.com/ Through the use of 3D animated explainer videos you can teach yourself how quite a few things work.
One more place to follow the latest news in data breaches is the Data Breach Observatory run by Proton. This site tracks data they find on the dark web, covering more than just the United States.
If you ever wanted another way of visualizing the extent of the Roman Empire, there is https://itiner-e.org/ to explore. Based on topographic mapping, satellite imagery and centuries of historical records, it is an open attempt to layout the variety of roadways and paths available in the mid-second century Roman Empire.