Sadly, my iPhone 12 mini recently started malfunctioning because the Face ID stopped working. And I have had to stop using the 12, which makes me sad. I love that it’s nice and small and looks somewhat archaic. However, the situation was not tenable. In my bid to become more secure, I had to adopt longer passwords, which meant relying heavily on FaceID to authenticate me for important websites etc… so I’ve migrated to using my mum’s old iPhone XR. It has its quirks, but it’ll do for now. I was forced to rebuild my phone from scratch because the migration assistant wasn’t working for one reason or another…
Husband also bought me a new laptop – the Macbook Neo. Ooh la la. I was working with an existing Macbook Pro 2019(?). In theory, I would use these things utnil they conk out. But in practice, I think I exercise fiscal recklessness every 7-8 years. Or in this case, my Husband did. I also chose to start with a blank slate for my laptop because I thought it was a good time to review what info I had and to do a good reset.
So I’ve been working through a slew of administrative decisions, which is/was painful in theory, but grounding and much needed in reality – here they are, if you’re interested in this kind of thing….
Goodbye Whatsapp Chat History.
I accidentally set up my Whatsapp on my new phone without realizing there was an option to transfer chat history… And I haven’t googled if there’s another way to rectify this issue. So I’m living as if this crutch is now gone. On hindsight, this has forced me to tidy up my contacts. I definitely took Whatsapp for granted because there are a few people I talk frequently, but I didn’t save their number. So, all my one-on-one chats are now gone.Thankfully, I’m in group chats with most of them so I’ve not had to go in roundabout ways to find their numbers again. Anyway, lesson learnt, save their numbers! And also, it’s a good time to remove people that I’ve not talked to in the past 5 years.
Tracking birthdays and major holidays.
I did a calendar clean-up for repeat events (mainly birthdays). For some reason, I seem to frequently create these things on the go and the names of the events have mixed cases/event names like “jAmes- Yay! Burfday!”, which was bugging me terribly.
The calendar clean-up came in at a good time. For the purposes of being a better gift giver, I’d wanted to set up a tracker for gift-giving for awhile now. I often find myself forgetting about people’s bdays – which is fine if the said individual is an adult. But it is truly heartbreaking to forget a child’s birthday. I can’t live with myself!!!
To try to avoid such emotional distress… I actually created two notes:
- “actual gifts given” tracker: everybody’s birthdays/major events listed down + what gifts I’ve given them
- “gift ideas” tracker: the same people/birthdays/events listed down + possible gift ideas.
The hope is that this will help me not to scramble when the time comes to get a gift AND to use this as a resource for the future too… I promise I’ll only recycle gifts for people who don’t know each other!
Two is One, One is None.
I also started thinking a lot about how my information is being stored. I have a vague distrust of the cloud, so even though I know I’m probably just a one-man army, I still feel weird about saving personal information on the cloud. I read this phrase on a Reddit forum a couple of days ago and decided that I should diversify my information storage mediums – cloud, local storage and external hard drives. I bought a couple of external data storage devices – did you know that those dinky USB sticks now come with 256GB storage?! What is this world…
What shall we do with our Photo Library?
Every now and then, I get a little jolt as I realize that while I’ve been focusing so much on saving important documents to multiple locations, I’ve completely forgotten about things like my photo library. To be fair, I willfully avoid thinking about my photo library when I consider the days before the cloud, when I would sit at my desk, plug in my hard drive and manually transfer over the 00s/000s of photos into my actual photo library. To that end, I’ve been thinking over a few action points.
(a) I need to bring this number down. Currently photos from the years 2019-2024 are averaging at about 300 pics per year. That is about 1800 pictures in total! I was thinking about setting a little challenge for myself, to bring this number down to a modest 70-100 pics per year, so that…
(b) I can do something with my pictures! Like make them into photobooks so that I’d have something tangible to look at and to access these more than every couple of years or so.
(c) Printing them out would be another kind of storage, which is great for my purposes because I also want to back this photo library up on an external hard drive. Having these photos divided up into manageable tranches would make the job easier.
Goodbye Spotify?
I’ve also increasingly been seeing people online talking about life without Spotify and been thinking about adopting such a move for myself too. I realized that over the past few years, I’ve not been listening to full albums of music, just one or two songs that I wanted to hear. Pleasant enough in the short-term, but it just seems kind of sad in hindsight. The music that really stayed with me was music that I sat through listening from the beginning to the end. I recently found a ton of music from a friend in the past who very astutely passed me discographies in full – so I’m thinking that I’ll start there.
There’s also this whole ethical thing about music via Spotify not going to artists at all (along with other questionable things about their owners supporting war etc) – and I can’t say that I’m any better with music from 10+ years ago that was procured dubiously. But maybe I can start here, with what I have, and move toward actually buying things properly. I’ll keep you updated on that. Oh, I’ll write down what I’m listening to on my “Now” page too, if you are interested in things like that.
Ok, I think I’ll leave it here for now.
N
the quarter light 