A Question Concerning Technology

This morning I went to Neeva Search to see if rain was on the forecast. I had been up since 5 AM and noticed that there were quite a bit of clouds moving overhead. During a hike along a local nature trail I could feel the crispness of morning retreating and the mugginess of an oncoming rainstorm permeating the air. I never did search for what the weather was going to do; instead, I went to Neeva and saw that they were shutting down on June 2nd.  I have quite liked Neeva Search from when I first started using it about six months ago. I was disheartened to see that it could not keep its doors (tubes? ports?) open any longer. What they were doing was admirable. Google has amassed a veritable fortune through what Shoshana Zuboff has dubbed "Surveillance Capitalism." It would be easy to try and replicate that, easier still to lay down and admit Google's dominance in the internet search and ad-server realm. Neeva tried to fight back. The whole philosophy of Neeva was to have a ...

Going Smart ish Three weeks ago, I gave my Google Pixel 6 to someone else. Their phone broke and they needed a new one. I offered mine up as a replacement. I finally had an excuse to try living without a smartphone for a while. I'm now walking around with a Nokia Flip 2780. It's not the same "dumb" phone I remember from my days of the Motorola RAZR, instead, it's smart- ish . It features quite a basic app store in its Linux-based KaiOS. There is a basic— basic —app store that has a few hundred apps. I was surprised to find that the phone came preinstalled with a simple version of Google Maps, a basic web browser, and some email connectivity. These apps work, but they are clunky, slow, and nowhere near the user-experience offered on Android or iOS. That's a good thing. This phone sits idly in my pocket primarily as a phone or message receiver. I don't  want to do anything else with it precisely because it is so bad at other things. Now, I am reclaiming my ...