Taking a break from social media is progressing as I permanently deactivated my Facebook account today. I know I’m not going to miss it, although I was in a couple of useful groups.

Facebook often gets criticised for the lack of privacy. “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product being sold”, and that is very much true. Facebook gets revenue from advertising. To be able to target ads, they need your data. Whatever you have in your Facebook profile, your friends, everything you have ever posted there or all the websites you ever visited that had a Facebook like button, they will all count. Even if you don’t have a Facebook profile, they will still probably keep a shadow profile of you, based on your phone number, email address or other identifiers they may get from you or people you interact with.

The internet! The internet is broken! Our broadband provider Relish has usually worked just fine without any major long-lasting hiccups. Sometimes the speed hasn’t really met our expectations, but it’s a wireless 4G broadband. It’s not fibre!

Last Sunday, everything suddenly changed.

Constant hiccups! The connection dies, doesn’t work at all until the router gets rebooted. Speed drops below 56k modem level and frustration grows beyond the limit where it’s trying to make us crazy, constantly pushing the anger-o-meter to the reddest of the red hue of the spectrum.

After dreaming of a vinyl player for years, I finally decided to get one.

I bought a Rega Planar 2 turntable, which is connected via Rega Fono Mini A2D pre-amp to the line-in connector of a Sonos Play 5 speaker.

The setup is not perfect though as the pre-amp doesn’t have a volume output control at all. The only way to adjust the volume is to access the room settings in the Sonos app and change line-in level from there. The built-in volume control in Sonos is disabled for line-in signal. Maybe I’ll get a better pre-amp some day.

After going to Slovenia for Metaldays festival, I decided to take a little break and be without alcohol for few weeks. At the same time I also reduced my carb intake below 100g in a day.

I’ve lost 4kg in 3.5 weeks and I’ve been much more productive than normally. I’ve probably had more GitHub activity during these few weeks than during the last few years altogether!

Sometimes when a man leaves the comfortable surroundings of his own kiez, he might notice that Berlin is actually a very big city.