What I Left Behind In 2022
This past year was characterised by my letting go of a lot of things from my life.
My iPad Mini 4
I mentioned this previously on my blog, but selling the iPad was my biggest change in 2022. I occasionally get pangs of regret about it, but not much nowadays.
My iPhone and my iMac between them are providing for my needs, and that’s what matters.
Backblaze online backups
This wasn’t an easy decision for me to make. I’ve suffered data loss in the past due to hard disk and computer failures, and as a result, I back up religiously. But I’ve never had to touch my Backblaze backups in all the years I’ve been using their service. My local Time Machine backups have always come through for me. And I decided that the extra reassurance wasn’t worth the annual cost anymore.
Apple’s Music app
I have zero regrets about importing my local music library into Swinsian last year. The Music app is and remains an abomination, one that will happily trample your local music behind your back.
Swinsian isn’t perfect, and there’s a question mark over whether it’ll be updated to run natively on Apple Silicon, but for now it’s helping me clean up my library and undo the damage that Music wrought.
Physical books
The process — and labour — of relocating my books and other items over the summer while new double-glazed windows were fitted in my room brought home how many books I own, and how heavy they are. That is not something I want to inflict on myself again!
Deciding what books to keep — and which to let go — was hard work, and I had to harden my heart and be ruthless about it. The majority were sold quickly and in bulk through WeBuyBooks, and I’d recommend them to anyone who wants to dispose of lots of books. I do not doubt that I could have gotten more for a few books by selling them separately on eBay, but I made a reasonable amount through several bulk orders. The only downsides are that WeBuyBooks sometimes mistook the book I was scanning — I had to watch for that when I was scanning barcodes — and may not make an offer if they’re not interested in buying now.
I did sell a couple of art books on eBay and made good money from them. But those were books that WeBuyBooks had no interest in at all.
Excess clothes
When it comes to my wardrobe, my clothing divides into three extremes: things I wear all the time, things I wear when it’s hot or cold, and the pile that I’ve not worn in years. And yes, it was a veritable pile!
The bulk of that went to Oxfam, with a few worn-out items going to recycling.
My cassette tape collection (or what was left of it)
I had a drawer full of the remnants of my collection built from frequent trips to Our Price Records, WH Smiths, Woolworths and other emporiums back in my teens and early twenties. I converted the majority of those into MP3 files using an old ION Tape2PC machine and Audio Hijack. Surprisingly, I didn’t encounter any broken tapes during that process.
A lot of subscriptions
Thankfully the majority of those were through Apple’s App Stores and thus easy to cancel. Technically, a few won’t expire until the middle of this year.
Among the services that I’ve not mentioned above:
I don’t have anything bad to say about any of these apps — I decided that I wasn’t using them enough to justify the continued expense.
Additionally, I tried out Halide Mark II at the end of last year but decided to cancel the trial and stick with the standard Camera app on my iPhone.
To Be Continued…
I’ve been closing down and deleting a lot of old and unused accounts, and that will continue into 2023. I’m doing this to reduce the amount of personal data that can be either scraped or stolen through a breach of the service it resides on. But there is an element of letting go of past projects and ideas that never came to fruition. And cognitive unloading that comes from admitting to myself that it’s better to stop focusing on regrets.
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