During the run up to the 2016 EU referendum in the U.K and the presidential elections in the U.S my news consumption increased at an exponential rate. My drug of choice was The Guardian online. After all, I’m a liberal academic raised on the internet. I’m well versed in most sexualities, fetishes, niches & sub cultures. Growing up online not a lot slips under the radar. The guardian was a perfect fit for my political views, my environmental views and my social outlook. Growing up I was exposed to newspapers from across the political spectrum. From right-wing news like The Daily Mail & Telegraph, right through to The Guardian & The Observer. The general trend being, the younger adults in the family bought into the liberal press & the older members into the conservative press.

As someone who used to dial onto the internet with a 14.4kbps dial up modem, I first experienced bulletin boards & forums. News wasn’t something that interested me until I hit my 30’s. Now I feel an obligation to be informed and at least somewhat politically literate. Like most people, my news started coming more from social media sites. Shared twitter articles & Facebook stories shaped my world view. The filter bubble had me.

I realized early on that news consumed via social media was specifically targeted at me. If you follow people on social media who you relate to, chances are they will also hold the same views on politics and the environment. I would read stories about renewable energy & social issues. I would consume stories on tech & music culture. I was fed an endless supply of catered news stories, peacefully unaware of an alternate narrative running in parallel to my filter bubble.

In late 2015 I started switching off all retweets and stopped using Facebook. I unfollowed all news outlets & would unfollow or mute users who got political or what I would consider ranty! I trimmed my social media so it was somewhat social again. I decided, if I wanted to read the news, I would do it consciously & head to news websites. This worked well for a period & then we entered the run up to the 2016 EU referendum. All of a sudden I could see the other side of the filter bubble. The mirror opposite of my bubble. People who instead of being angry about fossil fuels or the bedroom tax, where angry at immigration and that bizarre term ‘the metropolitan elite’.

I knew early on that Leave would get a lot more votes than predicted in early polls & I could also see the click bait & outrage techniques they employed online. They used the same techniques as advertisers & influencers use to gain attention & cement a narrative. The remain campaign had no clue that the new battle would be fought (and won) online.

The whole debate descended into outrageous claims & counter claims. It was like the worst parts of our tabloid press here in the U.K. but pumped up on steroids. Leave won the day, but our culture of discourse in the U.K. has been changed forever.

This essay isn’t about that vote, it’s about the atmosphere created by that vote. News reporting changed. 24 hour news became a quagmire of live blogs, claim & counter-claim, ‘fake news’ and the most bizarre quotations. Since when did a tweet constitute a quote or news? It would seem that the need to break a story now trumps the need to investigate a story, fact check & produce a coherent article.

What followed was the U.S. elections & a news industry which is whipped into such a frenzy it’s basically a live chatroom. Reporters frantically typing live blogs full of typos, users frantically responding in the comments section, only for stories to develop or be completely debunked hours later. Users are then arguing with each other & with journalists in the comments. This is not news or reporting in the traditional sense & it’s an assault on the synapses.

Journalists are paid to investigate, digest information & present stories in a coherent manner. Fact checking should be done before publication. Retractions should be rare.

This new kind of news reporting has made us all junior reporters. We interpret in real-time, often out of context & without all the facts & we form half-baked narratives. We also apply our own bias and then pass on our own biased versions of developing stories, essentially producing streams of fake news. Our opinions then hit social media where they develop in our filter bubbles & polarization increases between tribes. We’ve all had the flame wars with people of opposite political persuasions.

I reached news burnout in mid 2017. I was feeling depressed & overwhelmed. I’d had countless arguments with family members & total strangers online. I was like an addict, constantly refreshing The Guardian front page waiting on an update. Something had to change.

I went extreme at first. I added all of the news sites I could think of into a hosts file on my network. I essentially blocked all news at home. I went cold turkey for about a month, and whilst I felt less informed, I felt a sense of calm I hadn’t felt in at least 18 months. This was obvious denial & delusion, I knew I couldn’t hide from the news forever, but I could control how I consumed said news.

After around 5 weeks I removed the blocks & all was well for a few days before I felt myself checking the sites again. I knew I had to change my habits so I decided to subscribe to two newspapers. I now read paper versions of The Guardian & The Times. I decided to balance my own arguments like any good academic by selecting more than one source. The guardian has an obvious liberal slant, while The Times is a conservative leading but very well written newspaper (in the UK it’s the only choice amongst the other right leaning news outlets, the rest are a bit crazy).

I found by reading a newspaper, I was reading well written & well-edited stories. It also meant that I was selective over the stories I read & I was exposed to stories I would have otherwise missed. Reading real newspapers means that your data isn’t mined & your political leanings or preferences can’t be weaponized against you. There is something creepy about websites & third parties being able to keep track of all the stories you read & then using that data to target political messaging back at you. A major privacy benefit. Another added benefit is that when you reach the end, it goes in the recycling & you carry on with your day.

By removing all of my news apps from my smartphone & tablet, as well as resisting the temptation to read live news websites I’ve actively slowed down my news consumption. I now feel informed, but not overwhelmed. Also, by balancing the views of two outlets I get a more rounded view & can more easily pick out the political bias in stories.

24 hour news will always be frantic & a little haphazard. If a person only consumes this type of news, their anxiety levels will reflect the stream of information they are taking in. Most developing news is bad news or outrageous. We don’t get many good news stories on 24 hour outlets. Politicians can worry about the day-to-day running of the country & we can call them out as & when we can actually influence the debate. There is little value in getting irate on social media because a politician has tweeted something outrageous and we aren’t happy, all in real-time.

So my advice to anyone feeling news burnout is to take it back to basics. News websites are in the business of holding your attention. The longer you stay, the more advertising space they can sell for your consumption. Slow down your consumption and read a newspaper. You can even opt to read a weekend newspaper which will have the most important news of the week & a few nice supplements for balance. Even a news magazine like The Week here in the U.K or the Weekend edition of the ‘I’ will give you a good overview of the stories you really need to know, but in a concise way.

I wholeheartedly support journalists & real journalism. Unlike news blogs & websites, they still have a code of conduct to uphold & are unable to publish a story without scrutiny. Use blogs & personal websites for everything else, enjoy them, but for political news where there are real incentives to control the narrative or introduce bias, always at least have one trusted outlet. In the age of alleged foreign interference it’s a must.

If you can’t afford to buy a newspaper, head to a cafe or coffee shop and read theirs. Most coffee shops have multiple copies of newspapers for customers & most would be happy for you to take a copy at the end of the day. You can even read the newspapers in most public libraries.

Slow news, news that has already developed into a story saves you the personal processing time. You will feel less frazzled & more able to absorb stories, not to mention you will regain a lot of productive time & energy to be better utilized on your own projects.

The 24 hour news cycle really got to me & live news & social news is going a long way to polarize our societies & divide opinion. With so much fake news & opinion masquerading as news, it can be an exhausting process just sifting through it.

Buy a paper, grab a coffee & unplug from the outrage of online news & social media news sharing. Your brain will thank you for it.

**If you really want to keep reading news online, you can take a few steps to improve your experience. I would say to set a time to check the news each day & stick to it. I would aim for say 9am, so you get the best edited stories from the previous day, but without any of the developing stories. Stick to that time & once finished, don’t check again until the next day. Try to avoid all live updating content such as live blogs. Live news is overload and by it’s very nature doesn’t have a natural end, so stick to reading fully formed articles. Don’t use news apps on your phone, always use the browser versions. It’s too easy just to launch an app. A few changes in your habits will make a huge difference. Finally, use an ad blocker with your web browser such as ublock origin and sign up to the mute blocklist. Even if you don’t block anything else with the adblocker, mute will block most comment fields across the web. Comments have become pretty unhelpful and will only fuel your outrage. If mute doesn’t catch a comment field, specify a custom filter using the ublock origin picker tool included with the browser extension.**

Netflix on the whole is a good service. It is relatively cheap & does have some good content. The problem stems from the one reason for Netflix existence, and that again is content.

In recent years, the tug of war between the tech giants for our attention has intensified. What was once a relatively straight forward transaction between customer & service has become a war to keep us engaged for as long as possible.

Content has become the latest battleground & if I’m honest, my attention span has finally snapped. Like many people, I favour watching content online now as opposed to the more traditional mediums such as TV & radio. My music is stored in the cloud thanks to iTunes match, so I no longer need to worry about syncing music to my devices. Similarly, between Netflix & Amazon Prime I have access to a great deal of premium content. I have my favourite YouTube subscriptions which keep me entertained, and my favourite podcasts in iTunes. I have a newspaper subscription to both The Guardian & The Times in the UK because I support good journalism, but I also read The Verge, The Register, Minimalism Life, Mac Rumours, Macworld, Ars technica and Revolver on a daily basis online. I read Mini Magazine each month & Mini World. I have countless kindle books on the go & I’m working through my paper book collection thanks to my quest to be a minimalist. Then we have the DVR, and my Xbox Games Pass. The list is endless.

That last paragraph is a small example of the problem I’m talking about, and the composition of the paragraph just goes to show what’s going on with our attention. It’s a mess.

When I was completing my bachelors degree around 2006, I had a paper subscription to Mini magazine & Mini World, along with a paper subscription to Custom PC magazine. I had a few TV shows recorded on the DVR which I’d watch at my leisure, and I’d have one book at a time, normally from the university library. I had a fairly large DVD collection but this was limited by both my income & my desire to actually go out and buy the DVD. Same with Xbox games.

The inherent problem with modern media delivery is the lack of in-built stopping cues. From my two examples above, you can see that in 2006 I had in-built stopping cues. A stopping cue is anything that brings a natural conclusion to a task.

If I finished a DVD box set for example, I’d have to physically go and buy the next series. That was a stopping cue. Something to nudge me into thinking ‘that’s probably enough TV, now go and write that essay’. Similarly with books, I’d have a library book limit of 5 books, so I’d take out a few texts at a time & struggle home with them in my backpack. I’d read the books & return them. I listened to a few podcasts back in 2006, but I’d listen to these on my iPod, which was offline at all times, meaning I’d single task the listening of podcasts while walking somewhere.

Contrast that with 2018. If I finish an episode on Netflix, the helpful UI auto plays the next episode or the next series. If I finish all episodes in a series, it will algorithmically recommend new content based on my viewing habits. Without a stopping cue, I’m encouraged to waste all of my time wanting to watch everything which looks interesting on Netflix. Similarly, for such a low monthly fee, the further stopping cue of cost is removed, meaning another barrier to me binge watching has been removed.

Netflix isn’t the only guilty party here. Amazon do exactly the same thing on Prime Video. It used to be that a friend or colleague would personally recommend something to read or watch, or perhaps an album to listen to. These where valuable recommendations given to me by trusted third parties with a good understanding of my tastes and placed within context. The algorithms of today are just a brute force tool to keep you engaged on their platform.

YouTube is another prime example. I personally run an ad blocker, so I don’t see Google Ads on YouTube (say what you will, but I control my browser & choose not to allow advertising at a network level), but YouTube & parent Google are in the ad business, meaning the more engaged you are the more ads they can show you. This means they throw psychologists, neuroscientists, UX gurus and everything but the kitchen sink at their platform to maximize eye-ball time & engagement. The longer you are hooked, the more ad revenue they can yield.

There is an old school of thought in computer science which suggests that with any free service, you are not the customer but the product. These platforms don’t’ exist to serve you, they exist to sell your attention to advertisers. Tim Wu highlights this brilliantly in his book The Attention Merchants.

I read & research a lot about ethical computing and ethics online, and even I was sideswiped by the realisation that I’d fallen into the attention merchants trap. I’d gone from a productive computer scientists, reading journal articles, learning, formulating new ideas & examining web technologies to just another consumer of content.

As a self-employed academic & business owner I am solely responsible for my time management. From scheduling time to write, to completing work for clients, it’s down to me when & where I work. This also means that if my attention is disrupted, I become less productive & less able to do my job. If you work in a regular workplace, you will have targets & rules, perhaps you aren’t allowed your phone, or perhaps your internet usage is monitored. I have none of that & I need to rely on my own self discipline.

I’ve got to admit that my discipline has been tested & destroyed thanks to the modern content platforms such as YouTube and Netflix. It got to the point where I had Netflix shows running on my laptop sat next to my desktop, so I could try & catch up with shows while working.

I watch YouTube videos while I’m supposed to be concentrating & my attention is fragmented. This has had an effect on my workload, the speed at which I can get things done & also my general motivation.

This attention sapping extends across all popular ‘content providers’ as we should now refer to them. Instagram takes up too much of my time & attention, as does Twitter. I’ve actively wiped my Facebook account & stopped using it, but still use Whatsapp to keep in touch with friends on Android.

The news websites have been tweaked to always rotate headlines. Headlines are modified throughout the day based on metrics until the most engaging ones are found. News is delivered in Real Time and is never-ending & always inconclusive. This sort of news delivery, via websites, social media or the TV news channels is frenetic, chaotic and by far the most distracting & anxiety inducing part of my day. The age of outrage is truly upon us & its present in most aspects of our internet usage.

Twitter is alive with the sound of trolling & political discourse, often descending into pointless fighting. Polarization and outrage are favored by the platforms as the psychologists at Twitter and Facebook know this is good to keep you jacked in and checking for updates. Trump is golden for Twitter engagement & Twitter stock prices.

Netflix & Amazon prime don’t rely on advertising dollars, but they keep you hooked with auto play and recommendations to keep you as a customer, paying monthly fees & to amass more data which they can sell to content producers. The bigger their numbers, the better the content they can get from the studios.

Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music. They use algorithms to recommend more music. You have so much music to listen to that you need to dedicate more of your time to listening. The art of single album listening is dead. The data they collect can then be used to profile customers & probably sell to third-party advertisers.

Podcasts have taken off big time, but now they are full of advertisements and the content normally reflects the distracted nature of society, generally a bit lackluster, repetitive and shallow. Research is a thing of the past. There are now so many podcasts that I can’t keep up with the ones I’ve listened to for years, never mind find new ones.

So this argument isn’t just about Netflix, it’s about tech companies in general in 2018. The obsession with content creation for the sole purpose of engagement has led us down a dangerous path. If we are all so distracted by trying to keep up with all of the content, who is doing the deep work? Who is thinking of solutions to the major problems we face?

The work I do now in a week I could have completed in a day in 2006. Back then, when my magazine was done I’d have to wait until the next month for a fresh copy. Cost constraints and availability where my natural stopping cues. Now, with an almost infinite amount of content being generated, reaching the end of anything has become a thing of the past.

I honestly think this is leading to a spike in anxiety in our societies & is also the reason for higher levels of depression and lower self-esteem. With all of this content, all of these amazing lives in front of our eyes day & night, how can we ever feel content?

I know I still have the ability for deep work, I just need to reclaim my attention. Back in the mid noughties I finished my Degree, worked in the city as a web developer for a few years & then went back to do a masters Degree. Funnily enough, in 2008, as the social media platforms started to appear & Web 2.0 was the buzzword, I did a Masters thesis on combining an E Learning environment with aspects of a social media platform. I even built the prototype. Shortly after, social media became the big thing & more pervasive in everyday life.

After studying it for my masters I fell for social media Big Time. Since then, for one reason or another, I’ve delayed completing my doctorate. I now firmly believe that the distraction of social media, and the modern internet giants, coupled with their manipulative & psychologically perfected platforms have sapped a lot of my attention and ability to complete deep work. I also believe that my self-confidence, self-esteem and anxiety levels have all been affected by Social Media and the distraction technologies.

But no more. After committing to reading a long reading list of relevant books throughout 2018, I’ve realised how these platforms work & also the polarizing & damaging effects they are having on society. I’ve decided to take action and reset to a more manageable online life.

So far I’ve already cancelled all music streaming. I have an extensive MP3 library & any albums I do want, I’ll buy in second-hand shops or via the iTunes store. This means I’ll actually value those albums, instead of blindly consuming. It also means I’ll choose carefully which albums I introduce into my collection.

With regards newspapers, I now buy a physical copy of the Sunday papers and catch up on the week’s news curated into proper stories. I still checkout the headlines online, but I do this once a day in the morning & never follow the live news blogs.

I’ve uninstalled all news apps from my iPhone & I’ve also removed all music & video apps with the exceptions of the Music app which I use with my MP3 collection.

I’ve cancelled Netflix & I’ve unplugged my Amazon Fire Stick. If I want to watch a TV show, I’ll buy the DVD or pick it up on the iTunes store and watch it via the Apple TV. I’ve just done that with the BBC series Detectorists & enjoyed it much more watching on my own schedule and without the crazy algorithms trying to snatch my attention. Without Auto play, we watched 2 episodes each evening with a break in between. The simple task of having to click the next episode is enough for us to call it a night with the TV. And I’m going to do that old-fashioned thing & recommend Dectectorists to everyone.

I’ve subscribed to Mini Magazine & Mini World on my iPad. I await each months issues just like the old paper magazines.

I use the Forest App on my iPhone to plant trees and stop me from picking up the phone. I do the same in Firefox on the desktop & laptop to stop me checking news & social media sites for upto 2 hours at a time. It has really helped to rewire my brain.

Curating my own collections has slowed down content consumption for me. I still use YouTube but now only subscribe to a select few channels. I watch YouTube via the Kodi app, which pulls in only my subscriptions and no recommended content.

I’ve unfollowed a lot of people on Twitter, including all news agencies & most brands. I only use the Tweetbot app on iPhone and Mac now, which syncs my timeline position, removes all ads, keeps everything in chronological order & allows me to mute certain keywords forever. I’ve also disabled all retweets from all users. This has reduced my Twitter usage to around 10 minutes a day from what was around 3 hours a day.

I no longer use Facebook but keep an account just in case anyone needs to contact me. I’ve not logged in now for almost a year. I still have an Instagram account, but only check it a couple of times a day. I’ve accepted the fact that if I miss posts, I’ve missed them. Changing my attitude to content has really helped.

I’ve cancelled the Xbox games pass and buy used games from CEX. The act of going looking in the shop for a bargain has really helped me to buy games with intent. No more giving things a go just because it’s free. My time isn’t worth it for a freebie.

You can apply these techniques across most content platforms. Think about the content you are consuming & equate it to time well spent. Ask yourself if the time you will spend watching something or consuming something for the sake of it is worth it? even if the content is free.

Also, when producing content, either in blogs, social media or for any other purpose, create the stuff you want to create. Don’t just create what you think will be most popular or most engaging. This is having a negative effect on the internet as a whole, with each of us producing near identical content to try to engage. Forget your audience & produce stuff which you love. Even if you think nobody in the world will be interested in it, stay true to your ideals and your passions & forget the magic formulas.

So I say, dump the attention merchants & reclaim your head space. Next time you leave the house for a walk, leave the phone at home. It’s liberating. In the evening, forget the curated playlists of rubbish & instead pick an album with intent & purpose & enjoy the whole thing as an experience. Ditch the algorithms & trust your own taste & judgement. It’s such a nice feeling nowadays to listen to an album from start to finish as the artist intended, and then it ends & you get that natural stopping cue to do something else.

Introduce stopping cues wherever you can. If you want to write a blogpost, turn off your wifi & set a timer. Just see how much you can get done. The same goes for household chores, set a 20 minute timer to clean your house & you will get it all done against the clock. Without that timer, it could take an hour with distractions.

Consider buying movies & ditching the streaming. You might lose access to a plethora of content, but you will regain your attention & so much of your valuable time. You may spend a little more money, but a lot of the good TV & Movies aren’t available to stream anyway, so you will be choosing quality content over quantity of content. You will also change your viewing habits & reclaim your time.

Use an adblocker.  There is enough stuff that you already want without getting new ideas.

Ignore algorithmic recommendations, you already have enough to get done.

Buy a newspaper or magazine & enjoy some time offline.

Visit a record shop. They are still amazing & the people you meet may become great sources of inspiration.

Set times for tasks. For me social media is when I sit at my desk for 10 minutes in the morning, and again after lunch for 10 minutes. If you use it for business, create a buffer account & schedule your posts in a single sitting once a day.

Read news in a single sitting! There will be new news every time you check back, but any real news will still be on the website tomorrow.

Reclaim your time, your self-esteem & your smile. I guarantee you will feel less anxious & more content with life. You will also get more of your things done & feel like you have extra time, as opposed to too little time in your day.

It truly is liberating to reclaim your attention & I can’t recommend it enough!

I use the curated playlists on TED a lot, but sometimes I just select an interesting video & see where it takes me. Below are the three videos I believe you must watch in 2018.

The first video, by Zeynep Tefecki, is titled ‘We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads’. It is an amazing talk about the power of advertising revenue and the large tech companies & how they are using the lure of huge revenues to addict & surveil users. It’s an eye-opening talk & a must watch for any online privacy advocates.

The second talk is by Adam Atler and is titled ‘Why our screens make us less happy’. This talk is about the persuasive nature of digital screens and content & how they are reshaping our lives & affecting our happiness. Again this talk is a real eye opener & will make you question your own use of technology. This is one of my main areas of research & I’m astonished by the impact social media & apps are having on our society. Screens have managed to invade every waking moment & I believe it is starting to have a fundamental & negative impact on our societies. Adam’s talk is a great way to spend a few minutes of your time to regain countless hours of your time in the future.

Finally a talk by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. Personally, I’m not a religious person, but you don’t need to have faith in a god to have faith in humanity. This talk is a positive & upbeat talk about the important things in life & about how recent shocks, both politically & humanitarian, can be changed if we just change our outlook & the way we see the world. This is a really positive talk to start 2018 & I implore you to give it a watch. It’s not about religion, it’s about people & how we treat each other. We need to change the narrative from one of fear & pessimism to one of hope & optimism. The next generations will thank us for it.

Let me know if you like this kind of roundup post where I share videos & articles which I’ve found interesting. I’m using Social Media less than 10 minutes a day now, so I tend to share a lot less content over there, but I’m more than happy to update the blog more often if you find it interesting.

On our return the Macbook refused to startup. On pressing the power button it would make the startup chime, the grey apple screen would appear with the apple logo and then with a click of the hard drive the machine would shut down. This happened every time we tried to boot the laptop. The liquid had done damage. I inspected the Macbook where the drops had landed, mainly around the top right of the keyboard & the power button. I couldn’t see any signs of moisture at all. I suspected a fried logic board but refused to give up on the machine & testing.

I decided to lay it keyboard down on a towel and let it dry out for 12 hours. This did nothing. I then tried sitting the laptop in the sunlight to dry even further. Again nothing. I even pondered a huge bag or rice, but it seemed overkill for a few drops of tea. I thought long & hard how a few drops of liquid could have made it past the keyboard & backlight & down to the logic board. It was almost impossible due to the low amount of drips on the keyboard. At this point I decided that it must be a faulty keyboard or power button. As the laptop would boot a little surely the logic board must be OK.

I then tried booting the laptop holding the command key. It booted without issue, but as soon as I released the key it would shutdown. The shutdown was exactly the same as when you force shutdown the Macbook by holding the power button for 4 seconds. Eureka! It must be a short in the power button circuit. Probably due to the sugar content in the tea or corrosion caused by the moisture.

Next I opened up the Macbook, pulling out the radio board, battery, Superdrive and other bits getting in the way. I revealed the power button and noticed that the power button is part of the keyboard assembly and runs on a ribbon to the rest of the keyboard circuitry. As the keyboard was fried I decided to take a knife and slice off the ribbon for the power button. Surely if the short was in the button itself this would isolate it & allow the machine to boot. It didn’t. No big deal, the keyboard was thought to be faulty anyway so next I decided to disconnect the keyboard ribbon cable from the logic board, isolating the keyboard. As soon as I did this & reassembled the Macbook booted & worked perfectly. Due to the fact that I had disconnected the power button I had to start the Macbook up by shorting the power pads on the logic board. I did this with a screwdriver. I then replaced the bottom cover and had a fully working Macbook, without a keyboard & power button.

The power button wasn’t an issue as the Macbook always uses sleep as opposed to a cold shutdown. I plugged in an external keyboard and the Macbook was once again functional. What a result. We had gone from a destroyed Macbook to one with an obviously faulty internal keyboard. I enquired locally with Mac repair specialists who quoted between £200-£300 to replace the keyboard. Ridiculous prices, so I headed over to eBay and ordered a brand new official apple Macbook pro keyboard & brand new backlight for £24 delivered. The keyboard arrived next day and I set to work dismantling the Macbook. It’s a complicated laptop to dismantle, but only because of the sheer number of steps & screws involved. The keyboard assembly alone is held in by about 80 tiny little screws.

To disassemble you need to remove the bottom cover, followed by the battery. I then removed the hard drive mount, the superdrive & radio board, followed by the logic board fan, ribbon cables & logic board. There are model specific tear-downs over on ifixit so check those out for your model.

Removing the old keyboard & fitting the new one is time-consuming & fiddly, but not overly difficult. The hardest & most scary part for me was refitting the ribbon cable for the keyboard. It’s hard to get it seated properly, so I used a bit of sticky tape on the ribbon to create a tab, allowing me to pull the cable home in the bracket without kinking or bending it. Reassembly is the opposite of disassembly. When disassembling I’d advise that you keep components & their screws together so you know which screw belongs to which part. For the logic board screws I laid them out on a piece of card board in the same pattern as they came out of the logic board (see above picture), that way I could quickly see which hole to put them back into.

Once reassembled the MacBook worked perfectly. It had a brand new keyboard & backlight, which was all new & matte finished (the old one had gone shiny). This fix is well worth it if you think you have water damaged your MacBook, at least try disconnecting the keyboard to rule it out. If it boots, you can work with an external keyboard until you get around to replacing it. The Apple Macbook in question is 4 years old but perfectly good & used heavily, so this fix was a lifesaver. What’s more I managed to save a perfectly good bit of tech & a load of money in the process.

In a perfect world, devices that apple deem end of life should have the option of easily selecting any older version of iOS depending on a users needs. On iOS 9 my iPad 2 went really unloved. I wouldn’t turn it on for weeks on end as it was too slow for even basic web browsing. If apple had any sense they would allow downgrading on older devices as standard. I guess it’s a good way of making us keep upgrading. But I couldn’t live with the fact that this machine which was ludicrously fast only a few years ago was no obsolete.

Up until iOS 8 I was a fanatical jailbreaker. I had the ATV 2 jailbroken & running XBMC, I had my iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS jailbroken along with my iPad 2. I liked being able to run homebrew tweaks & software, especially XBMC/Kodi. I’m glad I used to jailbreak as it got me thinking about downgrading. I have all of my old SHSH blobs backed up so I looked at older versions of iOS. Due to the changes made in the way apple sign ipsw’s post iOS 5.1.1 it looked increasingly difficult to downgrade to iOS 6,7 or 8. I therefore decided to go for 5.1.1 which looked like the most straight forward thing to do.

Luckily redsn0w supports downgrading of the iPad 2 easily so long as you have SHSH blobs for iOS 5.1.1 and any version of iOS 4. I downloaded the correct iOS 5.1.1 ipsw and also a 4.3.5 ipsw and let redsn0w retrieve my SHSH blobs from cydia and start the restore. The restore itself was painless, let redsn0w do it’s thing, throw the iPad 2 into DFU mode and let it restore first to iOS 4.3.5 and then to 5.1.1.

A word of warning, a few apps will not run at all on iOS 5.1.1, most notably Instagram and BBC iPlayer.  For other apps an older version will install but I’ve found all the apps I need, to work in one version or another, including Pinterest, YouTube, Tumblr, Plex etc.

The next step for me was to head back to redsn0w and jailbreak. The jailbreak for iOS 5.1.1 is so simple. It’s known as Rocky Racoon and takes a matter of minutes. Once installed & cydia was setup, I added the Kodi iOS repository to my list of sources and installed Kodi.

This iPad 2 now has a new lease of life. It’s so fast. I will admit it takes a little getting used to after using iOS 9, but it’s so fast it’s worth it to resurrect your old tech. Kodi works a dream on this thing, with incredible battery life it’s the best portable media centre by far. The fact mine has 64GB of storage means I can keep loads of media locally on the iPad and playback using Kodi. The facebook app is an older version but so much better. The content is concise and not cluttered like modern facebook.

Safari is super fast & I’ve installed Adblock via Cydia to block ads iPad wide, not just in Safari. This means no annoying ads in videos. All in all I’m really impressed. I also love the fact that I can now airplay any video to my Kodi media centre running on the Raspberry Pi. The latest iterations of iOS changed airplay encryption & broke airplay to Kodi for everything but Audio. However on 5.1.1 I can airplay any video, meaning I can use safari based TV catchup services such as Quest TV and airplay the video to my Kodi media centre. I can also airplay the video from the YouTube app which is a huge bonus.

All in all I’d say this is the best decision I’ve made for the iPad 2. Whilst I do lose some functionality, the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks. The difference in speed is incredible and it’s now a device I use daily again. If you have one I would recommend running a backup and trying this, you can always restore back to the latest version if you aren’t happy. I for one will be sticking with iOS 5.1.1 on legacy devices.

I’ve also got my eye on an iPad Air. The price are pretty good for a huge leap in technology. Speeds are now much better and even weight has been drastically reduced.

I have been planning this post for a long time & researching these issues for many years. Back in 2008/2009 I based my Masters thesis around social media & it’s uses in a virtual learning environment. After writing 30,000 words & creating my own Social Media platform I realised the many benefits of Social Media when used within a specific context (in this case to enhance University learning). Although I did uncover many drawbacks which at the time (when Twitter was almost new & Facebook very basic) didn’t seem too grand.

Roll on 7 years & social media has become an everyday part of our lives. I for one used to love Twitter, to be able to interact with your peers & the people you looked upto. It used to be a great place, a place of enlightenment and learning. Now it has gone the way of many great tools & become the place to air your dirty laundry or advertise your latest product.

Social Media seems to be intertwined with daily life in 2015. It creates anxiety when people don’t have access to it. Conversations which used to be between friends at face to face meetings or over an instant messaging conversation/email/text/call are now conducted in the public arena. People are putting their entire life on display & it’s creating some interesting issues for society.

Instagram is a platform I used to enjoy. To see interesting things my friends had found, nice sunsets & new additions to well-known places. Now it’s the preserve of the narcissist & the self editors. We use it to present our best selves, perfectly edited & staged to make it look like our lives are perfect & wonderful. This may be all well & good, but when you are living your daily life (which tends not to be some amazing daily adventure) and you are bombarded with images of great restaurants, beautiful cityscapes, 1st class travel, gorgeous people wearing fabulous clothes, it does tend to make you feel a little inferior. This self editing has led to a climate of jealousy & insecurity. It’s plain to see with our young adults who try to always present themselves immaculately for every occasion. Roll back to when I was 16 and I had no money, grunge inspired jumpers with holes in & the best friendship group you could imagine. We also went on adventures & have such epic stories to talk about to this day.

This insecurity can manifest itself in many ways & I myself (who should know better) have even experienced it. Perhaps you feel you should have a better job, your car is a bit crappy, all of your friends & peers are doing well while maybe you are having a tough time. Rather than bringing people together, social media is breaking people apart. A sort of competitive instinct has developed where you aim to show you are doing better than your peers, simply by getting better instagrams, showing flashier venues or nicer vistas. It’s all fake.

It’s the same story with Facebook. People use that not as a social media platform to keep up with close friends, but as a platform to vent their political/social/personal desires & frustrations. Every time I go on Facebook to check if I’ve had a message from one of my friends (I have friends dotted around the globe) I find myself looking on with sheer disbelief. People are either having intimate exchanges (between partners) in public instead of between themselves, or they are venting their latest political or personal vendetta and sometimes generally being bigoted and racist. It’s a completely pointless platform now. Facebook is the platform I hate most. They hide content from people I actually know & show me conversations between someone I know & someone I don’t. POINTLESS! They also introduced that idiotic share button, so everyone’s feed is now full of pointless crap. They have made it so people don’t use the internet, they just use Facebook. One finely tuned propaganda & marketing machine. Oh, and they censor posts (You can’t type the word Tsu for example, because you may be linking to the social media network tsu.co which pays users for the advertising they see). Unethical.

Next we have twitter. This used to be the preserve of the more techie & learned people. This was actually shown in a statistic but I can’t lay my hands on it right now (google “twitter users better educated” and you will see loads of studies). Essentially a study was carried out and University graduates tended to favour twitter over Facebook. Now twitter has become an advertising mecca for brands & self promotion. The interesting tweets get lost amongst the constant crap. Even if you trim your following list you still have promoted tweets to contend with. AD blocking cuts through them but it’s not the platform it used to be. Remember back in the day when you could text status updates to your twitter timeline? I bet few people remember that.

The social media landscape is now endless. Snapchat, Beme, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest, Tumblr and many more. All of them promoting insecurity & a luxurious, perfect life beyond our reach. Living everyday feeling inferior is a bad place to be. A life lived in the hope of one day living your dream life is a life wasted. Every day is precious & every day helps you build towards your own future, a future mostly dictated by the actions of right now.

I have found myself bowing to the pressure of Social Media. In my earlier posts you can read all about my attempts to live a more photogenic lifestyle (let’s just say it didn’t end well). This weekend I made a big change to stem this ridiculous digital ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’. I switched of the internet. More specifically I switched off all of my social media & notifications on my iPhone. I didn’t look at it once. My phone remained silent & to one side throughout all of Friday evening while we watched Children in need on the TV. We had fun, we cried, we ate rubbish food & donated. We actually had a really nice evening. I kept this up throughout Saturday & it was bliss. We got load of things done at home and had loads of time to spare. I’d advise you all to step away from your Social Media accounts during a set time each week. It’s called a blackout amongst the people who do it. Try an evening, and then a whole day, then who knows. It’s so liberating.

I’m not saying it’s all bad, but it is addictive, very addictive. It destroys your productivity too. I used to spend so much time reading content on the internet. Well written content from tech industry folks who I respected. I had a huge list of blogs & sites I’d go to for information. Nowadays, I tend to click only the links that are distributed on twitter. It’s bizarre and unhealthy. The internet was a great place before social media. Before baby scan pictures & your pets (I love your children & your pets, but it’s just not that interesting to the world all the time) the internet was filled with insightful writing & thought-provoking ideas. Now it’s an adword infested, self promoting pain in the arse which saps more time than I care to admit.

If you turn off your social media notifications on your smartphone & don’t open your accounts on your computer I guarantee it will give you anxiety. If I ask you to turn off your phone completely while we have a conversation, you will find a million reasons why you need to be reachable via phone. You don’t, if it’s an emergency (which it rarely ever is), someone knows where you are & can find you. I find the Smartphone has ruined old-fashioned face to face conversations with your friends. Checking your phone whilst taking to someone is like saying “I’m interested what you have to say, so long as a better offer doesn’t come up on my phone, so I’ll be checking that now and then to see if anyone more interesting is speaking to me”. The Smartphone infuriates me. It’s become such a vital part of daily life but such a burden in the process.

I’m guilty of most of the things I’ve talked about, but I’m working hard to take back my time & my social relationships with people. I’d rather meet you face to face for a proper catch up that I’ll remember, and I’d rather be interested in hearing all of your stories directly. I hate the “Oh, I saw you did that on FB/Twitter/other pointless platform” response. It kills conversation dead.

This is just the start of a series of posts I’m going to do on cutting the cord with social media. I’ve still not covered click-baiting, armchair activism, bullying & all the other wonderful things that Social Media easily allows. I’m not trying to suggest it’s all bad, it’s just becoming noisy. It’s less of a useful tool & more of a way to keep us distracted & entertained. As this isn’t an academic paper & I’m sure most people have stopped reading by now, I’ll leave it at that. I’d love to hear your comments on this though.

A little over 3 years ago my beloved Land Rover developed a gearbox fault. It cost a lot of money to have repaired & the repair failed, so I ended up selling it for next to nothing. I then bought a sporty Mini Cooper S which cost me a fortune & after 6 months I sold it to buy a Mercedes estate. This cost even more money to run & maintain and after less than 18 months of owning 3 separate cars I was at a point that I could no longer afford to run a car (silly financial decisions & lots of expensive repairs). It was at this point we sold the Mercedes & used the money to start paying off debt. This would be the beginning of paying off almost £20k in unsecured debts.

We lived without a car for months & it was a great time. It was very sobering. For our trips to Scotland every couple of months we would rent a cheap city car & hit the road. We did this for a while & while not having a car suited us, it wasn’t practical with the family commitments we have. So in September 2014 we bought the blue peril (or The Tardis, depending on who you ask). It’s a 10-year-old Fiat Panda, it was a single lady owner car & only had 22k miles on the clock when we bought it. It was a great deal & cost the same amount for the whole car as we paid for the Land Rover gearbox fix. It’s cheap to tax & insure & generally cheap to run. It does 56MPG and costs us nothing in fuel. It’s a big difference to the big cars I’m used to but it’s honest, affordable & we own it outright.

When we got the Fiat Panda it had no service history. This is usually a gamble but as it was such low mileage and by the feel of the gearstick had never left third gear it seemed like a good gamble. When we got it, it needed new brakes and an oil change. That was it. The brakes cost £220 and an oil change cost £80. I wanted to do the work myself but didn’t have time at all. This year however the time came around to service the car & I was determined to do it.

The benefits of doing your own service are both financial & personal. The sense of achievement is great & you get to know your car so much more. I was also able to source my own parts & oil and got great items really cheap. The oil is a real high spec Shell fully synthetic and I know the job will have been done properly.

To buy 5 litres of oil (I only needed 2.8), oil filter, air filter, sump plug hex key, oil drain pan and an oil filter removal tool costs just over £30. Remember for an oil change alone the year before I paid over £80. £50 saved already & next time it will be even cheaper as I only need another 1 litre of oil and the filters. I now have the tools for life.

It’s usually very straightforward to service a car. A haynes manual is a must & reading over the process a few times will mean you know what to do when the time comes.

I jacked up the car & put it up on stands I had made from large bricks. I then laid down some card board & climbed under to see what I was working with. The oil filter had been overtightened and took a good 20 minutes to free, soaking it in WD40 and tapping gently to release any rust in the seal seemed to free it. I only loosened off the oil filter, ensuring no oil came out and then moved onto the sump plug. This had been seriously overtightened by the previous mechanic using an air gun. The torque wrench settings for the sump plug are very light and should be done by hand to avoid over tightening. I had to soak the plug in WD40 & penetrating oil & it took nearly an hour to get the plug out using the hex key & lightly tapping it with a hammer to free. I didn’t want to use a breaker bar as putting too much torque in may have deformed the small sump. Job done the oil drained into the pan I had bought and I left it for 30 mins to have a brew & a swear.

When the oil had stopped draining it was simply a matter of screwing in the new oil filter, screwing in the sump plug & refilling with lovely fresh oil. I added 2 litres & then topped up to just below the max line on the dipstick. I then changed the air filter which took about 30 seconds.

The car is now running beautifully and I saved myself a small fortune on labour for what is (and will be next time) a very straightforward bit of motor maintenance. I’ll be doing this now every 6 months or 6000 miles.

I hadn’t serviced my own car in around 10 years. Back then I had an old mini and no money so I would do everything with that car. I think I had convinced myself over the years that my time wasn’t worth giving up to do the work, or it was easier to let a mechanic do the job, but it’s really not the case. Being frugal & having a car is hard to combine, but by carrying out these simple tasks you can save a small fortune. I even saved enough money to treat myself to a new book.

Being frugal is definitely a state of mind. When I was lay under that car struggling to get that overtightened plug out I could have easily given up and paid a professional to do the work, but now I know for next time everything isn’t overtightened & I can complete the task in 25 mins.

I have since swapped out all the wipers for Bosch ones (really nice wipers) and I intend to flush the coolant & change the spark plugs next month.

I implore you to go a grab a Haynes manual & don’t be afraid to get stuck in. The tools you buy are an investment & once you have done it you will have developed some great skills & be able to save money for life. I wish I had done this earlier. I’ve spent thousands in servicing and repair’s I could have done myself.

This little car is such a statement of intent for me. It’s small & cheap, really classless but I can afford it & it’s mine. I don’t have sleepless nights & I don’t worry about how I will afford to run it. I’ll get another Land Rover one day, I’m an enthusiast & love them, but this little Blue Peril is going nowhere.

Prior to this we where very minimal people. We have never had much space or fancy things. We lived an honest life & always managed to do a lot on very little money. Life was simple. It then got very complicated. So last April we got rid of everything. We sold the Mercedes, got rid of the house & moved back with family to get back on our feet. We sold off a ton of stuff on eBay and started simplifying every aspect of our life. It now all fits into a small storage unit & will load into the back of a Ford Transit.

With all that stuff came a lot of finance, which has taken us the past year to clear off. But here we are, we have far less stuff, hardly any debt & everything finally seems back in order.

In September we bought another car. We lived without one for 7 months & it was a great period. We walked everywhere & hired a car to visit Scotland every few weeks to help with the family. But in September we bought our Blue Peril. It’s a 2005 Fiat Panda. It’s bright blue, classless, says nothing about our status and costs next to no money to run. We average 56MPG and insurance & tax is minimal. We have driven 8000+ miles in this little car & it’s a major statement of how we intend to live from now on. No flash, no status items & no debt. We bought it with 22k miles on the clock, all cash & even paid the insurance up front.

As you can see from the pictures below, our car ownership started to spiral. We went from an old Land Rover which I loved, to a flash Mini Cooper which was a total blip & then onto a Mercedes which was madness. We now drive this little blue beast & it makes everyone smile. It’s a zero stress car & has been a huge catalyst for our downsizing & change. I think we are even going to drive it across to Amsterdam in the summer. How cool!

So the house has gone, the car is sorted & we are looking for a new more modest house. Definitely as small as possible, perhaps just a 1 bedroom place. We are also playing around with the idea of building a tiny house. But at the moment we are weighing up doing that or planning our eventual move to Amsterdam. Needless to say it’s a fun time.

With regards the debt, we have gone from many credit cards & overdrafts to one 0% credit card with a much lower balance. We have paid off tens of thousands of pounds in debt over the past year & we are on top of everything. It’s really liberating.

I’ve also been reading Stuffocation by James Wallman & I’m working towards living with only 100 items. People say it’s impossible, but considering where I came from to where I am now I think it will be easy to achieve.

These posts are pretty hard to write so if you have any questions or queries put them as a comment below. I will answer any questions you have as honestly as possible & I’d love to help you guys achieve the same goals. My wife & I feel really liberated & free. I’m really looking forward to starting over in a new place, with a new respect for money & a healthier relationship with our own money. I’ve also come to realise that I love running my own little business & living off a very modest wage. If I ever went back to work now it would have to be to a non-profit. I would rather earn little & make a difference. People always say I could earn a lot with my skill set & education but I am happiest when I’m creating my own future & running my own small business helps me do that daily.

Anyway, ask away. I’d love to hear from you. I’ll keep updating you guys & when I start to downsize even further I’ll do more posts.

This standpoint is reflected in my current lineup of tech. My one & only phone is an iPhone 4. Not a 4S, a humble 4. It’s jailbroken & locked down to ios 7 as apple no longer allow it to be upgraded. With the jailbreak tweaks its perfectly fine speed wise, I actually prefer the smaller form factor and the battery life hasn’t really degraded from the day I bought it.

The same goes for my iPad which is a 64GB iPad 2 with GSM. This cost the best part of £700 on release (when i bought it from the apple store in Exeter) and has seen daily use ever since. I depend a lot on my ios devices. I run an online business & manage a few social media accounts, both personal and business and I do this perfectly well with my current lineup.

This isn’t the end of our legacy hardware setup though. My wife has a 32GB iPhone 3GS which again is jailbroken and tweaked to hell. She only takes this on the odd day out or meeting, the rest of the time she simply uses her iPad mini (which is the newest device we have) and finds a wifi hotspot. People are shocked when they find out she only carries an old iPhone a few days a year but our setup works perfectly well.

My main computer is an early 2009 24 inch imac. I got a pretty good spec at the time with the uprated pci-e nvidia GT 120 and to be honest, with 8GB of ram this machine kicks the arse out of most other macs I’ve come across, including my brother in laws 2012 iMac. This is largely down to the fact that I care for my hardware & software and have everything setup & tweaked perfectly. I’ve not even been tempted to upgrade to a newer imac, with the exception of airplay & hardware decoding/encoding of video this thing does the lot.

I have a real problem with this forced obsolescence of hardware. I know that companies like apple need to keep the market moving forward, they are in the business of selling hardware and software, but it just seems so wasteful. I’ve had these devices so long & the only time I wavered was when I bought a Google LG Nexus 5 on release date. I only kept it for 3 weeks and returned it to google. It was shocking. So many issues, fragile build quality, terrible audio, pretty poor ecosystem, jittery sound recording on videos due to faulty noise cancelling mics. It was a bad experience.

I do quite fancy a fairphone, but again I have the problem of upgrading an item which is perfectly fine & does everything I need. I know that marketing teams are very good at making older devices feel inferior, but for a smartphone I really don’t see the point of having all of that power in your pocket. After all most of us only email, lookup random things on the web and use a handful of apps, all of which work perfectly fine on older handsets.

By keeping my iPhone for so long I really feel like I’ve got my moneys worth. I’ve had this handset since mid 2010 (over 4 years) of daily hard use and it’s still fine. It’s not on a contract so with giffgaff for £12 a month I get all the minutes and texts I need and unlimited 3G data. To upgrade to an iPhone 6 for cash is a small fortune, the contracts have eye watering monthly costs.

The financial costs aside, there are huge environmental costs to all of this. Many precious metals and other materials go into making these devices. The sad truth is so many of these handsets sit in drawers for years after they are taken out of use (most people have a drawer full of old handsets & chargers) and are eventually disposed of when they have no perceived value. This is sad & wasteful.

The problem as I see it are two fold. People have the new handsets marketed at them with subtle differences. Enough to differentiate between the new and the old model and enough to make the old models look inferior. This is a good motivator for people to upgrade. Then comes the contract trap. Apple and other vendors know the prices are high and most people will opt for a monthly contract to obtain the new handsets. So people sign for a 24 month contract at £42 per month and over the two years their phone is superseded by two or three new models. During the course of the contract this shiny new phone becomes the old phone that users can’t wait to get rid of when their contract is up, so the cycle starts again & the marketing teams have a very simple job of selling the new hardware to you.

Lets take the £42 a month contract I found as an example. With a small payment upfront of around £60 you pay £1068 over the 2 years minimum. That is without any extra costs such as outside of tariff calls/texts/data or roaming charges. If the carriers advertised that costs I doubt most people would upgrade. Compare that to my £12 a month over 4 years which is £576 and not a penny more. Add to that the price of the handset which was £499 and i’ve paid the same over 4 years as most people will pay in two. So for each month I get out of this handset I make a killer saving, I’m not tied into any contract and I’m free to put any sim I like into the phone when I go abroad.

Maybe this is an old fashioned way to look at the world, but I don’t like items such as phones and cars and other consumer products to be paid for monthly. I’ve always owned my cars outright. The same with my tech. Difference being, they don’t change the way roads work or make fuel different each year so I can continue to use my car as long as it is useful. Not so with tech.

I’m not ignorant to the fact that new operating systems are too demanding for older hardware, but support for hardware shouldn’t cease after 4 years. I’m now being told I can’t upgrade apps on the phone as they are iOS only. Eventually this will force my hand but I aim to get another 6-12 months out of this phone. I will keep the iMac for years to come and our other devices will be in use as long as possible. At the end of their life they will be repurposed. The iPhone will make a great mp3 & internet audio player in a dock or in the car. I still have my 4th Generation iPod classic (the U2 limited edition i bought at the Apples tore in SF) and it still sees a lot of use.

Comment back if you have similar views on this. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. I can’t be on my own with this view. Tech should be used until it no longer functions, not because a manufacturer decided it’s time to spend more cash.

The aim was to get all of our belongings into one short wheelbase transit. We managed to get it down to two loads in said transit but we still have some things to sell so the goal in achievable.

To put it into perspective, we are now staying in one room in a family members home. It’s a fairly big room and we have access to the rest of the house but we have all of our work stuff, along with our bed & a sofa in one room. It’s like a crash course in downsizing but we have adjusted to it in less than a week & the benefits are already clear. I’ll highlight a few.

1. Heating costs – As we are in a small space and the computers & even our bodies give off heat we have no need to heat the room. None at all, in fact it’s cold in Britain and we have the window open.

2. Electricity – We only have a macbook pro using around 20 watts, an iMac using around 40 watts and a lamp using power. The lamp has a 7w bulb so our combined electricity usage is around 70w per hour. Our old house used to idle at around 700w. We got rid of the TV and just use the iMac as a TV to catchup on all of our TV & youTube.

3. Cleaning – Daily chore but takes 5 minutes.

Now we won’t be living like this forever, only until we find the perfect place with a good balance of workspace & living space. So far we are dealing well with it & the savings in the short term are phenomenal. Really looking forward to finding a really efficient and well thought out space to live in. We are so suited to European style apartments, surely we can get something similar in the UK.

The biggest thing is the house listing. After a month of waiting we finally got the house on the market & a sign up outside. Less than 24 hours later we have viewings lined up & hopefully things will move quickly. I’m excited to move on & start the next chapter of life. I know that won’t be in St Helens anymore & I’ve made my peace with that. The fact is apart from my good friends & a few family members I have very little tying me to this place now & it’s time to get back out there and start living again. Paying for this quasi-mansion has almost killed us. We have all this space & it’s lucky because once it’s all paid for each month there is very little money left over so we are trapped in it.

We are still not sure where we will end up next. Perhaps Manchester or Amsterdam. Perhaps somewhere completely obscure.

We have a hell of a lot to sort out in the Meantime. Everything is going into a small storage unit & we know when we eventually get another place to call home it will be considerably smaller. This means that all of the furniture we have accrued to fill this house has got to go. Some of it has already gone and other pieces are up for sale as we speak.

Another thing I’m thinking of down the line, once all debts are paid & we are free of the stress that entails, is the purchase of another car. I’m a real sucker for Land Rover. I fell in love with the brand young and it will always have a place in my heart, but in the 21st Century it’s not the wisest purchase. I’m really wanting to go down the electric car route. The Renault Zoe has really caught my eye & the Nissan Leaf (latest revision) is a great prospect with its 130 mile range.

Being self employed makes obtaining credit for cars quite difficult so I’m thinking of saving a massive chunk of the money, if not all of the money to buy one outright. For a car like the Zoe that is £14k, but I’m hoping by the time we have ourselves right & aren’t spending all of our cash on debt repayments that we will be able to save relatively quickly.

A car is the only thing I’ll ever willingly spend money on. It gives a great amount of freedom & also allows your to live somewhere idyllic but still take part in city life. It’s a delicate balancing act when you run your own business from home. You don’t have to live anywhere in particular, but when you have the choice of living anywhere it’s a really hard decision. Not many people would understand that & most would think I’m talking complete bollocks but it’s true. Let me explain.

If you live in a city, you have access to everything on your doorstep. You have bars & events, clubs, education, culture, life. But with that comes expensive rents, overcrowding, poverty, crime, lack of countryside & no peace & quiet. With a rural life it’s all the complete opposite. I guess we are looking for a happy medium.

This post turned into a bit of a rant so i will leave it there. Hopefully some of it resonates with at least one person out there.

It’s funny how we attach value to things even though they are no longer of use to us. A kind of sentimentality to a magazine you once enjoyed & some misplaced fantasy that you will read it again. Some of the magazines I’ve had since I was 11 years old, mostly old car magazines and the sentimental connection to them is unreal. The truth is I’ve never read them in 19 years, I’ve just carted them about. They weigh about 100Kg and take up 4 under bed boxes. They have to go.

Another thing I’m really attached to is packaging. I keep all packaging for electronics & with good reason. I sell everything to upgrade, I never just bin a phone or computer component or console. I put it back in its packaging and sell it to contribute to the upgrade. Keeping packaging for this purpose is acceptable, but when you are keeping packaging for things such as TVs they take up a lot of space. Unlike say a console, the box to a TV adds very little to its resale value so I’ve said goodbye to these. Only packaging that will add a significant resale value is to be kept.

We have lots of things up for sale on eBay and are adding things daily. Our dining table and chairs are going. We had a massive dining table and many chairs for the days we have family over. Truth is we have used it once, on Christmas Day. The rest of the time it’s unused. So it’s going.

I’m also selling my wii console. We had a fad a few years back with the wii. We used it for wii fit and a few games. Since then it’s lay dormant and unused. Another impulse purchase slowly depreciating and taking up space. We have had it in 4 different houses unused. What a waste of energy.

We have two digital cameras for sale. Yes we have two spare cameras, that sit in a drawer unused. Since iPhone cameras have got better and better we tend to take the actual camera less and less. Most of our travel shots are now taken on a phone and it seems to be a natural evolution. Why carry an iPod a camera a games console a phone and a laptop when a smartphone meets all those needs & more.

I’ve also downsized my media collection. I have everything digitised so I don’t have to find DVDs on shelves or music in racks. This has grown over the years and last week was 6 terabytes in size. That is a lot. It’s also a lot of anxiety and management. It’s almost a full time job maintaining, managing and worrying about all that content. So I’ve downsized my NAS to a 2TB raid array. Now it’s all backed up on the fly and is much more manageable. I was hoarding movies I’ve watched once and movies I didn’t even like. My music has gone as its all in the cloud with iTunes Match. My photo collection is slowly being purged and my TV box set collection has been drastically reduced. It feels so much better. Besides, with a netflix account most of these old movies are available on demand, and they have the headache of storing it for me.

We are still processing all of our stuff. We now have an empty guest room and an almost empty dining room. The house feels so big already and we already feel so much lighter. It’s a great feeling. We are looking at a 500sqft apartment this week too. That’s about 1/4 the size of our current home. It’s all very exciting.

We have hours of work left digitising the rest of our photo collection. Our photos take up 2 huge boxes so the plan is to scan them all and keep digital copies only, backed up to the cloud of course.

I hope you stick with us in this challenge. If you decide to give it a go yourself I’d love to hear your thoughts or comments. It’s a great thing to do and we are already planning our travels based on the savings we make moving to a smaller place. Between no car costs, a smaller home to heat, power & pay council tax on and a greater selection of free activities to attend we hope to save around £8k a year. It also includes using the proceeds from the sale of our stuff/car to pay off some debt. We hope to go away every 2-3 months to see another country or city. It’s an exciting prospect.

Ill try to post again tomorrow with some more progress.

A photo of the car going to the rubbish dump.