Likely this. Temperature and humidity also affect your sense of taste and smell, plus they can affect a hot drink’s evaporation rate.

Neither of those can stream video in real time AFAIK. They will back up the video file on some unpredictable schedule after you’re done recording. So not ideal for a situation where your phone might be seized or destroyed.

But if that works for you, there are lots of open-source options that work similarly. SyncThing can sync to any server, and all you’d need to do is make sure your sync destination is network-accessible somehow (VPN, internet-facing server, whatever). Lots of cloud drive apps can auto-upload photos and videos, and some of those are open-source.

A better off-the-shelf proprietary workflow might be a Zoom call with cloud recording enabled. Then you’d be protected against a sudden (and perhaps permanent) loss of network connectivity.

After working for many years in a “fast pace environment” I can’t help but notice that I have increasing difficulties to do simple tasks.

How many years are we talking?

A lot of what you describe sounds like you’re starting to have “senior moments”. If you’re past 50, that’s pretty normal. Which is not to say it’s good. “Normal” does not mean good. It just means common. I don’t think you should look for anything exotic if the mundane explanation fits your observations.

Low-tech suggestion: Keep a notepad in your pocket. Make to-do lists. Cross items off it when you’re done. Maybe put the time in when you cross it off.

• Put water on stove
• Turn off stove
• Make tea
• Drink tea

Yep. On a Blu-ray disk, you have 25-100GB of space to work with. The Blu-ray standard allows up to 40mbps for 1080p video (not counting audio). Way more for 4K.

Netflix recommends a 5mbps internet connection for 1080p, and 15mbps for 4K. Reportedly they cut down their 4K streams to 8mbps last year, though I haven’t confirmed. That’s a fraction of what Blu-ray uses for 1080p, never mind 4K.

I have some 4K/UHD Blu-rays, and for comparison they’re about 80mbps for video.

They use similar codecs, too, so the bitrates are fairly comparable. UHD Blu-rays use H.265, which is still a good video codec. Some streaming sites use AV1 (at least on some supported devices) now, which is a bit more efficient, but nowhere near enough to close that kind of gap in bitrate.

What this expression refers to is a pervasive false equivalence: the idea that anything that isn’t perfect isn’t worth bothering with, or that doing something small somehow hampers a greater task (even if when it actually contributes to that greater task). It is a statement against apathy and binary thinking.

This comes up in politics and activism all the fucking time. Like “Why should I care about car emissions when freight ships produce more emissions than all the cars in the world?” The answer is simple: because you can. Do what you can, even if it’s small. That doesn’t mean forgetting about the big polluters.

some sort of labor movement, a geopolitical shock, a massive strike, etc

If anybody is avoiding Amazon as an alternative to those things, then I agree that they need a kick in the pants. But I doubt there’s anyone out there thinking to themselves “I don’t need to take part in the revolution because I bought my cat food at CVS instead of Amazon”.

I affect a British accent

Lower-effort life hack: wear a Canadian maple leaf prominently. Put a patch on your bags, get a baseball cap, wear a t-shirt. Project “Canadian” any way you can.

Defaults matter. Every time you open a private browsing window, that’s what you’re going to get. Every time you use LibreWolf or Firefox Focus or any other browser that disables/clears cookies by default (which is a good practice), that’s what you’re going to get.

I don’t want anything I search for going into OpenAI. Ever. I’d feel fine about this if they hosted their own models.

If someone was uninformed and misinformed enough to think voting for Trump was even remotely in their own self-interest in the first place, then there is almost no disaster Trump can cause that will not be instantly reframed as “just imagine how much worse it would be under Dems!”

Dying of COVID? Well at least you’re not dying from forced vaccination!

Layoffs due to tariffs? LOL what’s a tariff?

Can’t get benefits you need to survive? Well clearly the Welfare Queens left him no choice! It’s their fault!

It’s no coincidence that Trump in particular and Republicans in general relentlessly attack education and free information. They’ve already brainwashed enough of the population to win elections, and they want to make sure the general population has no way out of that hole. This is why they’re attacking Wikipedia and Internet Archive. This is why Project 2025’s first order of business is to eliminate the Department of Education. This is why Musk bought fucking Twitter in the first place, most likely. This is why they’re now trying to repeal Section 230 (with the help of some Judas Dems), so they can bully any web site into taking down any information they don’t like.

The information apocalypse is upon us.

Link to Mastodon thread: https://mastodon.social/@protonprivacy/113833073219145503