The annual digital audit

Every year around now I go through the tech, work out what earned its keep and what quietly let me down, and write it up. This year the exercise produced an unexpected result, which is that nothing broke.

Nothing died. Nothing got replaced. Nothing needed a repair, a battery or an argument with a support chat. I sat down expecting to write about a failure and could not find one, which after twenty five years of buying gadgets is genuinely novel.

The inventory, such as it is

  • Work MacBook, an M1 from 2020. Four years old and still faster than anything I ask of it.
  • A MacBook Air at home, doing the not-work half of my life.
  • Nothing Phone (1), bought 22 July 2023. Seventeen months in.
  • Nothing Ear (1), bought 29 September 2023. Still work perfectly.
  • A NAS in the flat running Plex and a handful of other services.

That is the lot. The newest item on that list is fifteen months old. It is the most boring audit I have written and I have come round to thinking that is the point: at some stage this stuff stopped being a hobby that needed feeding and turned into infrastructure that works.

Still very happy with the Nothing Phone

Seventeen months in and I still like the interface, which is the bit I expected to tire of. It is simple in a way that phones mostly are not any more, and the simplicity has not curdled into limitation.

It is also doing two jobs. Work and personal live on separate profiles on the same handset, and it runs two SIMs, because I have been in Amsterdam for years and still have not given up my UK number. I suspect I never will. That number has been mine longer than some of my friendships.

Carrying one phone instead of two is the single best change I have made to how I work, and it was not a change I planned. I just bought a phone that could do it.

The annual Trello failure

Here is the one thing that did break this year, and it was me.

I tried to use Trello again. Set it up properly, boards for the right things, good intentions all round. It worked for a while and then it fizzled, exactly as it did the last time and the time before that. At some point I stopped opening it and did not notice I had stopped.

I am writing this on 29 December, which means I am three days away from deciding that next year I will really use Trello. I am aware of what that sentence is. It is a new year resolution with a login page.

The honest conclusion is that Trello is not the problem. Nine years of evidence says I am not a person who maintains a board, and the correct move is probably to stop buying the idea that one more attempt will take.

The accounts audit

The hardware held still this year and the accounts did all the moving. I went to Bluesky properly, which I have written about separately. And I think I got rid of Threads, though the fact that I am not certain rather makes the point about how much it mattered.

So: nothing to buy, nothing to fix, one habit to give up on honestly rather than fail at again in February. Not a bad place to end a year.