A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The twelfth post of a series.

In this month’s reading list email, Ryan Holiday points out that

just some twenty years ago, everyone listed their address and phone number in a phone book that was circulated to homes for free. In fact, you had to pay to NOT be included.

These days, my parents are careful about shredding everything with their address on it, even junk mail, and they’re hardly alone. How did we get here?

For much of this week, two petrol stations which are virtually opposite each other in Newcastle priced their regular diesel differently by 19.2p per litre (170.7p and 189.9p). It is surprising that a difference that big is seemingly sustainable.

I’ve been deep into automation this week: writing Microsoft Power Automate routines to automatically rename and file certain email attachments on OneDrive, and playing with Apple Shortcuts and HomeKit on personal devices. It’s years since I last played with these sorts of tools. They have become addictively straightforward and—shock—genuinely useful and time saving now that almost everything lives in the cloud.

I mentioned last week that I was enjoying Coco Mellors’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein, and I still am, but I’m now also reading Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. The former has a line

”Running is for children and thieves”

which I think summarises my feelings on Murakami’s subject rather well, even if his enthusiasm is somewhat infectious.

Diamond Geezer wrote this week:

I don’t know about you but if there’s a long gap until the next bus I always like to walk ahead along the route until just before it eventually catches up.

I share this habit, and have long been frustrated that Citymapper doesn’t seem to automatically understand that behaviour—but discovered this week that Transit does, so I’m a convert.