I share some genes with some squirrels and your grandfather.
I have two boxes for cables and power supplies. We have a couple of rental properties. In the garage I have boxes for plumbing parts, electrical parts, one for brackets, one with all kinds of fasteners, one for special tools. These are just small size moving type cardboard boxes, all on storage shelf. My helper laughs at why I keep all the junk, but he's the first to rummage through them when we need something. Everything somewhat organized enough that there's room to park the cars inside the garage.
My microwave oven, washer, dryer all have wifi, so I could supposedly interact with them via "apps". Nooooooo. I wish I could find the chip involved and "Muntz" it.
Turn off location services except when navigating or calling the taxi.
Uninstall as many apps as possible, use browser.
Use adblocking anti tracking browser (I use Duck, alt suggestions welcome).
Report unknown / unwanted senders as spam.
That said, I am a NEWS ADDICT. There are four world leaders whose downfall I eagerly await, and frequently check the news for this ;-) .. you might be able to guess three but not the fourth.
Replace Modi with Netanyahu and maybe Xi with Kim. These two are dictators but don't really care about things outside of their region (other than Chinese exploitation in Africa). They want to stay in power not take over the whole world.
Israel is abusing Holocaust guilt in Europe to get away with genocide and massive cyber ops against their own allies and open bribery in US elections. And North Korea is so insane that the power transition will be fun to watch. All the generals and family members are waiting on him to die, and when he does there might be a military coup or even a civil war.
The impact (both potential and current) of Xi on the rest of the world is much bigger than that of Kim and I don't think its fair to say that the Chinese are content to stay inside their walls. Kim is more of a puppet dictator of the Chinese and Russians than anything.
Sadly, one of the contributors to this are the "Little" Tech Bros. They have drunk the kool aid at work. A bit libertarian or right wing in nature, they salivate at the latest Full Self Driving (supervised) lie, or AI hype, or crypto when it first came out. Some intricate new feature or language puts them into paroxysms of joy. In their view, any attempt to regulate or draw boundaries around "tech" equates to communism, marxism, and attempts to curtail so called freedom of speech. Don't use it if you don't like it, they say.
By Little Tech Bros i mean developers with lots of technical skills, but who haven't been lucky enough to be in the right spot at the right time with an IPO. They keep evangelizing hoping megabucks lightning will hit them the next time. It won't. More likely, a layoff notice. Because Big Tech Bro figured out how to grab all the money from their excess productivity.
I get all my news by reading: NYT, WSJ, BBC, AP, and a few Substacks.
NYT has gotten so bloated both in actual content (long meandering interviews) as well as the encapsulating junk. I started to put it into Gemini to summarize. During this process I found, the two hour interview transcript was 50% actual words and 50% junk (probably formatting, tracking, adware, surveillance?).
I have two boxes for cables and power supplies. We have a couple of rental properties. In the garage I have boxes for plumbing parts, electrical parts, one for brackets, one with all kinds of fasteners, one for special tools. These are just small size moving type cardboard boxes, all on storage shelf. My helper laughs at why I keep all the junk, but he's the first to rummage through them when we need something. Everything somewhat organized enough that there's room to park the cars inside the garage.
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