All of a Twitter

As I may have mentioned, I have a shiny new phone which continues to give me much joy by a) working when I want it to, as opposed to when it feels like it, and b) having a very splendid camera. I’m continuing to explore the features of the latter – which, I suspect, will end up being largely limited by the capabilities of the person holding it, rather than any technical failings of its own. And I’ve more or less got it set up as I like having silenced as many annoying notifications as I can, told it to stop telling the Chinese Government/various tech giants where I am (or at least, pretending it isn’t), switched off any helpful suggestions, and generally got it into ‘grumpy old fart’ mode.*

There is, however, one thing which I haven’t managed to get working, though not through any fault of the phone’s. The Twitter app has quite happily installed but, embarrassingly, it seems I have forgotten my password. No problem, you’d think – just get it to send a reset email. Except that Twitter is so broken these days that the reset emails never arrive. So I’m a bit stuck. It’s still working fine on my laptop and my old, knackered phone so I’m a bit loth to make too many attempts to guess the password in case I’m locked out completely – it turns out that when it comes to Twitter I’m sadly addicted. For all its well publicised faults and recent problems, it remains my go-to place when I need a bit of chat, a deep dive into some fascinating topic I’d never even considered before, or just a video of a rescue beaver building a Christmas dam.

Dam. pic.twitter.com/Q7sCi1IRr6

— jamie (@gnuman1979) January 11, 2023

So now I find myself having to have TWO phones, one purely for Twitter, and one for everything else. I’m not proud of this, but that’s how it is. I suppose this does at least make me more conscious of how often I reach for Twitter for distraction when I should probably be doing something more productive.

It’s also been a bit of a wakeup call about password management. I’d actually been investigating password managers for my mother but hadn’t got around to trying any out for me. Conceitedly, I’d rather thought I’d got a handle on all my important passwords, but it turns out not, and simply relying on password resets for when my memory fails clearly has its limits. Unfortunately, like planting trees, the best time to set up a password manager is some time in the past (see also: decent backups). And the second best time is ‘after you’ve got yourself back into Twitter’. Once that happy day arrives, which one would you recommend?

* You think I’m joking, but it does actually have a ‘senior’ setting, although I haven’t actually tried it.

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