No News

13 Jan 2020 at 21:06 // under

No news is good news except if your news source is broken. I use a series of RSS feeds to keep me up to date with whatever I am interested in. Rather than repeatedly going to someone's website (or following them on social media), I subscribe to their feed, then whenever they post something, it appears in my own feed. In some ways it is a lot like social media, except I am in control. I decided what should be in my feed.

Rather than watching the weather forecast every day, I am subscribed to the weather warnings so I am aware of anything serious that I need to take action on. I will go months without any warnings, saving time, then when a storm approaches I get a notification and can make plans. Of course this is fine until the news source breaks. The met office recently changed the addresses of their weather warning feeds and so I stopped getting warnings. This wasn't unusual though until the bad weather actually struck when I wasn't expecting it.

To be honest it wasn't as bad as that. Friends and colleagues had inadvertently warned me, giving me a chance to check the system and fix the problem. But it does show how alarms are useless if they don't get tested. Speaking of which, when was the last time your smoke detector was checked?

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