what time is it?

About three years ago, I upgraded the watch I used to track my runs. Before this point, I was using a pretty basic Garmin that I'd earned as a loyalty reward at Sweatshop Running Club. It was a brilliant little thing that revolutionised the way I measured the distances I run, but it was hardly a fashion item. As a result, I wore it to run or bike, but then took it off and wore a proper watch.

This changed the day I bought a Garmin Fenix 3HR. Although this does basically the same job as my first Garmin, it was a lot more stylish and also did cool things like measure my heart rate and track my daily step count. As a result, I stopped wearing my nice watch and just wore my Garmin every day. It's amazing how quickly you get sucked into caring about things like how many steps you take and how many flights of stairs you climb in a day and how that measures against your targets.

This is clearly great for people who need a little encouragement to be more active. However, as someone who runs five or six times a week and a hundred or so miles a month, I don't really need to watch my step count. Interesting though it was, all it really meant was that I had entirely stopped wearing my nice watch. The Garmin is nice enough, but my other watch was much nicer.

I've broken the habit. I scraped my Garmin along a wall on Lady Bay Bridge when hit by a particularly strong gust of wind on Sunday's run and needed to replace the screen cover (it's a long story, but briefly: after a couple of years of to-ing and fro-ing, Garmin replaced my 3HR with a Garmin 5 to try and get around persistent problems with the altimeter. Great, but the upgraded watch didn't have a tempered glass screen and needed some additional protection).  As I couldn't immediately find my spare screen cover, and because I didn't want to scuff up the actual screen itself, I took the Garmin off and put my proper watch back on. I'd often looked at it a little sadly, but couldn't somehow break the habit of constantly needing to know where I was with my step count.

After a couple of days with my good watch on, I'm still marvelling at what a nice watch it is and why on earth I didn't do this earlier. Mind you, the Garmin takes its time from the satellite and is 100% accurate. My nice watch... isn't. It's also an automatic, meaning that it gets its charge from being on my wrist. Having barely been used for a while, it's working fine and then stopping overnight when I stop moving, and I find myself taking it off and waving it around for a few minutes to try and build up a bit of a charge. I'll probably keep it on with my Garmin when I next go for a run. Wearing two watches on a run instead of just one. I suppose that's progress? Still, I've broken the step count tyranny over my life for the time being, anyway.

What a world we live in.

pseudo human being...

Back in the day, it was an iPod that was my first introduction to Apple.  It was one of those rare devices that absolutely and immediately changed my life: in this case, by completely revolutionising the way that I listened to music.  I was one of those kids who was always taping things off the radio; I made mixtapes for people well into my 20s (it seems ridiculous to think about it now, but writable CDs weren't really a thing for most people for a really, really long time.  Long after all my music was on CDs, the only really practical way of making a compilation was to use a cassette).  I had a minidisc for a while, and that was okay but distinctly limited by the fact that not many people had minidisc players.... which may be at least part of the reason why that didn't really work out as a format.

Anyway....

I think my first iPod had a capacity of 30gb and I was suddenly able to carry around so much more music in my pocket... although, because my music was almost entirely on CD, I also had to learn how to rip CDs into MP3s first.  I then had to buy and install a firewire connection for my PC to be able to connect my new device to my computer.  I don't know about you, but how many times have you opened up a PC and installed a card? I worked in IT and it was my first time.  On top of all that, Apple hadn't made a version of iTunes for the PC yet, either... so I was forced to use something called "Media Jukebox" by JRiver (I haven't used this in over a decade and I think they still send me emails).  So I started ripping CDs onto my hard drive, and the choices I made then can still be seen in my library of MP3s today: every new CD that I bought was ripped immediately, but I selectively went back through my back catalogue, and loads of the CDs I didn't rip then have never been added since. The process of ripping a CD took ages on my old PC, and I just didn't have the time or patience to rip my way through a back catalogue of 1000 or so CDs... so I made some choices, and I'm still living with those choices today.  I guess I'm a completist, but not *that much* of a completist. Pah.  Evict me from the man club.

iTunes arrived for the PC eventually, and I moved my library over and downloaded my first track from the Apple Store.  79p for "Vertigo" by U2.

I loved the old iPod.  Even when Apple did everything they could to move us into newer technology, I loved being able to buy a device that had storage big enough that it was capable of holding my whole music library and I didn't have to choose what I loaded.  For me, the 160Gb iPod classic was where it was at.  I had an iPhone and used that for my day-to-day consumption of music, choosing playlists and albums that I wanted to carry with me all the time... safe in the knowledge that I always had my classic, and my classic had everything.

...and then Apple stopped making it.

Lots of people made a massive fuss about this and seemed angry at Apple for taking this choice away from them.  I sort of understood where they were coming from, but what the hell did they expect Apple to do about it?  They'd decided to move on, and that was that.  I was a touch worried that I wouldn't have the choice of something with this much storage, but my (second) classic was still pretty new, so it wasn't something I needed to lose any sleep over quite yet.

When we went on holiday to Switzerland and Austria this summer, we were going to be driving around everywhere, and I thought it would be nice to be able to listen to some music, so I packed the classic.  In truth, I'd been using the playlists on my iPhone more and more, but I still liked the idea of something with everything; something that had the whole of "Surf's Up" by the Beach Boys and not just a playlist of the band's greatest hits.  I quickly discovered something that Apple already knew: the iPod classic has a spinning hard drive and not solid state storage; it's built on old technology... and in the car we were using, it was painfully slow and crashed every couple of songs, requiring a full reset each time.  Needless to say, I just used my phone for music.  Suddenly, the iPod classic felt every bit an almost obsolete piece of technology.

Imagine my delight when I upgraded my phone to an iPhone 7 and discovered that I once again had a device with the storage capacity to easily hold my entire music collection.  In fact, the 256Gb storage capacity of my new phone is in fact significantly bigger than the 160Gb of my old iPod classic.

Technology, eh?

Naturally, in the time since I've started curating a digital music collection on my hard drive, I've bought a record player and started buying 180g vinyl, sometimes of music that I already own on cassette, CD and on MP3.

That's just the way of the world though, eh?

safe and sound...

I've got a new phone.  Because I've used iPhones for a while now, the process of moving from one phone to another is usually fairly straightforward: back up the old phone to iTunes, then plug the new one in and restore it from that backup and off you go.

Simple.

...or it would be, except that this time around, when I plugged the new phone in to load all my settings and apps and music and things from the backup, it told me my backup was encrypted and I'd need to enter the password before I could access it.

What?

Naturally, I googled.  It turns out that at some point in the last year or so, I must have set up an encrypted backup (it's a check-box in iTunes, so easily done).  Why had I done such a thing?  Well, I've no recollection of this, but apparently one might do such a thing because one is security conscious and wanted to backup passwords and health data and suchlike.

OK then.  So what's the password?

I tried some of my old classics.  No joy.
I tried the iPhone access code.  Nothing.
I tried a few combinations of various things.
I tried every old password favourite that I could think of. Nope.

I did some more googling.  Apparently, if you can't remember this password, you're screwed: there's no way of recovering it, and the only option you would have is to start all over again and manually move across everything from one phone to the other.  Not a disaster, but a massive pain.

I tried all the old passwords again.  Nothing doing.

Bugger.

I started using a password vault a few years ago. Initially with a free trial of one thing (Keeper), and eventually with a proper subscription to another service (Dashlane).  This had the immediate effect of making my passwords much more complex (because I didn't have to remember them), but also much less prone to repetition.  Mixes of characters and numbers and upper and lower case letters are much harder to crack, but are also much more difficult to remember.  With a password vault, you only need to remember one password and you are instantly more secure (as long as that password is a good one and you're sensible enough to have two-step authentication set up and TouchID enabled).  I was pretty sure I hadn't saved the password to a vault (I frankly couldn't remember setting up the backup encryption in the first place), but just on the off-chance, I checked the password vaults anyway.....I checked the old one first.  Nah.  Nothing doing and none of the other passwords stored there for other things worked either.  As a port of last resort, I checked the new one.  It almost certainly wouldn't be in here.....

....and there it was.  Filed under "iTunes encryption key".  Obviously.

So, to recap, the last place I looked for this bloody password was the one place that is custom built to store passwords.  I pay a bloody subscription for this service. Of course it was the last place I looked.

And yes, I do realise that you always find things in the last place you look.  You know what I mean.