Strictly speaking, this particular example worked itself out way back in 2014 but I only became acutely aware of it recently and once again is an example of what happens when your throw something out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Back in 2013 or so I bought an iPad and loaded it up with a pile of apps. One of those apps was a now infamous game called Angry Birds. I played it, enjoyed it. Other people played it and enjoyed it and everything was fine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Come 2026 and I find that I now have another iPad. Chris had a couple of tablets banging around upstairs and mentioned that I could take them away to strip for parts. The first was an old android tablet that I noticed was bent out of shape. Immediately I thought the batteries were swelling so I ripped off the back and found that the batteries were indeed not swelling but were outputting 0.0v. I removed them from the tablet and plugged it in and it started up but dear, oh dear. It reported having something like 128MB of, well I didn’t check whether that was RAM or storage space. It did have a 4GB SD card installed with a lot of the apps and – anyway\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The other tablet was an iPad that looked pretty good. It wouldn’t power up (because it had been sitting on a shelf for a year or two) so I hunted around and found the cable, plugged it into an adapter and it started to charge. I thought that was a good sign and let it charge up which took some 8 hours or so. I wasn’t particularly optimistic about the run time I’d get off it, but it can sit idle all day unplugged and still have 100% power. So it looks like it could be useful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Except that it runs iOS 10.4.3 or something and can’t be upgraded and these days many of the apps on the app store don’t support it. Nevertheless I logged into my account and discovered my library from 12 years was still there. So I set to downloading the apps and most of them installed without issue, except to say “install the latest version that is supported” or something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of those programs was Angry Birds and I thought why not? Let’s have some fun, so I installed it and fired it up. I played the first levels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then I was watching a fullscreen ad for some visual chaos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then the game wanted me to watch a video to earn stars or gems or something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then there were things to buy IDK I yeeted that thing off my iPad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And I remembered a YouTube suggestion a few years ago about how the publisher had destroyed the game with aggressive microtransactions. I hadn’t played the game for over a decade and, yep, it was garbage. It’s a game about flinging birds and I expect to be able to fling birds, not dodge ads and predatory monetisation that were not there when I first played the game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My point? I guess I don’t have one except to comment about how corporate greed makes things worse for everyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As for the not throwing anything away bit. I had a copy of the Angry Birds .ipa file from 2013. I had it for 13 years in various places, archived in a games directory. A couple of months ago I deleted that file, possibly the last copy I had because I thought there was little chance I would be owning an iPad any time soon. More fool me, I suppose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There’s a chance that I have another copy somewhere. It must have come from somewhere and, oh. It might have been backed up on an external drive that I’ve since repurposed. Yeah, there’s every possibility that I just deleted the last copy of that file. It would have been nice to load it up and see whether it was any different to what the app store installs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The other bit about not throwing stuff away: Back in 2014 I bought an Otter Box case for my original iPad which meant that the leather front cover with the magnetic attachment became surplus to requirements. I kept that thing for 12 years, banging about in the house and recently had it stuck to a wall in the study, just because. I had no use for it and was once again looking towards tossing it out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I didn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And now my new secondhand iPad has a nice burgundy leather screen cover that hasn’t been near an iPad in 12 years. It pleases me to know that something that might otherwise have been rotting in a landfill still has some use and all I had to do was not discard it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A token to atone for the dozens of PCs and computers and printers and other hardware I have tossed in the trash over the years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Strictly speaking, this particular example worked itself out way back in 2014 but I only became acutely aware of it recently and once again is an example of what happens when your throw something out. Back in 2013 or so I bought an iPad and loaded it up with a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blinkbonnie.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blinkbonnie.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blinkbonnie.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blinkbonnie.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blinkbonnie.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=227"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blinkbonnie.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":228,"href":"https:\/\/blinkbonnie.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227\/revisions\/228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blinkbonnie.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blinkbonnie.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blinkbonnie.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}