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FOUR SEASONS BREEZE | MAY 2026 17 By Steve Beno Call me pathetic. It's true I write a monthly column on apps, but does that mean my life is structured around them? Well, that appears to be the case. I have 28 apps on the main screen of my phone, and every morning, truly, every morning, the first thing I do is look at nine of them. OK, the third thing. First, I weigh myself. Second, I … you know. Then back in bed with my phone. By the way, I charge my phone next to my bed. But I set it to Do Not Disturb. Family members know that between 8 pm and 6 am, emergency calls should be made to my --- aha. What do I call this other line? For the almost 20 years we've been living in our home, we've had a "landline." Technically, this was never a true landline. I was in the telephone business for decades. And over the years, I installed lots of telephone cable. Ages ago I installed 25-pair cable to every room in a house so my customers could access multiple phone lines on six-button business-type phones. Keep in mind that for 40 years I worked for very rich people. In fact, when asked what I do for a living, I often said, "I crawl under rich peoples' houses." Later, we switched to four-pair cable for electronic phones. Anyway, those phone lines ultimately connected to actual two wires for each phone line that fed all the way from a central telephone station to the home. (They used to call them CO lines because they connected directly to the Central Office.) That was never the case for Four Seasons. From the beginning, our phone lines were supplied electronically over coaxal or fiber optic cables. So, my non-cellular lines was never a landline. It was more properly called a house line. But now I've cut the cable, and my house line is actually a cellular line on a single dedicated phone, and its number is my night line. Instead of paying $25 a month to Spectrum, I pay $10 a month to Verizon. And I paid $70 for a used Android phone in surprisingly good condition that now almost never gets used. I'll spare you the story of how it did in fact get used when tying two tech support people helping to solve an internet problem that consumed the better part of a day. Back to my app life. Every morning, I use Messages, Calendar, Planet Finder (I usually get up at 5 am), Weather, Sunset & Rise, Kindle (to sync with my actual Kindle), Sports, Mail, and Overcast (my podcast app of choice). A little after 7 am, I check Stocks. Three days a week when I ride my bike, I use Garmin Connect and Garmin Varia apps. Throughout the day, I'll use Overcast, play a game on Number Chain, ask a question on ChatGPT, read on Kindle, check ESPN for sports news, make a classical music selection on Music, and set up a recording on the DirecTV app. Interestingly, the app I don't use very much is Phone. I do have the New York Times app on my phone but not on the home screen since twice a day I get the NYT news emails. At the bottom of the morning email is a link to Spelling Bee, which causes me to use the Safari app. You may have noticed an absence of a certain popular category of apps. I'm simply not into social media. So, Tik Tok, Facebook, X/ Twitter, play no part in my life. I know I'm missing out on what has become a major inf luence in the lives of the majority of Americans. So be it. And lest you think I'm solely tied to my phone for news, every morning I read the sadly deteriorating LA Times and the still quite good Riverside Press Enterprise. So, am I pathetic? I'll let you be the judge of that. One thing you can't say is that this guy (me) isn't dedicated to the subject on which he writes regularly. If you use an app you'd like to share with others, let me know at steve.benoff@verizon.net. THERE'S AN APP FOR THAT! Using the "phone feature" of the phone is soooo last century

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