Yesterday during the evening I started to remove a few applications from my Google Pixel 5 smartphone. That effort started as a basic cleanup of a few applications and soon became a bit more intense. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are all now removed from my smartphone. I still have access to them from a browser at my desk computer or my Chromebook. However, they are now distinctly less accessible. I kept the communication applications loaded on my phone for now. At some point in the future, those applications might very well be the next wave of things that are going to get purged from my smartphone. For the next few days I’m going to just remove an application a day like a digital game of survivor. Generally applications get downloaded and are allowed to just sort of stay forever. 

Over the last few months the two applications I probably use the most are Pandora for streaming music and Google Podcasts. I know that people running Pandora would really like me to use it for Podcasts instead. They even changed the application byline to reflect that it is a music and podcast application. Moving my favorite Podcasts over would be pretty easy. In no particular order that would involve subscribing to the following: Sway, Bourbon Pursuit, Decoder, The MLOps Podcast, The New Yorker Radio Hour, How you livin j Piven, The Daily, Tomorrow. Lex Fridman, The Wan Show, Literally! With Rob Lowe, FiveThirtyEight Politics, Machine Learning Street Talk, and This week in Google. You can try to figure out a pattern from that mix of subscriptions. You won’t really find one as the content I elect consume is generally based on my mood intersecting with the topic they are covering. I’ll scroll along until I find something that catches my attention. 

It took me about 5 minutes to “collect” all the podcasts mentioned above using the Pandora website. Under the banner of collected within the Pandora website you can see all the podcasts. A good chunk of the podcasts that I listen to were either not on Pandora or hard to find. I even had to submit my own podcast, “The Lindahl Letter,” which in theory should arrive in 4-6 weeks on Pandora. I’m not sure actually switching over to Pandora for podcasts is going to be a possible thing to do in practice. A lot of the technology related podcasts that I listen to on a regular basis were not in the catalog of things to be collected on Pandora. I’ll give the application a try during my walking efforts over the next four weeks, but it may not work out and I’ll have to switch back over to using Google Podcasts as a primary driver.