Thursday, June 12, 2025

This is the fifty-sixth installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season. June is Accordion Awareness Month, so increase your awareness by listening to some of my favorite artists and soundtracks.

I was very excited about Kynseed when it was first announced, but never had the chance to play it during its lengthy Early Access period. It took so long to make the game that they actually decided to get a completely different soundtrack before the final release. I haven’t been able to find the new one anywhere, but there’s really no need since the Early Access version is absolutely fantastic. Fun Fact: For over a year I was the only person who had bought the album on Bandcamp. Then the artist followed me on Twitter shortly afterwards. Neat!

Today is NOT an Ember Day! For some reason they are only on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday of each week. So don’t fast and abstain today in preparation for the next two days. If you want.

Since I don’t have a smartphone, I rely on lots of other devices to navigate each day. One of the most important devices I use to navigate is a standalone GPS in the car. I didn’t really need one when we lived in Idaho, being so familiar with the area that I had lived in for 30 years, only needing written or verbal directions for most everywhere I needed to go.

Moving across the country, however, required a different solution, so I got the base model Garmin Drive 52, which not only got me across five states in four days, but also helped immensely once we got here.

However, the poor thing has been showing its age lately, being nearly five years old (in electronics years, that’s around eighty-five), and periodically refused to route me somewhere even when it wasn’t very far away and I’d been there before. Then on a recent trip to Louisville, it claimed I was driving in the middle of the Ohio River and couldn’t tell me which exit to take from the riverbank. Fortunately my ever-wise and patient wife had her phone already navigating to the same place, so there was minimal disruption.

So, time to get a new one, right? Well, my wife was concerned that this might just happen again, and wanted me to look into any other models by other companies. So I found a “Best Car GPS 2025” article, and every one in the list was a Garmin. Huh?

As it turns out, people’s reliance on their smartphones for navigation has meant that Magellan, TomTom, and I couldn’t even find another company have all stopped making and selling devices for the US market, and Garmin is the only one left. Wait, isn’t that a monopoly? I guess not, since the other companies all left willingly. It’s also a little concerning since what happens if the company ever goes under? I’d be left with zero options at that point.

Except, of course, for a smartphone. There’s a monopoly of sorts there as well, since 99% of people use Google Maps, despite there being alternatives. One of the major competitors in the software navigation space is Here Maps, which ironically is what Garmin uses for all of its consumer models. So it’s all connected, in the end.