14 January: The phone that I bought on 6 January got a system update yesterday, oddly enough, and then it stopped doing data, similarly as what happened with my other two recently bought phones. Yes, I’ve just verified it. It’s not the SIM card, it’s the phone. Yes, I’ve reset it.

That is, the temporary SIM card (for a different network) that I used after my other SIM cards suddenly stopped working, that got activated remotely by a woman whose voice sounded like that of the woman in the flat below me (coincidence or voice cloning?) and who asked me a lot of questions such as where I had bought the SIM card and who had to call me back in order to activate the card and who told me at least twice that if I didn’t want to auto-top-up, even though I had no payment method registered, I had to log in on the day before the credit ran out, ran out of credit yesterday. After that, the phone stopped going online, but the system software update came first.

(During the call, she also kept asking me to go online, which I obviously couldn’t.)

I now have 5 phones, none of which are fully functional. These 5 phones can hold 8 SIM cards. When you set up these phones, the three later ones, it says that the phone network operator, phone manufacturer and Google can force updates onto the phones, whether you like it or not. You can’t stop these “updates”. This offers ill-willing folks a perfect avenue to mess with your phone.

Or is this all related to the phone make, somehow? I’ll explore that next. (Nope, can’t find anything on that.) (Will try something else next.)

A thought… Could it be some anti-crime or counter-terrorism thing that I am running into? Because I (am forced to) have so many different phones and SIM cards? And/or so many different gmail addresses? Or do they think I am a conspiracy nut because the utterly bat-shit-crazy stuff that goes on in Portsmouth indeed is beyond belief?

Remember, however, that several of my earlier phones actually got “fried” because of all the hacking and that it’s also happened that my phone – one of the ones I no longer have – no longer connected to the nearest cellphone tower for a while. I had to leave the flat and walk into Lake Road or into Fratton Road beyond Lake Road. That was at the end of 2016.

(See below; I’ve unsuccessfully tried to get wired broadband now to get around this nonsense.)

Health-wise, I am definitely starting to do a lot better. (Jeez, I’m in bad shape though. I really need to catch up on exercise. That’s what I am doing and I am also trying to eat as healthy as possible.)

Believe it or not, I think the locals briefly stopped the walkalator (escalator without steps) at the Fratton Park Tesco, to see if I would take the stairs, going up. Yes, I had been avoiding them for a little while, earlier, but not this time.

However, I now seem to have yet another phone that is no longer working properly. That’s 3 newly bought smartphones, one of which I only just bought! I’ll explore this further tomorrow. Not sure yet what exactly is going on, but it looks like none of my recently bought smartphones are still capable of going online, of doing data, via a SIM card.

Because of the recent hiccups, I largely stopped using apps altogether. I not longer have a phone that really does apps, after all.

I just used an old phone to which I moved one of my older SIM cards to top up. (I transferred that number to a new card in September.) I then tried to text my main number to see if that number at least is still active. I saw the text message come in on that smartphone and then it disappeared into thin air, just like has been happening with e-mails too, for years, and on various pieces of equipment.

I used to see e-mails come in, on phones that I don’t even have any longer, and then they’d disappear. They’d simply disappear. I couldn’t see them on my computer either.

Other e-mails I get twice, such as this one about housing law today. Twice, okay, that happens. This is not a screenshot, by the way. This image, that was the entire e-mail. No link. It came from Lime Legal. (Yes, housing law. I signed up to their e-mails years ago.) It’s genuine. I am supposed to get one e-mail a week from them. (These days, it seems to be mainly about webinars like this one.)

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Some e-mails, however, I get ten times; see below. (That’s a totally different e-mail address and provider, viewed in Thunderbird.) The original message, from November, also oddly enough talked about a deadline of 31 OCTOBER. Likely, a genuine mistake.

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This afternoon, my computer froze at the start of a Zoom meeting. When I threw the power off the computer, because I had to, someone in the room under me coincidentally loudly exclaimed surprise, at the same time. I rebooted and all was fine after that.

A week or so ago, I tried to sign up to something, and could not receive the confirmation e-mail.

When I tried to sign up to wired broadband some time ago, hoping to put a stop to this mess, I got an error message. That’s like what used to happen when I tried to get a different wired broadband electricity provider some years ago at this address, also when I tried a computer at the library. The companies can’t find my address or something and tell me that an unexpected error has happened or whatever. I paid TalkTalk for one year in advance and still couldn’t get their broadband.

It probably also happens a little too often – hard to tell – that I can’t get into Zoom meetings. Once, I got an e-mail after I’d signed up that literally said something like “to join this webinar, click the link somewhere in this message” and there was none, of course. No link.)

Midnight: my harddisk is way way way too busy. (Then the computer froze and I had to flip the power switch again.)