Words On Wednesday

I’ve long said that I don’t really like laptops because they don’t seem to last long, and they are difficult or impossible to upgrade. One company is trying to change that. A coworker introduced me to the  Framework laptop . I had recently purchased my  Surface Pro 7 , but I was immediately intrigued. I’ve always gone budget tier with laptops, mostly because I treat them as almost disposable. It’s going to break down and become obsolete pretty soon anyway, and there’s no sense in paying a lot for one if my best option is going to be replacing it with a new model anyway. My Surface was a tentative bet on more premium lasting a little longer, but there still aren’t many ways you can upgrade it besides swapping out the solid state drive. The master plan of Framework is a device that is modular. You pop open the case with the provided tool and switch components as necessary. Need more RAM? Pop in a larger chip. Processor isn’t fast enough, or you’re working with a model that’s a f...

Some life lessons come pretty easily, but others require a little bit of painful personal experience before we catch on. Normally, I’m pretty quick on the uptake for a lot of lessons. Touch something hot, you get burned. What goes up must come down. I may not have a lot of common sense, but I have enough to realize the basic stuff without a lot of difficulty. Even caution is normally something that comes natural to me. I do a whole lot of things “just in case.” Data backups, an extra layer of padding, and 911 already dialed on my phone are just a few of the things I’ve done because I know things don’t always go as planned. One specific example is the floaty back door for my GoPro. This floatation device ensures that if you lose a grip on the camera in water, it will float to the surface. If I’m getting in water any deeper than a swimming pool, I’m using the floaty back door. I don’t care if it’s just a few shots, I know how clumsy I am, and I know that it’s safer to use a flotation dev...