Words On Wednesday

After discussing my  smartwatch experience , it occurred to me I haven’t talked about how I ended up with a Pixel 8 Pro. In July 2023, we went tubing with my brother-in-law. I had recently purchased a wet bag and I was itching to use it. I threw my phone (a Google Pixel 6 at the time) in there, my sister-in-law had her phone, and my brother-in-law had his vape. My wife asks me, “are you sure you don’t want to leave your phone in the truck?” Nah, the wet bag should keep it safe. Remember this, it’s important later. We get maybe halfway down the river and my brother-in-law wants to hit his vape. Cool, no problem. We drift over to a sandbar for a quick break. He gives me his vape, we throw everything back into the wet bag, and we continue on our way. Apparently, when I put everything back into the wet bag, I didn’t capture enough air in it or seal it properly. Once we reach our destination, I pull everything up onto the bank and notice that the wet bag is suspiciously heavy. I open i...

So many people feel pressured to buy a new smartphone every year or two, but is it really necessary? Why can’t we get a mobile device and stick with it? A common rule of thumb known as Moore’s law  will tell you that computer processors double in speed and performance capabilities roughly every 2 years. This pace has held true for decades, and has only begun to slow down in the past 5 years or so. Over roughly the past half of a decade, the progress hasn’t necessarily come to a screeching halt, but it has slowed dramatically. What does this mean for the technology industry? Well, a lot of things, but one thing in particular is that new versions of CPU chips are going to be smaller and smaller improvements over previous versions. Year over year, the latest and greatest won’t be so much greater than last year’s model. On some fronts, this is a good thing. Hopefully, it’ll force the hands of chip manufacturers into reducing prices. How specifically does this affect the mobile te...

It was bound to happen eventually. I missed a Words on Wednesday post. What’s worse is that I missed the first post of the year. Not some random Wednesday in the middle of April. I missed the first Wednesday of the first month of the year. Fail. While I am disappointed that I missed a Wednesday, I do have a good excuse. For one, I was on vacation, without having queued up a post beforehand. Plus, my laptop crapped out while I was out of town (more on that in a moment), so I had no way of writing up a post anyway. I can’t go back and change the fact that I missed a week, but I can at least give you the story of how I broke my laptop (again). Breaking the Laptop To get a break from the day to day grind, we decided to rent a cabin up in the Appalachian mountains to bring in the new year. While I was able to take PTO days from my day job, I still have school and side hustle responsibilities that I always seem to be behind on. As such, I decided to bring my laptop with us and catch up...

It was only a matter of time. After a hiatus of a few months, I’m playing Runescape again. The last time I spoke of Runescape , I had recently started back and was contemplating paying for a membership again. Though the dates are a little fuzzy at this point, I seem to have started back sometime around Thanksgiving 2015. I made the blog post above on January 27, 2016. Though I’m not sure how gradual the process was, I eventually played for the last time on April 19, 2016. I’ll get to how I came up with that date in a moment. While I did stop actively playing the game for a period, I continued to keep up with it. I still followed the official Runescape facebook page, as well as periodically browsed the subreddit forums for Runescape 3 and Old School. As I’ve mentioned time and time again, I do miss the game when I’m not playing it. It’s occasionally nice to talk about it and reminisce about all the fun I’ve had with it through the years. Eventually, one of these channels menti...

For the past 2 years, I’ve used a OnePlus One. That changed on Tuesday, May 30th, when I got the Moto G Plus (5th generation). I got my OnePlus One (abbreviated OPO) on May 12, 2015. I got it because my wife’s Nexus 4 was dying, so she got my Moto G (2nd generation) and I got an upgrade. After shopping around a good bit, the OPO seemed like the best balance of price and performance for me. Broken OnePlus One Even after 2 years, I was and am still pleased with the purchase. The OPO remains to be a solid device. Honestly, I wouldn’t even be upgrading if it weren’t for the damage from general wear and tear on the phone. It’s extremely responsive and powerful, I’ve just dropped it so much and had the kids do so much harm to it that it’s falling apart. As much as I hated to pay for a new phone when I still had a working phone, it was getting more and more to the point that “working” was a stretch. Screen Damage The biggest issue is that the capacitor in the touch screen is dama...