Wednesday, August 07, 2013

The best way to keep your phone charged is not to use your phone?

My iPhone was driving me crazy. The battery just wasn’t lasting unless I turned everything off, but what’s the point of a smartphone without location services and GPS? I finally gave up and bought a Mophie case with an external battery; to demonstrate how much I needed it, I couldn’t get the Apple Store app to work correctly so that I could just point at it and walk out with it, because location services were turned off for that app. Jeesh. If that’s the way things are, I might as well go back to a Touch. Anyhow, I charged the Mophie up last night and now I’m putting it through its paces to see how long it takes to drain. It does weigh more than a naked phone, needless to say, but not so much that it’s terribly bothersome. Whether I’ll use it all the time or just occasionally remains to be seen. Either way, I feel better having technology that I can use at its limit, rather than limiting how I use my technology. As I said, if it’s not doing what it’s supposed to do, what’s the point?

[24 hours later]

Used it all day, including a couple of hours of Bluetooth, all preferred location services set on stun, etc., etc. All in all, a typical day. This morning, when I checked, I was finally off the Mophie backup and into the iPhone battery (whieh said 98%). In other words, the Mophie can get me through anything I throw at it, which juice to spare. Excellent. I probably won't use it on a normal working day, because the extra weight is, well, extra weight, but weekends and debate trips? Moph it is!

Meanwhile, JV, Kaz and I are beginning to explore the tabroom tabbing software (which I have to admit sounds redundant). We got off with a misfire Monday, stupidly looking for the application in all the wrong places, but CP, who is too busy planning his trip to London to reclaim the family duchy* to bother with the likes of us, found a minute to set us straight. And so, we're off. I'll report on progress as I see it. If you're wondering why we're doing this at all, given that we have a system that theoretically works already, well, first of all, TRPC is short for this world at the level of Basic being able to run on modern Windows systems. And as we move to MJP pretty much everywhere, CP claims that the new system works much better than what we're doing now, which is at an average tournament of about 100, TRPC finds judges for 75% of them and we have to manually do the rest. As he says, a computer can juggle numbers better than we can, provided the computer is set up right. Add to this the intriguing bells and whistles of online balloting and it's a gimme. So while we are, like all users, fearful of change, we are nonetheless gung-ho about the benefits of the change.

Oh, yeah. I was reading The Second Sex but got interrupted by the new Bertie and Jeeves pastiche. I'll bet that happens to de Beauvoir fans all the time. I'll get back to her as soon as Jeeves gets Bertie out of all that trouble he inevitably gets into. (More importantly, CLG was right: TSS is the book to recommend as a starting point for feminism.)


*CP's family duchy is actually in France, I think, but let's face it. France, England, they're all Europe, right? What difference does it make?

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