Month: November 2024

It’s nice to be able to click “iPhone Mirroring” on my work laptop and quickly bring up my phone. It means things like Signal, personal Slack, even this blog can all be handled from the trackpad and keyboard. All my personal stuff can live on the phone and I don’t have to keep anything on my laptop pertaining to my life outside of work. (I’ll still have Firefox loaded with bookmarks for my soothing background video, obviously, but that’s a lot more innocuous than keeping my personal mail or encrypted messaging and the likes.)

It’s bigger, certainly. Especially with the silicone case on it, which is really the only option to start with. But as much as it pains me to admit it – and it absolutely does – it was time. At some point between late 2017 and early 2020, I transitioned to needing the slightly bigger display, and when I switched back to a smaller device I found myself raising my glasses and holding the phone up to my face a lot closer than I had before. My hope is that with the progressives and a 6.3″ display, that will be less of an issue going forward.

So far, so good. I can do work stuff on it much more readily. I can even plug a USB-C thumb drive into it and do some work. The battery is a lot bigger, and I need to see how well it works to leave Low Power Mode turned off. I’d love to be able to get through an entire day without relying on low power or running out of juice – if I could have this phone top up to only 80% and still be good, like the watch, that would be a big step in the right direction. I still need to figure out the camera – it should theoretically be quicker to bring up and use than ever, once I get the hang of the button, but I don’t have it yet and I missed stuff fumbling for it all weekend. But you can shoot feature films on this thing, in theory, so I can get out of the way and let it do the work.

It does feel like the one device – like the iPad can be saved for shutdown nights when I really need to separate, or kept just for games and video conferencing. Don’t have to tax it any more than I have and it should be able to last another three or four years, maybe longer as just a reader. And if this phone can be made to last for four years – as it should; I don’t need to make another purchase until 2029 on current form – then who knows what will be out there next.

Well, I didn’t think I needed a new phone, but if there are really going to be tariffs and the kinds of economic shenanigans that wreck the economy, better to have all the semi-durable goods in the barn. So now in have an iPhone 16 Pro, with a gargantuan 512 GB of storage. Which is insane. That’s 2000 times as much space as the hard drive of my first Mac thirty years ago. It has 1000 times the RAM. I don’t want to think how much faster the M18Pro processor is than a PowerPC 601.

It’s the same principle as anything these days: the phone is your primary computing device, your window to the internet for better or worse, an extension of your conscience into cyberspace. It pains me to admit it but it’s true: the 6.3″ display is better than the 5.4″ was for work and for reading, and the battery being half again as capacious makes all the difference. I don’t feel I have to stay in low power mode. The size is bigger, which means a lot of two handed use, but it also means it stays out of my front pocket, which reduces the odds of scratching the screen on a pen or a Leatherman or something.

Jury’s out on the slowly-rolling-out Apple Intelligence, although being able to magically clean up a napkin from a picture of my table at Original Pattern was cool (if a little creepy). Hopefully having all this storage means local LLMs will be enough to get the job done, because I’ll be damned if I let some third party run. If they can just make Siri usable, that’s all I really need.

so I guess let’s go. This is my phone of record for the foreseeable future. Who knows what comes next, but if this is going to be The One Device, best to have it be one that can do the job of the iPhone and iPad mini both. We’re going to need all day reading and listening material for a long time.

Well, we had a good run. Well, we had a run, anyway, but something broke in 2009 and the powers that could not cope delivered the country to the billionaires.

Bigotry defending wealth. That’s what a majority of voters chose. That’s what a majority of Americans chose, either deliberately or through indifference. This is just what America is now, and there’s no denying it, and there’s no fixing it in my lifetime. All we can do is try to keep things from getting worse as quickly as they could, protect the ones we love closest to us, and try to endure, and hope to plant the seeds for those who will come after.

It may be a while before I can think of anything else to say, but there’s nothing complicated about this. This is what America is.

And so we come to the end. 48 hours from now, all that can be done, we will have done. And then it’s just the waiting. The only question is what is the result and how long will it take.

A quick result is at least decisive. If it’s obvious for him, then we know what we are as a nation, and it will be time to reckon with spending the rest of our lives fighting a rearguard action against the United States of White Alabama. Which, at least you know. Or she wins decisively enough to call it by Wednesday morning, at which point it’s just about snuffing the dirty tricks as quickly as possible and not letting the enemy do what they tried last time.

If it wears on, that’s bad. Either we slowly bleed to death, or we win but the enemy has a foundation for another four years of saying they were cheated, of saying things were rigged, as if a complicit media didn’t sanewash a decompensating bigot for years and fly interference for the same things they hyped up to force Biden out of the block. And the longer it wears on, the more likely a rigged system tips against us – the House refuses to elect a speaker to create chaos, or the Supreme Court interferes to pick their preferred candidate for the second time in a quarter century. Either way, every day this wears on is bad news.

It should never have come to this. The time to stomp it out was in 2000, when the SCOTUS gave victory to the side that didn’t have the most votes, and we just let that go. The time to stomp it out was 2009, when Republicans laundered themselves into the Tea Party and mainstreamed bigotry as “economic anxiety.” The time to stomp it out was 2016, when Mitch McConnell tore up every last unwritten rule to steal a Supreme Court seat while the Republican Party rolled over for a reality-TV carnival freak. The time to stomp it out was 2021, when there was broken furniture in the Capitol and blood on the steps and Republicans were still willing to admit violent interference with the political process was wrong.

But now? Now we go with what we have. I have never been that positive about the impact of the gender gap, if only because I grew up in a place and culture where the Ladies Against Women could be counted on to be a bulwark against feminism and their own primacy. But if you believe Ann Selzer in Iowa, and extrapolate from there, a whole lot of women – especially those who were alive to see abortion legalized and no-fault divorce granted them and the power to obtain credit in their own names – have seen that the Trumpists can and will take away rights they thought were secure forever. And they have put away everything from their Tabs and Virginia Slims to their TikTok and Stanley mugs to stand in line for hours, to call and text and ballot-cure and doorstep and do what is necessary to defend the radical proposition that women are people.

And on paper, that might be enough. Women vote in higher numbers, and women prefer Harris more than men prefer Trump, and that might be enough to get the job done. Because the more decisive the rejection of Donald John Trump and all his pomps and works and empty promises, the harder we kick this senile bag of racist goo into the swamps from which he crawled, the sooner we can move forward. We can never go back to the way things were. We never should. We go forward. Always.

And that’s the thing: she hasn’t really put a foot wrong. For someone who rode in during July who was only half-expecting this could happen, her campaign has run a tight ship, messaged well, conveyed the signal that you can have life without the main character drama of an egomaniac, that you can have a woman of color in the White House without drama. (Which is not true, through no fault of her own. All the misogyny against Hillary harnessed to all the racism against Obama will combined to form Redneck Voltron for the next four years if she wins. This is not her fault and anyone who employs it should be called on it, not least the New York Times and CNN and the Washington Post and everyone else who trips over themselves to make Phony Stark and JD Vance seem like they represent a mainstream valid opinion.) She has been capable, competent, empathetic and just plain normal and nice, and if thats not good enough for America, that’s a reflection on America, not her.

I wish I could trust my gut. I wish I could trust the American public. But only a truly mentally defective individual would do either in 2024.

We’re about to find out if God really watches over old drunks, little children and the United States of America.