My old OnePlus 5 battery started giving out and I’d been a OnePlus person for years, so it wasn’t a hard sell to me in principle to get an updated version of it. However when I actually had it in my hands and read up on what they’d done to the software, the direction OxygenOS had gone after the merge with Oppo’s ColorOS, and it wasn’t the comforting OS I thought I was buying. I sent it back, and ended up with a Samsung S24+, and the reason I settled on it wasn’t the camera or the screen, it was that Samsung had put a number on how long they’d keep updating it: seven years of OS and security updates, committed from January 2024, which is when the S24 line launched, a number I’d looked up before I bought it and the actual deciding factor. ...

I was listening to the Era Vulgaris album before a Queens of the Stone Age gig, and it put me back in Birmingham between finishing secondary school and starting university. The technology I had then was a 17-inch gaming laptop running Vista, and I chose it over a desktop because I wanted something I could take with me. (A possible error given how heavy it was) It came to the US with me for my second year of university in 2008, and once I’d bought some cheap speakers it was the entire setup for the year, because the screen was big enough that I didn’t need anything else. Before that I’d never had my own machine at all, I shared a PC with my brother. ...

My old Windows laptop started shutting itself down in the London flat during one of the Covid heatwaves. It had enough CPU for what I was asking it to do, Windows still booted and the applications still opened, but the machine could not keep itself inside its thermal limits in the room. Cleaning the fans and repasting the CPU were the fixes that still felt mechanical, the sort of thing you could do with a small screwdriver, a tube of thermal paste and the belief that dust or bad contact was the problem. ThrottleStop came after that, because by then I was trying to get more control over the Dell’s CPU throttling and power behaviour when it hit its limits, before it decided the situation was unsafe and shut itself down. The cooling pad helped a bit, but only in the way extra airflow helps when the air being pushed around is already too warm. ...

Nobody defers a hardware refresh because they think the replacement will be cheaper later, they defer it because the thing still works and there’s never quite a reason to spend the money. That used to be a free position to hold. I keep deciding not to replace my home machine, the same 2013 i5-4670K I wrote about when I couldn’t containerise my home server, and it still runs everything I ask of it, which is exactly why spending anything on it feels hard to justify. What’s changed since I last wrote about it is that the floor under the replacement is rising while I sit here not making the decision. ...

A week with a voice-first keyboard still came down to where voice worked and where typing took over. Most voice typing keyboards either transcribe everything you say and leave you to tidy it up, or they do the cleanup in the cloud. The interesting fork is the one that does the cleanup on the device, where the audio never leaves the phone and there is nothing on the other end to send it to. Yaps is one of the few that takes that fork, it is about three weeks old, it was built by one person, and I used it as my only keyboard for a week to see what living with it was actually like. ...

My Mac went in for a screen repair last week, a burn-in issue known on the 2024 model, so I pulled my old Windows laptop off the shelf. It was my workhorse before the Mac, and being back on it properly meant I could verify the experience from the Windows side, which mattered given I’m developing something their users will be testing. The repair was the forcing function: old Windows laptop back into daily use, not as a nostalgia exercise but as the machine I actually had. ...

Hardware gets kept because it runs what it’s always run, and the refresh conversation gets deferred because nothing appears broken. The ceiling only shows up when someone tries to do something new on top of it. I had that exact experience last Saturday trying to containerise the apps on my home server. The Plan I’ve been wanting to use containers more outside of just reading about them, so running them at home on something real was the obvious next step. Set up a git repo for version control, VS Code as the editor, and OpenAI’s Codex to handle the agentic coding tasks directly on the machine, so I had everything in place to move quickly on something I hadn’t done before. The plan was to start with one small component and see how it handled it before doing anything else. ...