Pocketables

At my house I have two smart-managed heating and cooling devices. One is my Nest thermostat controlled central unit which is named “hallway” and the other is a split unit for the upstairs (named “Upstairs Theremostat”) because there’s just no way with the walls to get any sort of airflow up there. Being as it’s spring / dead of winter / spring lately there’s been a lot of turning the heat on, off, and occasionally the AC on.

The US Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Apple over the practice of making competing apps and platform experiences worse. Some of the highlights include limiting the functionality of non-Apple smartwatches on iOS and making an Apple Watch platform dependent meaning it’s mostly junk if you leave the Mac World. There’s also the severe limiting of messaging integration and continual measures to keep other devices out of the walled garden that is iPhone messaging.

My oldest has one of my refurbished phones (Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra 5g) on a Mint plan. We’d basically gotten it after back to back school lockdowns where we ended up unable to get a vehicle into sight of the school during pickup times post terrorist event, and yeah. Thanks world. tl;dr – settings, notifications, app notifications, locate messages, turn slider to on. Anyway.

Fitbit By Google got a brand upgrade to Google Fitbit, and it appears they did some work to the site to make it quite a bit more appealing. Notable overlooks however are that the food logging page still at 3 years 3 months and 18 days since the final discontinuation of Adobe Flash, is still embedding it.

The Snapmount 2.0 is a magnetic mounting disk with a unique reusable adhesive surface that can be used again and again with the occasional maintenance of wiping off debris with a wet cloth.

During all of the health fun I also was left with a bed that next to impossible to sleep in unless the room was freezing when my Ooler Sleep System threw the dreaded F2 error and shut off. It would last a little while and give hope with everything I tried (power cycling, hitting the hidden reset switch, chanting various curses at it,) but it would never run more than a few minutes, just enough to chill the bed a bit.

battery pack,  Magsafe,  qi charger,  wireless charger The TORRAS Magsafe Battery pack is a magnetically attached battery pack that offers wireless charging at 2.22 amps according to the spec sheet. It features 15 Watt wireless charging along with the ability to power via USB C also at 20 Watts. It claims to be able to charge an iPhone 15 Max 1.5 times with the 10,000, and presumably 75% with the 5000mAh version.

I’m going to gripe about the Vizio implementation of YouTube today. For those feint of heart you might want to step out as I’m going to point out how your grandparents are getting stuck in cult programming. I will note in testing this was both the Vizio and Roku implementations, but I don’t feel that my time glancing at the menu and available options on the Roku really counts as thoroughly testing that it’s exactly the same, so that’s an assumption.

In the past I’ve been threatened with fake DMCA requests, received letters from faux law firms, but this time one of my unfavorable reviews has gotten a DDOS attack on the site. As I just got out of some serious thoracic surgery and am home recovering (which is the reason for nearly two weeks of no content,) the news that I had 12,000 visitors in a 20 minute span (if I’m reading this correctly) should have been cause for elation… but no, someone’s attempting to bring the site down.

I’m going to keep this pretty short. I survived. Surgery to remove a tumor ended up taking out the thymus, unexpected heart operation, vein capping, unexpected lung operation, and two lymph nodes. I am home, sitting up, able to walk after 5 days in the hospital with multiple tubes coming out of me to drain. Wired shut with a plastic/metal combo to keep my chest in place while it heals.