Author Archives: Steve Mays

AirPods vs. “cans”

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Seems like only yesterday wearing a Blue Tooth earbud/mic made you the subject of derision. A techno-hipster intent on impressing everyone with his hands-free phone calls.

Fast-forward to the Apple AirPods, which also got you some snickers. A lot for snickers. But it turns out AirPods work pretty well and I started seeing them everywhere. The FedEx guy. The crew chief that oversaw our new roof. The guy that mows our yard (yeah, yeah).

The plague hits and Zoom becomes a generic term (“I was zooming all day”). And those TV “at home” interviews? Lots of AirPods. So many that when I see someone wear a big old set of cans I think, poor dweeb.

Like these two guys being interviewed by Bill Maher. I know, I know… superior audio quality!

iPhone 11

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The battery on my iPhone XS wasn’t holding a charge (I’ve had it a couple of years) so I popped for an iPhone 11 and it arrived yesterday. It feels strange to all them phones given all the other things we do with them. Mine is a camera first and somewhere near the bottom of the list is PHONE.

Barb has had one for a while and the photos she has taken are beautiful so I was eager to play with this feature. My friend George spoke glowingly of the photos he had gotten with the latest iPhone’s Night Mode. If I understand correctly, the phone takes three photos and magically combines them to come up with the best image. The photos below were just “point and shoot” on my part. I’ll probably never get around to researching and fulling understanding (or using) the many features of my new camera/phone.


First photo above using this new feature, the second photo not.
I was in San Francisco attending MacWorld (first and last time) when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. I didn’t understand or appreciate what a big deal it would be. I didn’t get one that first year but broke down a year later. And have had one ever since.
Here are a couple of more photos from yesterday.


I keep telling myself the iPhone I have is good enough. More than good enough, and I don’t need the latest and greatest. But look at those photos!

For want of a nail…

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The new roof is on and the crew did a nice job of cleaning up. They made a couple of sweeps with their big magnets, looking for stray nails. And they got most of them, but I did a sweep with my little magnet stick (just our chat driveway) and found some they missed. To be expected. And in fairness, a few of these were there before they did the roof.

Hard. Hot. Dangerous.

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The roof of our house was one of thousands that got damaged by a bad-ass hail storm back in March. A crew is coming Monday to make the repairs and a couple of hard working gents showed up today to get things ready.

Wonder how they got the shingles up on the roof before someone came up with the conveyor belt. Whatever they pay these guys, it isn’t enough.

UPDATE (17aug20): The pounding you hear is crew of hard-working men putting a new roof on our house.

Since the March hail storm, thousands of homes in this area have had new roofs installed and I’ve been wondering where the old shingles went. Either the land fill or an asphalt recycling place. For a smaller house like ours, the land fill would charge about $250 and the recycling place about $175, but they won’t take a load if there’s trash mixed in. A larger home would cost $350 and $250 respectively. (numbers are approximate)

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I’ve gone back and forth on comments since I started blogging in February 2002. When I remember I disable them but rarely get any comments on posts where I forget. We don’t get a lot of visitors here but that’s always been fine by me. One of my favorite bloggers, Dave Winer, has what I consider the best approach to comments.

Start a blog, I advise, and say what you have to say and link to my post. Of course what they really wanted was to use my flow to (very often) zing me personally in some way. I consider that spam. Or hijacking. It gets so insidious so quickly that I haven’t had comments here for any duration for many years. It starts off collegial, but quickly devolves into abuse as the trolls take over.

I’ve attempted to disable all comments from previous posts but haven’t checked to see if that worked.