My long time friends might be surprised about that. At one point I had to have the newest items.
I came to the realization that these things are tools. I simply need them to "just work".
I am fortunate that I have a ready supply of these "older" electronics come through my sticky little fingers.
I am using 5 year old laptops running Debian Linux and they just work. As in Super Fast.
I giggle at the people standing in a line at the gadget stores before dawn. Sure, that's a bit rude but... come on. It is manufactured demand. Perhaps "manufacturing demand" might be the point.
I am using a phone that is 4 versions old right now. I hate the thing because the Apple Walled Garden concept is faulty. At least it is faulty to me.
I resent being told that I must back my phone up, and pay them for the privilege because they are giving me a "generous" 5GB of space, while the phone has 128GB on it. Let me back the damn thing up to my own computers, or somewhere else, and step the hell off.
Every time I try to get something off the phone, I have to start a third party program to get my photos off the thing. It is a computer. If I plug it into another computer, it should come up reliably as a drive. It does not every time, and it gets confused.
Anti-Apple rant aside, the newer versions are evolutionary and not revolutionary.
Slightly better camera, slightly better speakers, slightly more spyware I assume.
I don't trust them.
More important I use the thing for a few very important, to me, items.
Photography. Most of the pictures on this blog are taken by me, for my own entertainment. Occasionally I'll grab something from elsewhere. I try to remember to attribute the original person but I do forget. Those pictures get big fast. I have to get the third party software started, bring them into a browser, cut, paste, annotate them with a title and my URL and post them. The camera does get better, but it tends to be a few steps behind the state of the art for the time the phone was put out.
Athletics. Once upon a time, I was "Picked Last" for sports. I was kid who had no clue about "ball sports". I still am not good at those. Doesn't matter, I had a resting heart rate of 50 yesterday and I regularly bicycle and inline skate at a heart rate above my theoretical maximum for my age. My personal motto is "Lead, Follow, or Get Out Of The Way". I will help you along, and give you information on nutrition and training to get to my level. For my age bracket, I am in the 99% percentile for inline skating - my goal is 25,000 miles in my career and at 24645 miles, I am very close. Once around the world on Inline Skates.
So I monitor my heart rate, distance, and speed. Assertively. The phone does help. In order for it to help I measure out the trail on the phone via GPS. It tells me the trail is 4.5 miles. I verify that aggressively via mapping software and obsessively measure that out.
Entertainment. Music. I have a data plan that lets me listen to international music for unlimited time. I am also using it to watch video internationally in two languages. News as well. I see nothing wrong with walking the dog an hour and a half before dawn listening to the CBC for news bulletins and switching to BBC for in depth coverage.
When I was given a New To Me phone, it was because my old one had a battery in it that was wearing out. I could have had the battery replaced, but the New To Me phone had a brand spanking new battery with "96% health". More importantly it is slightly larger and a number of generations newer. Faster processor, although frankly, I did not notice that. Once upon a time I had an android phone that I could snap the battery in and out, and repaired the daylights out of it. Tech is not getting better, it's getting more annoying to maintain.
I am in the process of migrating onto that phone. It means I have to proofread the thing and make sure that everything I depend on works.
I listened to my preferred music which is surprisingly diverse. Classical, Classic Disco, Happy Hardcore, and EDM as well as Norteño from Mexico, and news outlets in 5 different countries. I could do that from my chair, and did.
Then I had to workout "in parallel". I had once been given a New To Me phone that had a bad GPS. It told me that the 2 mile walk I had with the dog was actually 1.9 miles, roughly. I knew better. But I also knew that phone was damaged.
Tuesday I had a workout on the bike. Along with the GPS enabled sport watch, the GPS enabled bike computer, and the GPS enabled phone, I had the second phone with me telling me where I was in a woman's voice to let me know it wasn't the main phone which was in a man's voice.
The differences were .01 mile over a basis of 27.18 miles. 52 feet or less than the distance across the front of the house, and I can live with that.
Good workout Tuesday as well, but I won't strain my shoulder patting myself on the back.
So the New To Me phone seems to pass the athletics test. The only thing I need to do is try a different sport and see how the walk is with Mr Dog.
Some folks are less demanding, they just slide it out of the box, charge it up, and shrug because it works. Me... nothing is simple.
Mind you, yesterday? I was taking my old daily driver laptop with a bad USB C power port apart. I used the monitor to repair a laptop that was dropped and shattered the screen, the hard drive was swapped, and it was tested to be completely functional.
Yes, Ramblingmoose runs on old stuff.
Now! Let me tell you about my 23 year old car!
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