throwing out old electronics
If some electronic I own works, does the job it's supposed to do and isn't wrecked, I hang on to it; this is why I still have a pair of small Radio Shack calculators (originally from a 3-pack, cat. no 65-1009 for those interested). These things are probably 25 years old if not older and could be late '90s models for all I know. The only thing each needed was one battery replacement. Both of them look almost new and still work perfectly.
Some people get bit by the nostalgia bug with old broken electronics, but I don't. I prefer the electronics in my life to not just work but also be functional, usable, practical, and reliable. If an electronic I have doesn't meet those conditions, even if it's in good condition, it gets thrown out.
Such is the case with four Garmin screens I just binned. A gray-sticker serial Garmin nuvi 200, a gray-sticker serial Garmin nuvi 250W, Garmin StreetPilot i3, and Garmin StreetPilot i5. All of those are in the trash because none of them can acquire a GPS signal quickly anymore, which makes them completely unusable. And what mean by quickly is a GPS signal acquired and ready-to-use in under 2 minutes. For any one of those four screens, the wait time for possibly acquiring a GPS signal is 20 minutes to an hour, and that's not an exaggeration. In comparison, my Garmin Drive 53 has a GPS signal acquired, locked and ready-to-use in around 20 seconds, and that's if it's having a bad day. It's usually the case where the GPS signal is acquired and ready in fewer than 10 seconds after power-on.
I also just threw out a laptop that was given to me some time ago, a purple HP Stream back from the Windows 8 era. It was in great shape, but the problem was that the primary storage was soldered to the board and only 4GB. Not upgradable at all. Yeah, I could technically install a small Linux distro on it like a minimal Xubuntu or something smaller, but it's not worth the bother since the on-board video could barely play full screen 720p video, never mind 1080p. It is a shame because the laptop was only lightly used with a great monitor that was easy on the eyes, but it's slow, can't be upgraded, can't even be used as a media player, so... in the trash it went. A lot of laptops from years ago can be saved and repurposed with a lightweight Linux, but not that one.
And I also just binned an 8GB microSD memory card. I beat the crap out of that thing with a ton of file writes and it started spitting back file copy errors, so in the trash that went. While I am very well aware how much microSD cards are at the moment, I was okay binning that one because I have a small pile of barely-used 32GB's I've acquired over the years (they were all for Garmin screens) that are kept in a static-free bag.
Broken electronics crap is definitely something I don't need in my life, and I'm not afraid to throw stuff out when it breaks or just stops working.
pilot's time
Another Halloween has passed. What's my favorite Halloween movie of all time? Sleepy Hollow, no question. That whole movie is a work of art. And it's interesting Christopher Walken is in it but doesn't have a single word of spoken dialogue.
Also, being it's November, daylight savings time is now "off" and back to standard daylight time.
It would be nice if daylight savings would go away along with AM/PM and time zones altogether. The pilot's way of time (UTC a.k.a. Zulu or GMT in 24-hour style) would be far easier to deal with.
I'm not saying "there oughta be a law", but if it were decreed that the United States no longer recognizes daylight savings time, time zones nor AM/PM whatsoever, I'd applaud that decision. It won't happen, but it'd be nice if it did.
If I wanted to, I could set all my clocks to UTC, even including my phone. The problem is that while I'd be observing UTC, nobody else would. It's not like my dentist would switch over the way they schedule appointments just for me and say "Show up at X date 15:30 for your next cleaning". That's not happening.
Here's why AM/PM sucks:
Most of the time it's not a problem, except at dusk. I have had it happen a handful of times where I'll nap in the afternoon, such as on a weekend, then wake up a few hours later just when the sun is setting. I wake up, look at my watch, it shows 7 o'clock, I think it's 7am. Wrong. It's 7pm. It's the light outside from dusk that tricks me where I think it's dawn when it's not.
When I remember to, with a single button press I can switch my watch to 24-hour time (a nice feature of the WS1600H model). 7:00pm on the watch shows as 19:00, and that instantly tells me it's evening. But again, when I remember to. I usually don't.
So I deal with daylight savings, time zones and AM/PM. Oh well, such is life.
i am not an acoustic guitar guy, but could be
In August I had acquired a classical guitar, but said that I didn't know if the classical was right for me.
It's not. I sold it. It wasn't that particular guitar that was the problem, but rather that I couldn't get along with it even after a proper setup and string change. Although I will say the D'Addario Pro Arte EJ43 string set felt nice.
Over the years, I've tried getting along with acoustic guitars, and none of them have ever worked out.
But one might, when outfitted with the right strings.
Something that exists now that didn't years ago is super light acoustic strings. Specifically, D'Addario EJ23 (9-45 gauge), which I think is as light as it gets for a proper acoustic string set.
And as for the acoustic that might actually work for me, it could be the Fender Acoustasonic Jazzmaster. The Jazzmaster body is purposely designed first as a sit-down shape, the neck is further out which is actually better for comfort, and the thin body with forearm contour means my right arm has a comfortable place to rest.
That Acoustasonic Jazzmaster with the EJ23 string set might be the perfect combo. For me, that is.
I have played an Acoustasonic, but not in the Jazzmaster shape just yet. It is on my list to try one at some point.
enthusiastically annoyed
What does AI voice sound like? It's corpo-speak taken to its final form. Imagine taking the accent-less, very deliberate and very formulaic speech of a television news anchor, then chuck in some Hollywood actor-speak like you would hear in a movie preview, then make it "peppy", "upbeat" and the dreaded R-word, "relatable". Mix it all together, and that slop you hear is AI voice. Put more simply, the sound of AI voice is enthusiastically annoyed.
What's the latest to get infested with this trash? Google Maps. The default voice you get now is that enthusiastically annoyed AI slop voice, complete with vocal fry to be "relatable". Because as y'know, everyone just loves vocal fry.
Shit like this is what makes people run right back to Garmin navigators. Again. It could be a Drive 53, Drive 7.1, whatever. It could even be a cheap old nuvi 54LM off eBay. Get the screen, stuff a 8GB microSD memory card in there to fit modern map data, update the maps with Garmin Express and off you go.
And yeah, I said again. Every so often, phone navigation introduces something so irritating and so annoying that a large swath of people just flat out stop using it. This time around, it's the AI slop voice.
Does Garmin get it perfect with their voices? No, of course not. The biggest complaint by most people is that they sound "computery". However, I'll take computery over enthusiastically annoyed every time. If that AI slop voice was in my navigation, that would put me off enough to where I wouldn't even use it. I absolutely do not want some peppy-yet-irritated, upbeat-yet-condescending vocal fried voice giving me navigation instructions.
I have had my battles with annoying navigation voices
On the phone, I never found a voice that worked, and this was even before AI. For nav apps with prerecorded voices, they were all too grating and/or distorted and/or spoke too fast or too slow. For TTS, the distortion at least wasn't there, but speed of speech was never quite right, and tone was either over-computery to the point of sounding robotic or too nasal. Even more so than a Garmin TTS version 1 voice from the late 2000s.
And speaking of which, I did have to modify the early TTS1 Garmin English voices Jack (US), Jill (US), Lee (AU), Karen (AU), Daniel (UK) and Emily (UK) to remove the biggest annoyance, "recalculating". Every time you missed a turn when using a TTS1 voice, "recalculating". Or even if you didn't miss a turn but instead decided to turn in to a parking lot next to the location that wasn't on the route, "recalculating", over and over. Very annoying. I used a tool someone wrote that made it possible to mod voice files, and made no-recalculating versions of the TTS1 English voices from that. Job done. I still have them. Thankfully, after a mountain of complaints by customers to Garmin, TTS2 and every version after that doesn't do the "recalculating" crap.
There are only two solutions to cure an annoying navigation voice problem
The first solution is obvious, mute the volume.
The second solution is to only use a prerecorded voice.
On a Garmin, one of the best English prerecorded voices is Australian English Matilda, which can be downloaded using Garmin Express. All that's required is connecting a Garmin screen to Express and downloading the English voice bundle. US, UK and AU English voices will all be loaded in, and Matilda will be one of them.
Prerecorded voice means no spoken street names, as in just "Turn left" instead of "Turn left on Main St". It might be basic, but that's fine because it's not annoying.
Right now I'm using the TTS voice American English-Zoe on my DriveSmart 76, but if Zoe started getting annoying, I'd switch to Matilda and wouldn't think twice about it.
results of the coffee water conditioning experiment
Back in August I decided to try an experiment with filtering my coffee water.
To recap, all I use is a plain drip coffee maker, plain coffee filter and tap water. I run the water through the coffee maker with just the filter, leave the filter there, add coffee, then run the water through it again.
There is definitely a taste difference, and it's significant enough to where it's now my preferred way of brewing. I thought at first it was just the aftertaste that was different in the positive direction. I was wrong. It's the whole brew that improves.
However, there are two things I don't know.
First is whether a faucet-mount water filter would achieve the same result with a single pass through the coffee filter.
Second is if the act of double-heating the water is just as important as the filtering itself.
What I might try next is running the water through the coffee maker first without filter, then a second time with filter and coffee. Doing that will tell me how much double-heating actually affects the taste. It might be more important than I realize.