i bought a garmin drive 53
The Drive 53 is the entry level car navigator from Garmin. Even though I already own the 6" DriveSmart 66 and the 7" DriveSmart 76, I wanted the 5" Drive 53 anyway just to see if there are any real disadvantages using a smaller display.
I think a Drive 53 is worth owning, but not for the typical reasons others mention.
One typical reason might be "works where a phone doesn't". A particularly nasty gotcha is having phone app navigation suddenly stop working when crossing a country border, depending on phone plan. For example, you're happily driving in the northern United States on your way to Canada. Phone navigation is working just fine. You reach the Canadian border, cross, and uh-oh, now the phone doesn't work. Service off, data off, and that nav app that requires data to work? Yep, that's now nonfunctional too. You just learned the hard way that your phone won't work in Canada. There's your gotcha.
The Drive 53 has no gotchas like that and just keeps working, but again, I think it's worth owning for other reasons most don't think about.
On 20-Oct-2025, there was a boo-boo over at AWS (Amazon Web Services), and because roughly about a third of the internet runs off that, when AWS has a problem, the internet as a whole has a problem. Amazon has since fixed the problem. But a lot of people realized how much of the internet relies on AWS to actually be up and running for things to work.
No, it was not a security breach thing. A lot of people think it was. Nope. It was a straight up IT thing. DNS resolution, specifically. That's the thing that translates names into internet addresses. In very oversimplified terms, that means that when you type a whatever-dot-com in your browser, DNS translates that into the numerical address (i.e. IP address) of the server serving the web site, finds it, then the site is served to your browser. It was the DNS as far as I know that temporarily broke on Amazon's end.
Did this outage affect me?
Since Microsoft laid down the boom with Windows 10 and cut off support (unless you pay for an extra year), there have been videos aplenty on YouTube from Linux people telling people DOWNLOAD LINUX AND SWITCH! SWITCH! SWITCH!
That's not happening.
It will never happen.
And I know why.
Oct 14, 2025 came and went, and that was the end-of-support day for Windows 10.
While true Microsoft has offered a way to have Win10 continue to receive updates for longer, that's not free for United States users.
Given I hardly used Win10 at all, I deleted it.
Near my computer, I have a little mini Ms. Pac-Man game. Mine is the one that looks like a little arcade cabinet. I remember many years ago back in the '80s when those things were at Toys 'R' Us and I wanted one so bad. Back then, I wanted a set of three. A Pac-Man, a Donkey Kong and a Frogger. The set I want now has changed. I have the Ms. Pac-Man, but I also want a Q*Bert and a Galaga.
There is another one however that's much bigger to truly satisfy my Pac-Man fever.