my totally disgusting phone case
My phone case looks nasty, but it's what happens when a phone case gets used because these things obviously don't last forever.
While the case would suggest otherwise, my phone is actually in very good condition. The screen only has a few minor scratches on it, the back and sides have no scratches, and I can still clean and polish up my phone to a mirror shine.
The case, however, is just one step away from giving up the ghost. Recently, the plastic finally started coming apart.
The only part of my phone that looks slightly bad is the charge port, mainly because fabric fluff gets in there (which I did clean out) from being in my pocket.
At the charge/data port is where the plastic broke, and on the side next to the bumper is a big ol' crack. On the case, not the phone.
With the case on, it makes the phone look dinged, pitted, rusted and all sorts of horrible. This is a kind of a neat illusion, because again, the phone is actually in very good shape.
Yes, I am one of those people that prefers transparent clear phone cases, and for the very specific reason that I can see what's going on better when the case gets old.
Yes, shockproof cases exist, and they do last longer. But I like the thinner clear cases.
In the way clear/transparent cases age, they start yellowing, then develop staining (just on the case), then fall apart.
This may sound bad, but to me it's not, because I can see the aging happening sooner when the case is clear.
Yes, I have ordered another clear case. Just a basic one. I could have spent more and bought one that's non-yellowing, but I just went with a basic clear since I'm not rough on my phone.
things i hate about fender stratocaster design
Recently, I traded out my Squier Affinity Stratocaster. My main guitar is now the Yamaha Pacifica PAC112VM.
A big reason I parted with the Strat is because there are three main things about Stratocaster design that really annoy me.
- The knobs. Plastic press-down knobs suck. Metal knurled knobs with a set screw are far better. Fortunately, these are inexpensive and easy to acquire, so it's an easy fix.
- Cleaning the pots properly is a ridiculously complicated process. To do this right, the strings have to come off, and all 11 pick guard screws must be removed. Only two Fender Strat models escape this nightmare, and I'll mention them in a moment.
- I'm always wishing for more "oomph" from the bridge side pickup. The solution for this is go HSS (which I did), or get a "Nashville" Stratocaster so you get the overwound Telecaster style bridge pickup. Fender currently does not have a Strat Nashville model, but Squier does with the Paranormal Custom Nashville Stratocaster. It's also nice the controls are on a Tele plate, meaning the pick guard does NOT have to come off to clean the pots.
In order to stay in Fender world and have a Strat where the pick guard doesn't need to be removed to clean the pots, the only two Fender Stratocaster models that exist which can accommodate this are the Fender Aerodyne Special Stratocaster and Fender Aerodyne Special Stratocaster HSS.
What's the secret? No pick guard, and the pots are accessible from the back.
Have I played one of these? Yes, I have.
Quite a nice guitar, and easy to maintain, and keeps the head-adjusted truss rod location (no need to remove the neck!), and it keeps the top-mounted output jack too!
I went through Fender's entire catalog of Strats, and this Aerodyne along with the HSS version are literally the only two Strats in Fender's entire lineup where you don't have to fight with a pick guard just to lubricate a scratchy pot.
Will I ever own an Aerodyne? Maybe. My current Pacifica has rear access to the pots, so it gets the job done.
As for the Squier Nashville Strat, I'll pass on that because a Nashville electronics setup is slightly "too Tele" due to that mini single-coil neck side pickup. Yeah, I get the overwound bridge side pickup, but also a weaker neck side pickup. I'd prefer if the guitar had middle and neck Strat pickups, but that's not the way Nashville electronics are, so I can't get it. Not in a production model, anyway.
I will admit however that the Squier Nashville Strat has some nice trick electronics to it. The tone knob is a push/pull that adds in the neck side pickup to positions 1 and 2, effectively giving it 7 different pickup selection options. The extra two options with it enabled are bridge+neck "Tele middle" and all 3 pickups on all at once.
I might be done with Squier
The only reason I'm not done with Fender is specifically because of that Aerodyne Strat. However, that guitar is firmly in the "maybe" category because the HSS does not split to single-coil, and with the SSS, I don't know if the guitar has an output that would agree with me.
Aerodyne as far as I know has always been a Fender Japan thing, still is, and there's nothing wrong with that since it's a solidly built guitar. But it would be nice if there were a Mexico Player version, if for no other reason than to have other Fender color choices without the color matched headstock.
Of the 11 colors Fender has for the Player II, White Blonde, Birch Green, and Aquatone Blue would take to the Aerodyne style very well, even with the existing Player II neck attached. It would work.
As for the body binding, I don't know if Fender Mexico could keep that with an Aerodyne shape, but I'm certain they could craft everything else that is an Aerodyne Strat.
On the Squier end of things, I may be done with that brand. I have my two '89 Squier II Strats, they work, and nothing is coming out of Squier these days that really excites me.
This is not to say Squier isn't trying, as the Nashville Strat they have is a good example of that. And the Affinity Telecaster Thinline is a genuinely nice offering. Getting a semihollow Tele for a lower price is a good thing, and you get it with that guitar.
I'm good with what I have. Maybe I'll have a go with a Fender Aerodyne Strat at some point, but that's later.
outlook classic 2019 saved a yahoo mail account
If I wasn't such a nerd when it comes to email, a bunch of email would probably have been lost forever.
In an ultra rare instance where I actually helped somebody out with a computer problem thing, I successfully moved about 13.5 gigs of email off a Yahoo Mail account so it could become usable again. Yes, this was saving a Yahoo mail account for somebody else since I moved off all web-based email a long time ago.
For years, Yahoo had a 1TB storage limit for email. Recently, Yahoo said there will be no more free 1TB of storage and now the free limit is 20GB. Yahoo also of course says sure, you can get your 1TB back if you want, but now you have to pay for it.
The goal was to not pay that toll, so it was time to figure out how to download a mail backup and then free up space on the Yahoo mail account so it could continue to be usable.
I'm sitting in front of this person's computer, which had a standard Windows 11 installation. Right. Now I have to figure out how to download the mail and back it up locally. Right. Now I'm thinking okay, Windows must come with some kind of email client. I look around and I see two Outlooks. One that's some "new" web-based thing, and another, Outlook Classic from 2019. Outlook Classic appears to support local accounts, which is what I wanted. Sounds good to me, I'll use this.
This is where things temporarily got bad.
In order to download mail from a Yahoo account to a mail client, an "app password" must be generated on the Yahoo side. I go to do this, but I'm getting all sorts of warnings and that phone authentication is required. The person who had this Yahoo account was nearby, I told them to get their phone so I can get that stupid separate app password set up. After some juggling around between the computer and the phone, the app password is generated. Okay, good.
I'm successfully able to get the Yahoo mail account working in Outlook 2019, but hold on there, cowboy, we're not done yet. Not even close.
Now I have to figure out a way to set up a local way to store email so I can actually, y'know, back it up.
This is where the real nightmare happened, because wow, what a process. In order to actually set up a local place to store mail, it required setting up a local PST. That in itself wasn't a big deal, but finding where to do it was where the actual nightmare was. Teeny tiny menu options spread all over Outlook Classic. It was not that different from how mail used to be set up a quarter century ago. Remember Windows 2000? Remember Office 2000? That was the experience, and I'm not exaggerating. It was like I was dealing with email in the early 2000s all over again, except with a modernist Windows UI. Weird. I plodded on.
Okay, I finally get a local PST set up. One file, and I plop it right on the desktop so I know where it is.
Done yet? Nope.
Turns out this person's PC was low on space, and I'm about to synchronize many gigs of email from Yahoo locally. I ask the person I'm doing this backup for if they have an external drive or USB stick I can move files to. They have one. I move a bunch of stuff off the computer, reclaimed the space, and now there's about 55GB free of local space to use. Good.
But we're STILL NOT DONE.
Outlook Classic is now downloading/synchronizing all the email off that Yahoo mail account, and that's not fast even with the fastest of internet connections. I said okay, just leave this computer on overnight and hopefully all the mail will be synchronized tomorrow.
Tomorrow comes.
I go to the computer, check Outlook Classic vs. Yahoo mail to make sure the number of emails match up, which was also a minor nightmare because getting the total number count of emails is annoying to acquire for both Yahoo and Outlook Classic. After hunting and pecking around, I figured out how to get those numbers, because if they match, then the sync was successful. The numbers matched. Good. All the email is synchronized.
Now I have a giant PST of all that Yahoo mail. I do a few tests of connecting/disconnecting it to Outlook Classic to make sure it works. It does. Good.
After that comes documentation time. Documenting what? How to "attach" a PST to Outlook 2019. I screenshot the whole process, screen for screen, with little additional notes and all, and give that to the person the Yahoo account belongs to. I then step them through that whole process to make sure they know how to do it. They do so, make some additional little notes of their own, done. Now they know how to access the backed up email if they ever have to. Good.
After that - because WE'RE STILL NOT DONE YET - copy that entire big honkin' PST file twice. Once to an external drive, once to a USB stick since this person had both. Done. If one PST corrupts/fails/whatever, a backup is ready.
Then FINALLY comes the point where email can be safely deleted out of the Yahoo mail account. I ask the owner of the account if it's okay to only keep email from 2025 and delete everything else. User agrees. I head on in there and mass delete everything older than 2025.
Done yet? Almost. I had to wait for that Yahoo mail to catch up and reindex. It did so a little while later.
DONE. Finally. The Yahoo mail account is safely well within the storage limit and can be used normally once again.
Why does anybody use a Yahoo mail account?
Answer: It's the only email account the user has and it's used to authenticate to everything they have.
At the time I write this, there are Yahoo mail accounts OVER 25 YEARS OLD. Yahoo mail itself is almost 28 years old. Yahoo mail isn't just old enough to drink, but also old enough to rent a car!
I doubt there are many young people signing up for Yahoo mail accounts these days. But as for old accounts, there has to be many millions of them.
Having over 20GB of email sounds insane to most people. But if you were using a free email service that touted 1TB of storage for free, wouldn't you take advantage of that? A bunch of Yahoo mail users did.
Now imagine if all your stuff, that being your banking, social media, forum accounts, EVERYTHING... was all connected to that Yahoo mail account to authenticate with, and oopsie, that 1TB is now 20GB and you need to free up space to fix your busted email account.
When I say busted, I mean truly busted. A Yahoo mail account over the storage limit is effectively locked. You can login to it, but cannot send nor receive any mail AT ALL until storage space within the account is freed back up.
What do you do? Abandoning the email account for another is an option, but for many, that isn't an option at all. That Yahoo mail account has to work because so much stuff is connected to it. Deleting email? Also an option, but for many that's also no-go territory.
If you figured out how to download and back up your Yahoo mail, good for you. Seriously, I mean that.
You might be somebody that uses a Yahoo mail for a lot of stuff, so you figured out how to download/backup your email to keep the account functioning correctly. Very good. Give yourself several pats on the back for that one, because you just saved a bunch of money.
However, I'm sure there will be more than a few Yahoo users who will pay Yahoo to get their 1TB of storage back until they can figure out a way to download/backup everything.
Backing up a Yahoo mail account for free is doable using Outlook Classic 2019, provided you have the space for the backup, and somewhere to put the backup when finished. Easy? Not at all. But doable.
just drive
There's a word that comes to mind when navigation gets so complicated that it becomes ridiculous...
...and that word is convoluted.
Since I'm a navigation nerd, I do sometimes read user reviews of both Garmin navigators like the DriveSmart 66 and popular navigation smartphone apps like Google Maps and Waze. Call it a guilty pleasure, but I do get a laugh reading about the absolutely unreasonable and totally ridiculous feature requests users make.
One of the top complaints has always been routing, which is something that's been going on even before smartphone navigation even existed. Back in the early 2010s when a Garmin nuvi 50LM was what most people used for GPS navigation (or a nuvi 3590 if you were a fancy-pants), oh yeah, people yapped about the routing.
Was the routing bad back then? No. What happened is that if the navigation device didn't calculate a route exactly the way the user wanted, TO THE USER REVIEWS he or she went to give it a 1-star rating.
On the Garmin side of things, there is and has been a way for years to set up routes absolutely exactly the way you want with extremely fine detail, and that's making a route using Garmin BaseCamp software.
You thought you could get ridiculously detailed with routing using Google Maps? You can get even more ridiculous with BaseCamp.
If I wanted to, I could put together a ridiculously long 1,000+ mile route avoiding every tollway, every roundabout, every highway and interstate, every U-turn, use nothing but residential roads, and use no roads exceeding 45mph.
Yeah, I can do that, but won't, because that's convoluted.
Here's an example of something that turned convoluted on me:
There's a specific place I go to once every few months where along the way there's a particularly nasty intersection that always gets jammed up with traffic. Figuring I'd be smart and craft a route around that intersection, I sat down at my computer and created one. Every road seemed to check out, and I was certain the route I made would not only go around that nasty intersection, but also get me to where I wanted to go quicker.
The day comes that I have to drive to that place, I'm ready with my custom route, and off I go. Things are going great, then I get to the part where I go around the intersection, go up a few side roads, and...
...there's an elementary school that I didn't notice when I made my route. And I happened to be going through there exactly at the time school was letting out. Parents in cars everywhere, crossing guards stopping cars, and all the rest of the standard stuff that happens when a school lets out. Traffic is crawling, and there's not a thing I can do except deal with it.
Not only did I not save any time at all, but wasted more time crawling through there at 10 to 15mph along with stops until I finally passed the school. I would have been better off just dealing with that other intersection that gets jacked up with cars.
This isn't to say that creating custom routes is worthless, but it doesn't account for several things, including but not limited to:
- A town deciding to close off Main Street for a parade that you had no idea was going to happen.
- A landscaper's truck blocking an alley that can happen any time during daylight hours.
- A long gravel truck driving exactly where he's not supposed to be and manages to block lanes on both sides of the road where everybody has to wait for 5 to 10 minutes so he can straighten out without hitting a utility pole.
- Road construction that was not reported in advance by anybody and doesn't show up in your navigation system either.
- Random hyper-local weather events like flash flooding, a tree being knocked down, or even something as simple as wind gusts that blow trash/recycle bins directly in the middle of the road.
You get the idea.
How do you accommodate for it all? You don't, because that's impossible. Regardless of how good you are with crafting a custom route, you'll never be able to account for it all.
Intuition is the solution
Custom routes in my experience do not save time because it lacks something. No matter how good technology gets, it doesn't have intuition. Technology thinks rationally, but a lot of human intuition, i.e. a gut feeling, is irrational.
Developing a good intuition requires knowing the map and taking risks.
What kind of risks? I'll give a small example.
There's a town I sometimes drive through where more or less everything there is on Main Street. As such, this street does get clogged up with cars often. And it's one of those towns where it's easy to get in but difficult to get out.
I was in that town to get some stuff done, did so, and when I started to drive out I saw that Main Street was all clogged up as usual. This is when I tapped the Garmin DriveSmart screen to get a 2D map view, like a paper map. I was driving east, and saw a little side street heading south that appeared to connect with a larger boulevard that also headed east. I took it.
Would that side street actually connect to that boulevard or lead me to a dead end? I had no idea, but turned on to it anyway. It was a risk I was willing to take. Fortunately, that street did connect to that boulevard, and I was able to skip all the Main Street traffic entirely.
No navigation system, be it Garmin or phone app, would have tried that. Doing what I did was an irrational go-by-the-gut maneuver that the computer simply will not do.
Sometimes taking risks like that works, sometimes not.
Crafting convoluted custom routes doesn't work to save time, but a good sense of what's around you along with some reasonable risk taking does.
In other words, I just drive and figure things out.
Those seeking a navigation system that always gets routes correct every time is in for some serious disappointment, because that doesn't exist. This was true years ago, it's still true now, and I doubt that will ever change.
the analog watch i almost get along with
As I said just recently, I've tried to get along with an analog watch before but just couldn't. However, this is the one that was so close to agreeing with me, but didn't.
I have the Casio AW80-5BV, which is the only AW80 model that comes on a nylon fabric strap. The other variants either come on steel or resin strap.
Said again, it's not that I can't read an analog dial watch. My brain just doesn't like doing it, so I stick to digital-only.
If my brain could get along with an analog dial, I would wear the AW80-5BV all the time. This is a featherweight watch with 3 alarms, stopwatch, countdown timer, and dual time mode. This is everything anyone needs. AW80 is also one of the easiest watches to show two times at the same time. Local time shown on the analog part and the other shown on the digital panel.
The hands actually have lume on them. It's a near-worthless lume, but there. And it's kind of pointless since the AW80 already has an amber night light.
On the 5BV dial design seen above, it's one of the more thoughtful because you get hour numbers, minute numbers on the outer track and 24-hour numbers on the inner track. If you're the type that likes to read 24-hour time, yeah, this watch has got you covered. You can set the digital to 24-hour and you've still got the 24-hour analog printed on the dial itself in little red numbers.
I don't know any other ana-digi watch that packs so much for both for analog and digital as the AW80 does, which is why I bought it in the first place.
But, unfortunately, my brain just doesn't agree with analog time reading no matter what.
This honestly makes me wonder if I'd be better off with a Movado super-sterile style dial to get an analog watch my brain can agree with.
Yeah, I know Movado is a fashion watch brand. However, many of their models are the ultimate for a dial that takes minimalism to its extreme. I'm talking about the models with just two hands (no seconds hand), one marker for noon at top and absolutely nothing else.
It could be the reason my brain doesn't get along with an analog dial is due to distraction. A Movado super-sterile dial is almost as distraction-free as it gets.
What could possibly be more distraction-free than that? A one-hand watch. All you get is an hour hand. Some of the one-handers are 12-hour dials and the other 24-hour dials. And I have to admit, the idea of a one-hand 24-hour dial is kinda neat. However, I would only take a one-hand 24-hour dial with hour markers because they would be necessary. For a 12-hour however, the dial could be completely blank and that would still work for me.
I may look into getting an analog watch with minimalist sterile dial just to see if my brain agrees with it.