Tag: tech

#REVIEW: Macbook Neo (2026)

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReviewsLeave a comment

I’m not going to pretend to have super unique insights here, but I figure if anyone is in the market for a new laptop, hearing from an actual person and not a tech website might come in handy. Honestly, the biggest question for me is what color the Citrus version of the MacBook Neo actually is. I’ve been thinking of it as green, but I’ve heard people call it yellow? So naturally my picture of it is directly underneath a red monitor which is throwing the color balance all off. One way or another, the Citrus color is really pretty and it’s not picking up fingerprints or anything annoying like that.

At any rate: I went with the slightly more expensive version of the laptop, with twice the storage space and a touchID button for an extra $100. I mostly need the extra storage space for my music collection, which mostly lives in the cloud right now anyway, but $100 for an extra 256 GB isn’t bad one way or another. I’d say unless you have a reason to upgrade you probably don’t need to, but either way you’re getting a deal.

Here’s what I use a laptop for: web surfing, watching videos, writing, lesson planning, listening to music. Any video editing is going to be done on my (much more powerful) desktop, and the main reason I went back to a laptop is that the iPad I bought a while ago actually proved to be too big for, well, lap use. At 13″ this is the perfect size to balance on one knee in one of my comfortable chairs while I write, which I couldn’t do with an iPad even with a more laptop-style case on it.

And here’s the verdict: buy one if you think you want one. There are a couple of shortcuts taken to get this thing down to $600 or $700 for the higher capacity version: the touchpad is physical, so you will actually be clicking on things rather than Haptic Touch feedback, and it charges via USB-C and not MagSafe. It comes with a nice, braided USB-C cable– at some point, I’m not sure exactly when, Apple decided to upgrade their cables so they aren’t breaking off at the plug-in point any longer, which is awesome. I don’t love the touchpad but it’s fine, and the Neo battery lasts long enough that I can’t really pretend that the port to charge it is a big deal. I’m recharging it right now for, like, the second time since I’ve bought it. The keyboard is snappy and responsive– I type fast, so keyboards are important to me, and this one passes all of my tests– and the monitor is bright and clear.

It’s not the fastest laptop in the world, of course; it takes a little longer to start up than my desktop, but once it’s running, again, my computing needs aren’t currently anything that are going to challenge it so it’s fine. If you’re doing something complicated with your computer– or, if, in other words, you need to worry about how fast it runs– it might not be the best one for you. It’s not slow, by any means, it’s just not touching the Speed Force like some of my other devices. But the fact of the matter is I interact with my computing devices mostly as a writer and not as, say, a programmer or a gamer or a multimedia person. Lesson planning doesn’t exactly tax the CPU either, y’know?

It goes without saying that the build quality is solid as hell; it may be a budget Mac item but it’s still from Apple. It does not in any way feel cheap.

So, yeah: if you think you’re the target audience for a $600 MacBook? Go forth without fear. I’m happy I picked this little computer up, and I’ll likely be using it for quite a while.

So anyway

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek3 Comments

I was going to start yesterday’s aborted post by making fun of these horrifying things. After that I had a whole gross story about getting sick at work and hell if I remember what was coming after that.

So, yeah, I got sick at work, and then made it through the rest of the day and I’m fine now. Meanwhile, I haven’t technically fixed the deeply weird issue the new laptop is having– I think something about the OS isn’t playing fair with Gutenberg at WordPress, because nothing else makes sense– but I’ve found a sufficient workaround for now. I’m going to spend some more time tomorrow or Sunday fiddling with it; until then, all good.

Anyway, I’ll do a review of the laptop once I’ve had it for a week or so and put it through its paces. I’m pretty sure this particular issue (did I ever say what it was? Click on “new post” in WordPress, get a white screen. In every browser. No matter what. Every other device I have is fine.) is not the laptop’s fault. We’ll see if anything else stupid crops up.

Tomorrow we’re going to get some more shit done in the bedroom. The goal is to get work done in the house without inhaling enough drywall dust to give me cancer. Not the highest of bars. We’ll see if we can pull it off.

#REVIEW: Kindle Paperwhite, Signature Edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews2 Comments

Having read an entire big-ass book on this thing (TEOTBB is 260,000 words) I can get to the meat of a review of my newest tech toy in a single sentence:

Reading a book on this thing feels like reading.

If you don’t know what I mean by that … I’m not sure how well I can explain it, to be honest. I have an earlier version of the Paperwhite– about ten years old now, so probably pretty close to the first generation– and on that device and every other Kindle I’ve ever touched, I was never able to forget I was holding a tech object with a screen and not a book. I couldn’t get into stories the same way I could with a book. I had trouble remembering details, or even keeping my place on a page. Reading short stories on the Kindle wasn’t bad, but entire books? Forget about it.

At some point in the last ten or so generations of this thing, they fixed that problem, and I’m not sure exactly what the difference is. I can say it’s tremendously faster than my old Paperwhite, which is no surprise, and since ebooks themselves haven’t really evolved all that much in that time you can really feel the speed difference in a way you might not be able to with a phone upgrade or a new laptop or something. It’s got a pleasing heft in the hand and while I wasn’t terribly happy with spending nearly $40 for a case at first, now that I have it I really like it. I got the fabric cover, and the texture is marvelous, both on the inside and the outside of the case, and the automatic wake-up/shut-off when you open and close the cover is a nice feature.

(Why did I spend $36 when I could have gotten a case much cheaper? It says “Kindle” on the cover and not some other random brand. If I’m going to put my device in a case, the case needs to be either featureless or branded for the device and not for whatever random company makes the case. Yes, I know that’s dumb. It’s how my brain works. That’s my original Paperwhite case under the new one up there, and you’ll notice there are no words on it.)

Battery life is going to be excellent– I’m not sure how long I spent reading that book, but it only ran the battery down to 81%. It says that “typical reading time” is just under 14 hours, but I don’t know if that’s how long I took in my one read or what. I was annoyed by the Kindle displaying when certain passages had been annotated by a ton of other people, but I was able to turn that off.

I spent a pleasant half-hour today rearranging my wish list on Amazon, moving fiction books by new authors into a new “Kindle Wish List” section, keeping books I know I want in print and nonfiction on my original wish list. I’m going to need to get into the habit of deciding I Shall Read A Kindle Book Now and buying the book right then from my wish list, because I still don’t like how this thing displays your library and anything I download and don’t read immediately is going to get lost. That will require a bit of an adjustment, but at least I know the reading part is going to work, and that’s good.

(Two more quick things: I just started Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain today, and it’s 1200 pages, and after holding it for a while I damn near shelled out another $17 to get a digital version that wasn’t going to torture my hands as much. I may still cave, we’ll see. Also, Bedlam Bride is unfairly fucking good; it’s the best book of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series so far, and as I’ve said repeatedly DCC already didn’t have any right to be as good as it is. I only have one book from the series left and then I have to wait for the rest of them to come out. I’m not happy about it.)

First world problems

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy9 Comments

My current phone is an iPhone 14 Pro Max. Apple is a few days away from announcing the iPhone 17, and my phone has reached the point where on most days I have to charge it for a bit while I’m at my desk or doing something else; the battery isn’t getting through a full day reliably any longer. I used to replace my phone almost every year more or less whether I “needed” to or not; I’ve gotten out of that habit with the last few phones as they’ve gotten steadily more expensive.

So here’s my dumb problem: I don’t really want an iPhone 17 of any particular stripe, although it’d be highly unlikely that I would order anything other than another Pro Max. Not because I’m thinking of switching back to Android– I am Apple’s bitch now and forever, and am too thoroughly tied into their ecosystem to even seriously consider switching– but because their foldable phone is rumored to be coming out in 2026.

Rumors for the price of the foldable iPhone have ranged between two thousand and two thousand five hundred dollars, and that’s before whatever tariff fuckery might happen between now and next September.

That’s … a hell of a lot of money. And it’s even more money if I spend the $1200 or whatever I’m going to pay for a 17 in between now and then. And it’s also money that would be spent on a first-generation Apple product in a category that, so far, phone manufacturers have not exactly been covering themselves in glory with. Foldable phones are tricky as hell, and from what I’ve seen so far no one has really nailed the tech yet.

Now, for a sensible person who doesn’t have a spending problem, this isn’t actually a hard decision. I hold onto my current phone until it’s genuinely untenable to keep using it; if that’s before the Fold is released, well, that sucks, but it happened, and if the Fold comes out and I don’t like the price or something else about it (or they delay it, or the rumors are wrong, or or or … ) I just buy whatever the equivalent of my current phone is at that time.

That’s the sensible approach. But the sensible approach ignores the fact that I’ve been fighting off the newshiny for three years already, and I am maybe more sensitive than I should be to being annoyed by my phone– part of the reason I have a Pro Max is that I don’t like having to think about battery charge pretty much ever– and, like, September is the month you buy new phones. I recognize that all of this is stupid; that’s why I titled the post the way I did.

I could, in theory, try a smaller phone for a year, instead of buying the most expensive phone in their lineup. What would that be like? I don’t even know. But it would cut the pain a little bit if I decide to upgrade a year later.

Anyway. I have no common sense, but that’s why I have readers, who I assume are smarter people than me. What say you? Put up with bullshit for another year assuming I’ll want to trade up in 2026, upgrade but with a less expensive model so that it’s not as big of a hit in a year (worth pointing out: the trade-in will get me money back) or assume that I’ll manage to talk myself out of spending laptop money on a phone a year from now and just get the phone I’d be getting if I didn’t know anything about the Fold?

Quick request for the WordPress gurus

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking2 Comments

Do any of you know how to change this image? Is it through my hosting site, maybe, because I can’t figure out how to change it on WordPress? It’s the default image on the card whenever I link a post that doesn’t have an image on it, and I have no idea what to do to change it.

Pretty!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek2 Comments

In lieu of a post with actual content, please enjoy this photograph of my pretty new watch on my somewhat less pretty, keratosis pilaris-riddled wrist.

There’s something weird going on with the angle there, btw. The watch band could stand to be a tiny bit bigger, no more than a centimeter and probably not even that much, but I swear it fits nicely and is not cutting off my circulation in any way. 🙂

Now to see if I can make it through the day without any notifications.

Watch Poll 2 Update

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

Before I reveal the truth, let me remind you of the watch:

And, while I agree with the person who said it’s much harder to tell from an image than it is from something you can touch and manipulate, only two people successfully stated that this is a $15 watch, and other similar variants are even cheaper.

Two possible clues: one, and this kinda surprised me, while quartz watches actually keep more accurate time than traditional clockwork/mechanical watches, they are much cheaper, and the largest face has the word “quartz” on it. Second, the larger crown on the right side is visibly out of alignment, and if that thing’s on a funky angle in the picture they’re using to sell the watch, we’re not dealing with a stellar example of build quality here.

So, fully confirmed at this point, and with no slight intended to anyone who was wrong: no one has any idea how much watches cost just from looking at them.

Typed in between crashes

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocyLeave a comment

The computer is getting worse, not better, and I still have no idea what exactly is wrong, but the arrival date on the replacement keeps getting moved up, which is good. Currently it’s supposed to be here on Wednesday, which would mean that it took two days to get to Memphis, TN from China but then took five days to get from Tennessee to northern Indiana. Which, okay, intellectually I get why that might be the case, but it still strikes me as kind of ridiculous.

At any rate, the computer could decide to shit the bed on me at any time, so expect short updates for the next several days and then probably a New Hotness post. Hooray?