I had a flight from Tokyo that departed on Tuesday and arrived on Monday, so of course I took advantage of the opportunity to stress test some apps. Resaonable handling by Day One (pictured). Very poor handling by Apple’s sleep tracking (not pictured because I don’t even understand where it went wrong).
Shinjuku Gyoen
Edo Castle ruins (Imperial Palace East Gardens)
Edo Castle ruins (Imperial Palace East Gardens)
Edo Castle ruins (Imperial Palace East Gardens)
Shibuya
Trump is sending people to the camps based largely on appearance and without any hearings or convictions. The best you can say is that he has “only” sent around 250, so far. I am strongly opposed.
I wasn’t expecting to be the target demographic for the iPhone 16e, but apparently I am because I just bought two of them.
The two oldest phones that my kids still used were an iPhone 14 Pro and an iPhone 12 Pro. Both of these belonged to me at some point, and now had made their way down the chain. The 14 Pro is still a very great phone, and the 12 Pro is okay. I planned to keep them in the rotation for at least another few years.
But since my kids don’t really use the Pro features, the 16e was a small step up in almost all dimensions, especially battery life, which is a big one for them. And with trade-ins and the fact that my kids get by fine with the base storage level, it was not that much money to upgrade.
Which brings me to the real selling point, which is that these were the last two Lightning devices in our house, and the 16e charges by USB-C.
California coastline near Willow Creek, south of Big Sur
A lime kiln for which Limekiln State Park is named, Big Sur, California
Limekiln Creek in Big Sur, California
Redwood forest in Limekiln State Park, Big Sur, California
There is still no excuse for using personal devices and consumer apps for war plans, but Signal has a contact verification feature for exactly this scenario.
This feature is in iMessage too, called Contact Key Verification. If you haven’t turned it on yet, turn it on now.
A few months ago we got a Volvo EX90, completing our migration from gasoline-powered cars to battery-powered cars. The Volvo joins an Electric Mini Cooper that we have had for two years.
The Mini has a range of 120 miles and a capacity of four humans, so we basically never take it on long drives. I have only fast charged it a couple of times, on a 225-mile round trip from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara. We charge it mostly at home, hooking it up to our 240V charger whenever it falls below 40%, which is about once a week. It can charge from zero to full (29 kWh) in about 5 hours.
The Volvo has a range of about 300 miles, with a battery (107 kWh) more than triple the size of the Mini’s. We plan to take it on longer drives, which means I need to plan for mid-trip fast charging and/or overnight destination charging, in a landscape the currently includes J1772/CCS plugs, which both of our cars use, and NACS (formerly known as Tesla) plugs.
A quick introduction for the uninitiated: J1772 is an AC plug, and CCS uses the J1772 together with two bigger pins for DC charging. Meanwhile NACS uses the same pins for both DC and AC. This means that a NACS-CCS (DC) adapter is different from a NACS-J1772 (AC) adapter. They look somewhat different, because the DC version is much bigger with the extra pins, but they fit together even if you use the wrong one. (If you are interested in the technical details of electric car charging, I recommend this video “Tesla won the plug war”. It is a bit long, but the first 20 minutes are pretty great for a high-level overview of where we are today.)
Most car brands have an agreement with Tesla now to charge at Tesla superchargers, which generally requires a NACS-CCS (DC) adapter. I have been able to charge at a Tesla station, using the Tesla app to start and stop the charge. It is a little finicky because there are no screens or anything on the Tesla chargers, so you have to just wait for the app to tell you what is happening. Also, you can’t use every Tesla supercharger, as some locations are limited to Tesla cars only.
Electrify America is the next biggest charger network in my area, and for now has mostly CCS chargers. I haven’t had issues with Electrify America in my limited experience, but it does make me nervous that they tend to have four charging spots at the most, and often fewer. Tesla, on the other hand, tends to have a dozen or more. This means even if the chargers are all in use, you have enough people coming and going that you are going to more easily form a queue and have a good idea of how long you are going to have to wait.
For overnight charging, if there is a fast charger within 10-15 miles of my destination, I would prefer to just use fast charging in most cases. But if you are going to be more remote, or if there is available 240V infrastructure, it is convenient to be able to charge at the place where you are staying. Unfortunately, here is where you get into adapter-land because there are a wide range of compatibility issues to worry about, especially if you are going to a place you haven’t been before.
So here is what my overnight (AC) portable charging kit looks like:
When it comes to my AC chargers, both can switch between 120V and 240V. The 120V settings use a standard 15-amp receptacle and draw about 1.4 kW, which is almost not worth using. An hour charge will extend your range by 3-4 miles. A full charge of the Volvo would take 3 days uninterrupted.
The 240V settings are different between the two portable chargers, since one has a 16-amp max and the other a 30-amp max. I assume that the 16-amp max is so that it can be lighter weight with a longer cord, which is useful in a portable charger. Since the voltage is doubled and amperage is a little higher, you get a charge rate of 3.8 kW, which is 10 or more miles every hour, and probably good enough for most situations. A half day of charging at 16 amps would fill the Volvo’s battery to 40%, while the 30-amp charger would fill it to 80%.
At first, the 30-amp charger seems like a no-brainer, but if you are traveling to a new location, you never know what kind of outlet might be available. The 30-amp charger needs a 50-amp circuit, while the 16-amp charger can charge on a 20-amp circuit. So I carry the 16-amp charger together with adapters to fit NEMA 14-30 and NEMA 14-50 receptacles. (Technically you could go the other way and buy an adapter that allows you to plug your 30-amp charger into a 20-amp circuit and then hope to avoid tripping the breaker by telling the car to charge more slowly, but I would never do this.)
The better way to handle adjustable amperage is with something like Tesla’s Adapter Bundle. A similar part is available at a ridiculous price for my 30-amp charger. In both of these cases, the attached plug identifies itself to the charger (using a resistor, for example), and the charger limits the amperage accordingly.
For DC charging, NACS is already the most common thanks to Tesla’s superchargers, and CCS will quickly become rare as non-Tesla stations are upgraded.
For public AC charging, there are already a lot of J1772 chargers, and these have far less need of upgrading than DC chargers, so I expect to see these stay around for a long time.
Portable AC charging and NEMA adapters are already a niche use case and will become even less necessary as more charging infrastructure is built out.
For my cars, it is realistic to depend on two NACS adapters, one for DC and one for AC, with the latter slowly becoming more useful as time goes on.
For a future car with a NACS port, I would probably not worry about a DC adapter at all, but it is still worth it to carry an AC adapter so I can use J1772 chargers.
The WiFi at my house is called Grigg Network and has both 2.5 GHz and 5 GHz. After a couple of recent instances where my iPhone was for some reason connected via 2.5 GHz, I decided to make a 5 GHz-only network, which I called Grigg Network+.
The next day all of my kids were asking if they could be on this new, better network, even though they have no idea what it is. I guess score one for marketing.