Charging Cables

~ Veselin ~ 14 Comments

I’ve not cracked the charging issue yet. My kids run through cables very quickly because they charge their numerous devices while playing games. They twist them, bend them, and use lots of power. We also need to maintain a collection of chargers with cables at the grandparents where they’re used by the niblings as well. The devices and chargers vary greatly and I’m always in the look for improvements.

10 days ago I bought a beautifully looking Energizer cable. 2m long, 100w, looked very, very solid. It stopped working after charging my computer and phone 5-6-ish times each with an Apple’s 45-watt charger.

I was sure something in that cable was fake and decided to slice and dice it to see proof of deception. Nope. You can pull a car with it. But you can’t charge a phone.

Took me significant effort with the pliers to cut through the outside. So I guess, just another brand that wasn’t meant to be.

So what somewhat worked:

  • The Apple’s Lightning and USB-C cables tend to last months to a year with our usage. The downside is that they’re bland, look dirty, subject to dry rot and twisting. I’ve stopped buying these as they are the highest price, lowest joy level, and medium durability for our use case.
  • Vivanco’s 1m cable is my personal favorite for a durable lightning cable. It doesn’t twist as much and is thicker. My kids have destroyed some of these while playing Minecraft but I’ve personally never broken one. It’s short and ugly, so it’s far from ideal.
  • XMart’s cables with textile braid look great, probably best in term of looks from what we use. They are also 1.2m long, which is better. I have an USB-C braided cable at one of my work spots, working with a 100-watt charger, and it’s fine after a few years of use. However, those cables with multiple ends my family likes? Not so much. I don’t know why we keep buying them.
  • Cellularline’s braided USB-C cable would be my top choice. The one I got is 2.5 meters long, about 1 meter longer than it should be, and just works. However, it’s never been put through the real Minecraft test because it’s USB-C and the kids use Lightning.

UPDATE (2025-01-25) Cellularline’s Lightning cable I bought to my kids failed after less than 10 days of use using a 65 watt Cellularline charger: Not ideal.

What do you use?

If you could un-invent something, what would it be?

~ Veselin ~ 9 Comments

If you could un-invent something, what would it be?

I believe information exists without observers. A human noticed that we can burn fossil fuel to drive ourselves around instead of riding horses at some point. By that time, cars might’ve already existed for billions of years in galaxies far, far away. We just didn’t know about them. Uninventing cars wouldn’t make them go away, it will only postpone their appearance. They will reappear because they can satisfy the demand for fast transportation.

So removing inventions sounds pointless to me. Certain human behaviours or use of the inventions – sure! I’d make people commute by walking or using bicycles, for example, but I wouldn’t uninvent cars. Cars have legitimate use cases.

Same with other things like nuclear weapons or multi cookers. All of that can be described with numbers, and all numbers already exist.

Pleasant Surprise

~ Veselin ~ 13 Comments

The Reader is the primary reason why I can keep being motivated to blog. Found many nice folks there, and some found me. It gives me likes and comments I didn’t have with my previous blog, which had better SEO and far more visitors.

The Reader link was rebranded from “Read” to an icon some months ago, which made it less recognizable. It’s now back as a O^O Reader. I’m thankful to the folks who put the text back. I hope more bloggers discover it this way because the tool is quickly improving.

New Social Media Accounts

~ Veselin ~ 8 Comments

I’m now on Bluesky and TheStoryGraph.

Bluesky is the new Twitter with everyone seemingly moving there but not really. I want to migrate out of Twitter for some reasons:

  • Twitter doesn’t let me publicize my blog there
  • My thousands of followers there seem to be inactive and never click
  • Twitter seems to be filtering out content that contains outbound links

Two of these do not apply to Bluesky. My user is dzver.bsky.social. I’m not fully committed to the migration but I added Bluesky to my phone. I wouldn’t dare to do that with Twitter.

TheStoryGraph is an alternative to Goodreads. It’s worse in terms of books availability but:

  • It has modern charts
  • Their reading challenge is real
  • It seems to be built by people who read books for people who read books

You could not hope to see anything like that on Goodreads.

Here’s my profile. Getting 1-2 friends there will help me explore the social aspects of this service and see if I can realistically migrate out of Goodreads in the future.