It was just a little water but the speaker went fuzzy and the charging port stopped working for 2 days. Now I'm wondering if those cheap waterproof pouches actually hold up or if I should just get a proper case. Anyone dealt with water damage on a phone that wasn't fully submerged?
I was on my porch last Saturday and my neighbor Dave was yelling into his flip phone. He told me he's had it since 2010 and never once dropped a call. That hit different because I was holding my smartphone with half a signal. He let me try his old Motorola and my voice went through crystal clear. Makes me wonder how many of us are paying for features we don't need just to get worse reception?
The battery lasts 8 hours while browsing, the keyboard actually has key travel, and none of my startup apps hang for 10 seconds so I'm wondering if I should just switch full time to a 7 year old machine, has anyone else had better luck with old hardware than new stuff?
For years I trusted one of those big password manager apps that stores everything in the cloud. Then last spring I read about a breach at one of them and realized if they get hacked, all my logins are gone. So I switched to a plain spiral notebook I keep in my desk drawer. I write down every site and password by hand, organized alphabetically. It sounds old school but I never worry about someone cracking my vault from across the internet. Sure, I can't access my passwords from my phone unless I'm home, but that actually forces me to memorize my most used ones. Anyone else gone back to a low tech method for something important like this? What made you switch?
Last week the fiber line got cut by a construction crew around noon. No internet for the whole day. I work from home doing IT support so I figured I was screwed. But I had some offline tasks I'd been putting off for months like updating my local backup drives and organizing my cable box. By 5pm I'd finished more real work than I do in three normal days with Teams and Slack blowing up every 5 minutes. It made me realize how much time I waste just responding to notifications and refreshing tabs. Now I'm thinking about blocking off one day a week where I just work disconnected. Has anyone else tried that and had it actually stick?
My office printer kept saying "paper jam" when there was nothing there. After 4 hours of pulling it apart and watching YouTube videos, a guy at the repair shop said to check the sensor arm. A tiny paper clip had fallen inside and was blocking it. Has anyone else had a dumb fix like that waste your whole afternoon?
I went to the downtown library last weekend to use their 3D printer and the software was so old it wouldn't even load my file. The guy at the desk said they haven't updated the firmware since 2021 and the printer keeps jamming. After 45 minutes of waiting he just handed me a flash drive with a slicer from 2019 and said try this. Has anyone else run into public tech that's just completely ignored? How do you even use gear that's that outdated?
I downloaded a PDF editor from some random site because I didn't want to pay $15 a month for Adobe. Worked fine for two weeks then my browser started showing these weird pop ups every time I opened it. Turns out it was injecting ads into my Chrome tabs, pretty sneaky. I ran Malwarebytes and it found like 12 threats hiding in my system files. Cost me an hour to clean everything up, not worth the hassle. Has anyone else had a free tool turn out to be junk like this?