The features that matter to you

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Back in 2017, I leased a 2018 Genesis G80, part of the “luxury” brand from Hyundai. When the lease was up, I turned it back in and ended 2017 Ford Fusion — and I consider the Fusion to be a better car in every way.

That seems odd, as the newer “luxury” car should seem like the better car. Perhaps it is for some folks, but not for me. The G80 had a sticker price a few thousand dollars higher than the Fusion, so it should have the advantage. Here is where it fell short:

Entertainment system

The entertainment system in the G80 was weird. Super slow to respond to touch, and it seemed buggy. However, I had them look at it a few times and they assured me it was normal. I guess it just wasn’t any good.

On both cars I use Android Auto 99% of the time, but on the Genesis even that was slow to respond. Their entertainment system was simply awful, and I don’t know why.

Horsepower

The Fusion is simply a quicker car. The difference in horsepower isn’t huge (325 on the Fusion versus 311 on the G80), but the Fusion is also more than 500 lbs lighter, which makes a noticeable difference.

App, key fob, and door code

This is where the Genesis was really weird. Let’s start with the Fusion:

  • Their mobile app is fairly simple and can remotely start the car from most anywhere.
  • The key fob can remotely start the car (within a tighter range), like most cars can.
  • They have the keyless entry panel on the driver’s door so you can enter a code to get in. This is GREAT when you go running or hiking and you can just leave the keys in the car.

The Genesis didn’t have the keypad panel, but no one but Ford does that so I don’t really hold it against them. It was their app and key fob that were bizarre, though.

The app was just a hot mess. It tried to do SO much (pulling in your calendar and things like that) which made it a clunky mess. It could remotely start your car, but I generally kept it uninstalled because it was such a battery hog.

The key fob was even more weird because it didn’t include a remote start option. I don’t know why, and they couldn’t tell me. It was app or nothing, so generally it was nothing. So strange.

Heated wheel, cooled seats, and a sunroof

The Fusion has all three of these while my G80 didn’t. Of course, these were options on some G80 packages that I didn’t choose, but the sticker price on the G80 was already higher than the Fusion, so where that extra money go?

Silly little things

Being a Ford guy for much of my life, there are also some little things (such as the keypad entry) that I really like with Ford cars. Here are two small things that Ford does better.

Car stays locked
When I’m getting out of the car, my keys are typically in my pocket. So, out of convenience, I generally just press the lock button the door as I’m climbing out. With the Genesis, that didn’t work because it would detect the keys still “in the car” (in my pocket) and immediately unlock the doors again. I guess it was trying to help, but it wasn’t.

Courtesy swipe
My wife makes fun of me for this, but I love it. When your windshield is dirty and you wash it with the wipers, the car automatically swipes three times. All cars do this. In a Ford though, after the third swipe it pauses for a second or two, and then does a “courtesy swipe” to clean up the dribbles. We all do that manually anyhow, so it’s neat that Ford does it for us.

That leads to really what the problem was — the Genesis wasn’t finished. They already had a few years to get things rolling, but it just felt like they had to cut some corners to get it out there. Maybe that’s not the case, but the G80 simply had too many rough edges to excuse. It’s been a few years now and perhaps the later models are better, but I’ll likely never find out.

The features that matter to you

With that list above, you might be thinking “who cares?”, and you might be right. There are very likely a lot of people that have a 2018 Genesis G80 and absolutely love it because it does what they want it to do. The desires for one person are a lot different that someone else.

All of that said, the Fusion is no longer in production. 2019 was the last year for them and for most sedans from Ford. It’s a shame, as I really thought the Fusion and Taurus were excellent vehicles. We’ll see what happens down the road when it’s time to replace this one, but I’ll be looking for a car with features that matter to me.

Why you should keep your phone battery above 30% (but below 80%)

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Battery health has been in the news a bit the last few years, starting when people found out that Apple intentionally throttles (slows down) older phones in order to help with their battery performance. As a battery gets older, it can’t perform as well, and Apple chose to throttle old phones to help combat that. While Apple handled it poorly, the idea was solid and ultimately helps users. But why do batteries get worse over time, and what can be done to stop it?

Batteries are chemical

At their core, batteries perform chemical reactions in order to work. A side effect of those reactions is a bit of microscopic junk that accumulates in your battery, kind of like very small rock salt. The more that piles up, the worse the battery performance becomes, and there is nothing you can do to reverse it.

While you can’t reverse it, you can help prevent it. Generally speaking, with lithium-ion batteries (which is in virtually every device you own), going below 30% battery life is hard on a battery, as is filling it up to 100%. That’s right — keeping your phone charging overnight is slowly killing it. Of course, the trade-offs are likely worth it for most of us. You’ll lose a bit of battery life over the course of a few years, but you’ll have a full phone every morning and a new phone every few years. Ideally, though, you should try to keep your phone in that middle range if you want the battery to stay as healthy as possible.

Drop to zero

Years ago, the advice was to frequently let your battery go all the way to zero before charging it back up, and that was good advice. With old nickel-cadmium batteries, you could encounter the “memory effect” if you recharged in the middle of a cycle, and going all the way to zero (and then all the way to 100% in a charge) was wise.

That was good advice for that kind of battery. That’s not what’s in your phone, so don’t think you need to do that anymore. If you routinely do that with your cell phone, you’re degrading your battery at a much faster rate.

So what to do?

As I said up top, probably nothing. We replace our phones often enough that the effects of a degrading battery really won’t be too noticeable. For the best results though, work to keep your phone in the 30-80% charged range as much as you can, and the performance of your battery should hold up much better over the years.

If you interested in learning more about how all of this really works, this recent episode of the Techstuff podcast dug deep into the science behind batteries and was amazingly informative (and mostly over my head…)

Good versus “must listen” podcasts

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I was looking in my podcast app today and discovered that I’m subscribed to 41 shows. Episodes pour in every week, but I don’t have time to listen to anywhere near all of them.

I’ve realized that I’ve essentially put my podcasts into two categories:

  1. Those that I listen to every episode.
  2. Those that I pick and choose based on the title.

Of the 41 that I subscribe to, only seven of them make the “every episode” cut. These are shows that I know I’ll get something out of regardless of what the exact subject is, so they make the cut every time.

In no particular order:

Hidden Brain

I’ve referenced Hidden Brain on here a few times, as it’s a very thought provoking show.

Revisionist History

Malcolm Gladwell’s amazing show about things “overlooked and misunderstood”. The first two seasons of this show are among my favorites of any show ever (with his episode about Wilt Chamberlain perhaps my top pick), but the more recent ones are still ones that I won’t miss.

2Bobs

These guys talk about the “art of creative entrepreneurship” and they do a great job. There are some episode titles that just don’t sound super exciting to me, but I always get something out of them.

Akimbo

You’ll notice Seth Godin’s work sprinkled liberally around this blog, and his weekly podcast is one that I never skip.

The Way I Heard It

Mike Rowe’s podcast, where he tries to channel Paul Harvey’s “The Rest of the Story” and does an exceptional job of it. His more recent episodes include some long conversations at the end that I often skip, but the core stories are incredibly well written and fascinating.

Tech Talk Y’all

A weekly tech podcast that helps me stay on top of the latest news and trends from the tech world.

Reply All

This show has gone through some major changes this year, including letting one of the main hosts go, so we’ll see where it ends up. For now, I’ve enjoyed it enough over the years that I’m still in for every episode and we’ll see what happens.

With 34 other podcasts in my player, I certainly listen to a lot of other individual episodes beyond those seven shows. However, those are seven that I don’t skip and they all are excellent.

What are some of your must-hear podcasts?

That’s against the natural order of things

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In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, they proposed three rules that describe our reactions to technologies. The rules are pretty simple, and they seem to fit my experience pretty well.

  1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
  2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
  3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
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Of course, knowing and understanding that things often work this way can help you fight against your tendencies. In my case, I find things such as disappearing stories like Snapchat to be “against the natural order of things”, but I realize that’s just my interpretation and that those types of tools are really quite useful for a lot of people.

As time goes on, I suspect my natural inclination will get even more deeply seeded into viewing many new things as “unnatural”, and I’ll need to work hard to avoid that. I’m excited about many coming technologies, and for those I’m less excited about I need to always remember that for my kids they’ll be seen as “new and exciting” and for my grandkids they’ll be “normal and ordinary”.

Facebook still isn’t listening to you

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It’s a common joke (or sometimes a fear) to “be careful what you say, because Facebook (or Google) is listening to you“. While it may be often intended as a joke, there are many people that think it’s true and there are some decent reasons to believe that it might be. However, I don’t think it is and I have four reasons why.

1. Facebook would get caught

There are literally thousands of people out there that tear apart everything Facebook puts out, trying to catch them in the act of listening — and they’ve found nothing. These are brilliant people, and there has been no evidence of Facebook or Google secretly listening to our conversations.

It comes down to three pieces here:

  • People dig deep. As a simple example, here is an ongoing series of posts at XDA where they dig deep into the code for various Android app updates to see what they can find. Other people go much deeper, many want to be able to find bad things against Facebook, and they always come up empty.
  • Notification lights. Android and iPhone both have system-level notifications for microphone access. For this to work, Facebook would either need to have found a way to get around that on both operating systems, or they struck super-secret deals with both companies to allow them to surreptitiously listen in on everything.
  • Packet sniffing. All data on the internet travels in “packets”, and it’s fairly easy to watch those packets on your network to see where they’re going. By watching (“sniffing”) where the packets are going, you can see when companies are mysteriously sending data from your devices to their servers. People have used this technique to try to catch Facebook, and again have come up with nothing.

2. They’re still not great listeners

Every night before I head up to bed, I tell my Google Home to “turn off my home office lights”. The house is dead quiet, I stand right in front the speaker, speak carefully, and it still gets it wrong once a week or so. The listening skills of these devices is amazingly good, but far from perfect. If this speaker can’t understand one clear intentional statement in a quiet room, I find it hard to believe that Facebook is going to pick up the full story among a bunch of friends in a noisy restaurant to serve perfectly targeted ads the next day.

3. You see 5-10k ads/day

Studies show that you generally see between 5,000 – 10,000 ads every day, and that contributes to this issue. We’re very used to tuning them out, so we generally don’t really notice most of them. That is, until a friend mentions something and the same ad pops up again, but this time you notice it and become alarmed. I attribute that to the Baader-Meinhof effect, as I dug into a few years ago.

(sources: PPC Protect says 6-10k/day, Clario says 5,000+/day, Small Biz Trends says 6,500-11,000/day, and Whoofey says up to 10,000/day)

4. The truth is worse

In that same article about Baader-Meinhof, I also shared an episode of the “Reply All” podcast where they dug into this. While Facebook and Google aren’t literally actively listening, the truth is perhaps more scary because they have a lot of information about you. They know what you purchased recently, what you look at online, and where you’re going. Connecting that with your friends (since they know when you’re together), they can make some pretty good guesses at what you might be interested in.

Privacy is something you should certainly be paying attention to, but I’m convinced that Google and Facebook aren’t listening to you — they’re not willing to risk getting caught, and they don’t really need to listen anyhow. If you want to try to be a bit more secure, my post about the Freedom Phone shows some good places to start (which, ironically, is certainly not with the Freedom Phone itself).

Email isn’t dead yet

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Every few years we hear that “email is finally dead”. It’s not.

Social media, SEO, and digital ads can be great ways to help promote your business, but lowly email still generally has (by far) the best return on investment. According to a recent study from some top companies:

The study showed that email-marketing ROI is currently calculated to be 4,400%, or about $44 return on every dollar you spend in your marketing campaign.

There are two big reasons why email is still huge, and why it’s not likely to go away any time soon:

  1. Everyone has it. Some people check it more often than others, but no one can escape it. By comparison, your friends, colleagues and customers are spread around various social networks, with things fragmenting a bit more every day. In some ways I still wish that “everyone” was on Facebook, but they’re not and they’re not all going to come back.
  2. It’s an open protocol. If you don’t like Facebook and you leave for Parler, you can no longer talk to people on Facebook. If you don’t like Gmail and leave for ProtonMail, you can still email 100% of the people you could before. Yeah, changing your address is a bit of a pain, but you’re not cut off from anyone. The core tenets of email make sure that’s possible.

Email has challenges, for sure, but I don’t see either of those items changing anytime soon. This is why I’m bullish on services like TogetherLetters, which use email as their glue. I worry that those kinds of services may not take off quickly enough due to user laziness (“it’s just easier to create a Facebook group”), but as social media continues to slowly splinter into separate apps, email will likely remain the one place that you can reach everyone.

The right tool for the right job

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Over the past year or so, I’ve seen Google release two products that make subtle unexpected use of technology in brilliant ways.

The first is Google Stadia, their streaming video game service. I talked about it a few years ago, and it’s indeed quite excellent! What makes it interesting for this post is the way the controller works. Most video game controllers, like on a PlayStation or Xbox, use Bluetooth to connect to the system. It’s a great way to connect and works well.

Stadia, on the other hand, uses wifi. At first blush, that seems really weird, but it’s actually very smart. The biggest potential issue with Stadia is latency. When you press the “jump” button on your controller, that button press has to go all the way back to Google, where they press “jump” on their server, and then they stream that video to your TV. It happens amazingly fast, but it’s clearly much different than the “jump” command just having to go across the room to your PS5 and then on to the TV.

Since your “jump” command eventually needs to get out on the internet to get the data to Google, having them connect to wifi saves a step (and some of that precious time). The controller can issue the jump command directly to the internet, whereas a Bluetooth controller would pass that info along to your Chromecast or computer first, and then send it out. It’s a smart move by Google to shave a few milliseconds.

The other is a more recent Google product, their Google TV device. It’s essentially a fancy Chromecast, and it includes a remote control. However, unlike most remote controls, this one uses Bluetooth instead of IR (infrared). This means that you can press the buttons on the remote without having to point it at your TV. It’s a subtle change, but pretty helpful. In fairness, Apple TV has been doing this for a long time as well, but this is my first experience with a remote like that.

That’s the way we’ve always done it

Essentially every wireless game controller has used Bluetooth, and every remote control has used IR. Google decided that “the way we’ve always done it” isn’t always the best way, and these two subtle moves show why. Kudos to them and Apple for these kinds of changes, and it’s a good reminder to always be thinking about what might really be the best option for that next project.

Episode Zero

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Over the past few years, it’s become popular for brand new podcasts to first publish an “Episode 0”, or something like “Introducing the xx podcast”. While introducing your podcast isn’t a bad idea, that’s not the real purpose of these initial episodes. Consistency is.

The way they were built, with the exception of some shows like Joe Rogan, podcasts use the open RSS format to share their episodes. This means any podcast player out there could find the feed for your show and offer it to their listeners, which is a great thing. However, given the huge number of podcasts out there, those players aren’t just randomly finding shows and adding them — you need to request to be added, and then you need to wait. Apple Podcasts is generally the biggest one to get into, as it powers many other apps, but it can take a few weeks to get accepted.

The other challenge is that places like Apple Podcasts won’t accept a show that doesn’t have any episodes. You need to publish at least one episode before you can apply to be added, and then you need to wait a few weeks for approval. As a result, it can be a messy few weeks trying to get approved by all of the major podcast apps (including others like Google Podcasts, Spotify, etc).

If you produce “Episode 1” at the beginning, you can’t really promote it for a while, as some of your potential audience might be able to download it, and others can’t. With “Episode 0”, you never really promote that episode. You publish it, start getting accepted to the various apps, and then you can hit the ground running with your real “Episode 1” a few weeks later.

It’s kind of an awkward way to do it, but it works well. If you’re planning to launch a podcast, I encourage you to create a super short intro episode, get it out into the world, and then focus your efforts on a proper promotion for your first true episode a few weeks later.

The Freedom Phone is asking for trouble

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There’s a new phone on the market called the “Freedom Phone”, and the basic idea behind it is solid. It’s a phone that gives you more privacy and less of the tracking from companies like Google and Apple, and I think most of us can agree that’s a good thing. The problem is that the phone simply doesn’t do that.

First, it’s still running a version of Google’s Android operating system. It’s hard to build a new phone operating system from scratch, for sure, but using Google’s is a tough angle to start from if you’re trying to show how bad Google is. Plus, you still need to get service through Verizon or AT&T or similar. Those folks are essentially impossible to escape when it comes to mobile phones, but they can still watch everything you do.

Taking it further, though, this phone is just the UMIDIGI A9 Pro, rebranded as the “Freedom Phone” with some different apps preloaded, and being sold for 4x the cost. (note: it’s been confirmed that it’s a UMIDIGI phone, though whether it’s the exact same specs as the A9 Pro is still being uncovered). If you want privacy, buying a cheap phone from a Chinese manufacturer isn’t likely the best way to go.

The App Store

Perhaps of greater concern is the app store on the phone, and their hard push to make it completely uncensored. This means it will likely find plenty of spam and malware in the store soon, but we’ll see what happens.

You can find plenty of articles about this phone, but here are two good ones to start with:

So what to do?

If you’re wanting privacy, and the Freedom Phone isn’t a good solution, what should you do? You have a few good choices.

First, you can replicate pretty much all of the privacy-focused features on your own phone in a matter of minutes. Use Signal for messaging, DuckDuckGo for search, and Brave for browsing. Those apps are very privacy focused, and available to all Android and iPhone users already.

If the “censored” apps are a concern (like when Parler was removed from the Google Play Store), every Android phone allows you to sideload apps, so you’re never limited anyhow. Sideloading comes with risks, though, so be careful if you go down that road.

If you really want to be secure, you can use a PinePhone instead. It uses a custom Linux-based operating system (not a trace of Google or Apple in there), and is likely the best bet for privacy-minded folks. With that custom OS and privacy comes some big downsides, though. In particular, most of your apps aren’t available on there — that’s the cost you need to be willing to pay.

Our diminishing privacy online is a major problem, and something that needs to be continually addressed, but this new phone is certainly not the answer.

Dash cams are like computer backups

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Over the years, most of us have had a bad data loss of some kind or another. The Word doc that you wrote your paper on got corrupted. The hard drive for your computer crashed with a lot of photos on it. Things happen.

In most of those cases, it’s a bit of a wake-up call to start keeping better backups. I’m finding a similar train of thought happening with dash cams; they can go from “nice to have” to “why didn’t I have one?” right after an accident where facts are disputed.

I’ve had one in my car for about six years now, and it’s helped a bit. I’ve been rear-ended twice in that time, and while my camera only faces forward, it still shows that I was at a complete stop when I was hit, removing any doubt that I might somehow be at fault. That said, in both cases the other party admitted fault and the footage wasn’t necessary.

There’s also a few times I’ve captured really bad drivers in our area, like this:

It might be super helpful someday, and it might not

Like a regular backup of your computer, having a dash cam could prove to be incredibly useful one day, or you might never need it. While I keep great backups of my computer files, I’ve not needed any of those backups in about 15 years. I’m going to keep doing it, because you never know what next week might bring.

If you are looking to try a dash cam, I’m using this Garmin one right now, and it works well. It’s very small, but what I really like is that I can wirelessly copy videos to my phone, instead of having to take the MicroSD card inside and connect that way. The transfer is bit slow and clunky, but it’s not too bad. Ideally I’d like a dash cam that captures the rear view as well, but I haven’t gone there yet.

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Just like with computer backups, I encourage you to not wait until you wish you had one. Spend a few dollars and get one today, and you might be super glad you did in the future.