Techy odds and ends

In a word - well, 8 words, actually - because I respect the privacy of my friends. When it comes to WhatsApp, my contacts can be broken down into two main groups: those who use WhatsApp already and those who don't. Those who do use WhatsApp have already handed over their contact details voluntarily to Meta, WhatsApp's parent company. Those who don't use WhatsApp have not. Now, WhatsApp is almost unusable without access to the contacts stored in your phone. It can't let you choose the recipient of the message you want to send by tapping on their name from the contacts, you have to find and enter their number manually. Nor can it identify the sender of a message that you received without cross-referencing it with the numbers in your contacts. If given access to your contacts, WhatsApp will upload them to Meta to check whether any of them are already WhatsApp users. Let me repeat that: WhatsApp will upload the details of all of your contacts to Meta. What right ...

When smartphones started being a “thing” I went for SymbianOS with the famous Nokia N95. A few more Symbian devices and one MeeGo device later, I remained loyal to Nokia and used a Lumia 1020 powered by Windows Phone, but we all know what happened to that operating system. I think it was around 2014 that I was in the market for a new phone. At the time there were countless “dumb” phones that only had a fraction of the Lumia 1020’s capability. The only way I was going to get close was with a smartphone and at the time there were two major options: iPhone 5 or 6 on one hand and Android phones running Android Kitkat on the other. I hadn’t paid much attention to iPhones having remembered how slow they were to adopt 3G connectivity, so I went to Android and bought an LG G3. I’ve been using Android phones since then. Only recently - within the last month - have I become curious about how green the grass is on the other side and I bought a refurbished iPhone 15 Pro from Apple 3 weeks ago. ...

I’m revising my position on the eSIM vs. pSIM debate. Until now, I was strongly against eSIM. Nothing is simpler than taking a physical SIM (pSIM) out of one phone and sticking it in another. You can do it whenever you want and you don’t need your network’s blessing. The only down-side is a security risk: if someone steals your phone they can whip the SIM out of it to disconnect it from the mobile network so you can’t trace it. They can’t do that with an eSIM and they need to be able to unlock the phone to take it offline. Either that or break it, which defeats the purpose of stealing it in the first place. Mobile networks are beginning to cotton on to the fact that their customers don’t want to give up this freedom to chop and change phones whenever they want. Customers vote with their wallets when they see something they don’t like, so the networks are making things easier for them. The network that I was using only started supporting eSIM at all in August 2025 and even then, onl...

Why this post? The number of "Will this charger work with my phone?" or "Will I damage my battery using this charger?" posts that you see in public fora such as Reddit is quite disturbing. It shows a global lack of understanding of the basic fundamentals that everyone should know to prolong the life of their devices and of themselves in some cases. I'm hoping to address some of the misconceptions out there in the wild. Charging Protocols Brief history Back in the "old" days there were no charging protocols, or at least there was nothing standard. Each manufacturer would do its own thing with different charging connectors and different chargers providing different voltages. Even different products from the same manufacturer would have different charging requirements leading to people having drawers full of different chargers. Then came USB. The USB 2.0 (introduced in 2000) type A outlet on laptop and desktop computers was a conve...