Demoting the Phone and Other Updates

Typically I buy refurbished or heavily discounted phones. Not cheap ones, mind you, but flagships from a year or two ago. The phone I'm currently using is a Samsung Galaxy Fold 3. I got it for a steal a while back, but found myself almost never using the larger inner screen. A week or so ago, I took my case off to clean the back and the back of the phone came off, too. Everything is in tact, no battery swelling, so likely just adhesive failure and not a big deal. But I've been thinking about getting a new phone for a while, so this started the hunt. Then, the next day, I dropped my phone on gravel and one of the pieces hit perfectly between the screen protector and the case, cracking both the protector and the phone itself. See below for pictures. This solified that I'll get a new phone.
At first, I realized I missed using the S Pen on my old Samsung Galaxy Note 9, so I was looking into the S's Ultra series and had my eyes set on the Galaxy S24 Ultra. A large beast of a phone that would do everything I wanted. I've always been an Android power user, sideloading apps, utlizing widgets, etc, so it just made sense. But then I got to thinking... There was a time I seriously considered the Unihertz Jelly Star; a tiny Android phone with just a 3 inch screen. And more recently, the BigMe HiBreak Pro; a phone that has an E-ink display. Both were considered just to make my phone less important in my life. Both avoided due to not being super practical. The Jelly Star wouldn't get updates for bugs and such most likely and would be a little too small. And the HiBreak likely wouldn't support the right phone signal bands in my area so service would be poor. 
So, the phone I decided to go with is an iPhone 13 Mini. I don't have it yet, but it is on the way. I never thought I'd even try Apple, but I feel like this is the only way I'll transition the phone into the tool it belongs, instead of being an addiction. I ordered a watch as well, as my Galaxy watch isn't compatible with iPhones. But all in all, the cost is roughly half of what I was looking at for the S24 Ultra. First order of business when it arrives will be migrating the essentials: banking, credit cards, authenticators, and so on... Making sure they all work. After verifying those, I'll move set up communication, calendars, podcasts, and music. Then my SIM card. It'll be mostly a fresh start - no games. I know TikTok and Reddit will end up on it, but I plan to be far more deliberate about the tiem spent on them. Actually using the Digital Wellbeing utilities baked into phones and putting it down while picking up my Kindle to read more. Which is something I don't think I'll be good at in the Android ecosystem. Apple locks things down more, so there's less to go and discover/try. Plus, worst case, this experiment lasts a month or two and I switch back. Best case, I stay off my phone a lot more and learn to enjoy life with one less addiction. I have the Steam Deck for games, Kindle for reading, laptop for most other things, etc...

Speaking of the Steam Deck, I did purchase a headset that should be able to mix audio from two different sources. This means I should be able to connect it to both the Steam Deck and the laptop. That way, I can play games with no audio lag while listening to music and/or talk in a Discord voice channel on the laptop. I've already set up music to work with PhantomBot and I think I have OBS set up properly to stream the music, but not record it in the VODs - so if I post anything, there shouldn't be any copyrighted music in it. I did a small trial (without the headset), but the music was a little choppy, so I may have to do some more tinkering or scrap the music idea. We'll see.

My girls are doing great! Happy and healthy. Sleeping through the nights. Being normal toddlers. My three year old is in that stage where she's asking more and more questions and it's interesting to hear. Hard to answer, sometimes, though! Then my two year old just likes to ask "Why?" They're both great kids. My dog, Bianca, is probably close to ten years old and is a mix of who knows what, but she's a small/medium sized dog. See below for a picture of her pretending to be a chicken. They love her and she puts up with them very well. My youngest likes to put blankets on her. It's fun to watch.

Getting a little more progress done at the old house. Today, I removed everything from the upstairs in the shed and took it home. Except for some old swords/knives I do not have a place for currently. I'll figure out something for those later. All that's left is clearing out the bottom floor, which should be do-able this weekend, and moving the things I think someone may want to the front of the storage unit I've rented. After that, cleaning, painting, and general repairs. I've decided I'm going to rent a mini-excavator to dig the gray water line/tank I need to replace. I didn't realize it's usually only a few hundred to rent one and that would save my family's backs from having to dig and definitely allow it to be knocked out a lot quicker.

I also recently pulled out an iPad Mini 4 I bought years ago for... some reason I don't remember. Possibly just the game FTL. I don't know. But I'm converting it into a digital recipe book using the app Paprika. I haven't loaded much into it yet, but I did stick a magsafe ring on the back of its case and put a magsafe mount above my sink for ease of use. I think that'll be a great use for it while I work on getting my cooking back into full swing after this move. Plus, it'll make making shopping lists easy. 

For this site, I've replaced the "Contact Me" page with a "Links" page and will try to make it a little more fancy later on.