Today is my birthday; I celebrated by staying off social media all day so far. It’s been relaxing.

I visited the Apple Store so they could clean out the USB-C port in my iPhone; of course I couldn’t resist looking at the new iPhones while I was waiting, but I left with my trusty iPhone 15 Pro and no regrets.

I also stopped by the Los Gatos Library to pick up the ESP32 case I had them print for me on their 3D printer.

And I took advantage of my Starbucks birthday reward for the first time in a few years – it was easier when it was valid for a week on either side of my birthday instead of only being valid on the day itself.

I should stay off social media more often…but I’m going to head over to Facebook now to wish my birthday buddies a Happy Birthday while it’s still the right day!

I may have made a few mistakes recently when it comes to technology.

I’d had an iPad Pro for several years and thought it was too heavy and awkward, so I traded it in for a new iPad mini 7th generation…which I then gave to Diane in exchange for her iPad mini 6th generation (she does a lot of photo editing on her iPad and wanted the Clean Up feature of Apple Intelligence, which the 6th generation doesn’t have).

I soon discovered that the screen of an iPad mini is truly *mini*, and found it less comfortable for reading than I had hoped. And I no longer had a hardware keyboard, which was awkward when I needed to type more than a few sentences.

So today, I went to Best Buy and traded it in, buying a just-plain-iPad (A16) and a Logitech Combo Touch keyboard folio. My hope is that it’ll have enough oomph to let me blog when we travel without carrying my MacBook Air; this post is an attempt at doing just that. I’ll see how things go when I have a lot of photos to edit and include, especially photos from my “big” camera.

The other tech mistake I made today was accepting Amazon’s nags to allow my Echo Show to upgrade to “Alexa+”. It’s got a much more annoyingly enthusiastic voice; it reminds me of Eddie, the shipboard computer in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its Genuine People Personality. And it’s stupid, as shown by the question it posed in the photo below.