Bring Your Own Charger

The USB chargers provided complimentary with new electronics are bad.¹ The bricks are slow and/or bulky, but even if by some miracle they aren't, they only take one cable. As soon as you have two devices to charge, it's a waste of outlet space. It can be tolerable if you only have one charging setup in a fixed location with abundant power strips, but it's still going to be a hassle to manage.

Laptop chargers are even worse. Bricks have been getting smaller, but you either get a comedically large charger which falls out of outlets and blocks the other sockets, or a two-parter which forces you to manage two cables and an extra brick, and requires you find a resting spot for the brick every time you want to plug in.

Get a reputable GaN charger instead. At the size of a laptop charger you can get something with enough speed and ports to more than charge everything you use daily simultaneously, or downgrade to a phone-size which will still be powerful enough to fully replace your laptop charger. It won't be the cheapest, and because of the design tradeoffs made for compactness they'll have shorter lifespans as well, but that's a cost I'm happy to pay for something I use multiple times daily. Life is too short to be stressed about your electronics dying.

You might want better cables as well. The ideal world is as few cables as possible, as short as possible.² Stock charging cables probably have acceptable charging speeds (unlike the bricks they come with), but you almost certainly need a data cable, and potentially Thunderbolt or DisplayPort as well.

How's the data transfer speed on your cables? You might be able to find a spec sheet but they're definitely not labeled on the cable, which is the only thing that matters.

Get a couple quality braided cables with more capacity than you could possibly need and ditch the rest. Life is also too short to check which unlabeled cable is the good one.

- Rew

Nightly Notes

Seriously, having the extra port matters. It's not for only your devices, it's being able to top up a friend. I wouldn't bother to carry around another brick for someone with a moderately low battery, but it's no trouble at all to bring one more cable to the brick I'm already using. I like being able to help people in those little ways.

Evidently by the number of posts I think more about charging than I did a few years ago, even though my goal is to think about charging as little as possible. But, it's mostly positive these days. Every time I plug in I'm reminded of how much more I used to deal with daily, and how much less it is now.

Is it so bad to be happy at the little changes?

Anyway.

End of the month again. Feels like it flew straight by me. I'm really looking forward to a change of pace.

- Rew