Tag: Blaugust

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I had a migraine this morning that really threw me for a loop. Then I spent the afternoon and evening dealing with a different kind of headache: getting my phone number transferred to a new(ish) phone.

We picked up a Fairphone 4 a few years ago as sort of a hedge in case the electronics industry and/or tariffs and/or international trade went bonkers and one of our phones died. (We weren’t expecting all three.) The teenager used it for a bit before we bought him a phone that was closer to what he actually wanted to use. So the Fairphone returned to the back bench, so to speak.

A cell phone held in a hand, showing the California DMV website. A bright magenta line is running vertically down the entire screen, including the status bar at the top and the onscreen buttons at the bottom.Today, a bright vertical magenta line appeared on my Pixel 5’s screen. I’d noticed it was running hot lately, and when I pulled it out of the case, sure enough it had started bulging.

I know it’s old. I’ve been trying to get as much use out of it as I can, which, well, I guess I have.

(Edit: added photo)

I do not like spicy pillows, Sam I Am.

So I reset the Fairphone and started setting up the most important apps: authenticator, password manager, stuff like that. And I set about unlocking the SIM protection on my phone number and got ready to call customer service.

I knew from experience that the Fairphone 4 works fine on T-Mobile’s US network, but their apps don’t know how to activate the e-sim. So I was prepared to talk someone through.

But because we’d been swapping back and forth between phones, the sim was still registered as attached to the teen’s number, even though the number is actually pointing to his current phone. It took over two hours (at least 45 minutes of that on hold) and three levels of escalation to first figure out that’s what the problem was, and then find someone with the access to fix it.

They did finally get it all sorted out, but it was not the way I wanted to spend my afternoon.

(And when I let the old phone cool off, the screen went back to normal, though it’s still bulging.)

Edge-on view of the phone showing that the glass screen is splitting away from the plastic case.

And to top it off, Nextcloud’s photo uploading has stopped working reliably, so I have to go through the last couple months of photos and make sure I have everything copied over. I went through some of them tonight, and need to get the rest…soon.

For now, I’ve turned the old phone off completely overnight.

Once I’ve got the photos transferred, I should figure out whether it’s worth repurposing the device with a new battery or just running it without one. And then dispose of the fire hazard.

Blaugust 2026: My Posts

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I know, I’m already doing 100 Days To Offload. And I’m on track! I’ve written 24 posts in the last two months, so I’m actually ahead! But a few days ago I found out about Blaugust, a challenge to publish daily and/or write 31 posts in the month of August.

I can’t resist the wordplay in the name!

100 Days doesn’t have any set themes, and Blaugust’s themes are optional. And apparently it’s a fairly laid-back challenge, so if I miss a day I don’t need to drop out.

So what the heck: I’ll aim for 31 posts this month and see how far I get.

Besides, it’ll help motivate me to catch up on book reviews.

As with 100 Days, for Blaugust I intend to include any new or substantially rewritten page on my site, not just the ones that show up here in the reverse-chronological feed. The way I see it, what matters is less the specifics of what counts as a blog, and more that I’m writing new stuff on a regular basis and putting it out there on my own website, not on corporate social media.

Time to start my Blaugust post list:

  1. This post.
  2. Legends of Amberland (game review)
  3. First the Migraine, Then the Headache
  4. FairEmail (app review)
  5. Grumbling about Planned Obsolescence
  6. Where to Put Your Permalink
  7. What is rel="bookmark"?
  8. TIL about Hybrid MBR/GUID Partitions
  9. Starfleet vs. Jean Valjean?
  10. The Prestige
  11. Eulogy for the Pixel 5
  12. Canon Camera Connect
  13. To Each This World (book review)
  14. Reusing the Sign: Com-On-Inn
  15. The Confidence Game (Maria Konnikova) (book review)
  16. Regarding Empathy
  17. Lunar Eclipse vs. Summer Gloom
  18. Sometimes Reality is Unrealistic
  19. A Month With The Fairphone 4
  20. A Month With /e/OS

September 1 Update

Well, I didn’t manage daily blogging past day 12, didn’t manage 31 posts in the month, and didn’t manage to kickstart my book review backlog as I’d hoped. I did manage to review two books I’d just read and a game I’d just finished, and I did finish a few older drafts.

But the bulk of what I wrote ended up being about tech troubles: 6 posts about my dying phone and replacing it, and another about an invisible disk partition, make up fully a third of this month’s posts. More if you include the rabbit-hole investigating a stock image that looked like AI but wasn’t.

I wanted to write about something else. And I got partway through some drafts. And then offline complications got in the way. And I never quite got back on track. Apparently even with a blogging challenge, I still don’t feel like posting filler just to post something.

On the last day I decided I didn’t have time to write about the busy weekend, but I could at least polish up the drafts I’d been working on all month about the new phone and its OS. I still want to write more about its camera, and include some photos, but that’ll have to wait for an update. And yes, this update probably could have been post 21 if I’d written it last night, but having missed the deadline, it felt more appropriate to include it here, so all my writing about this year’s Blaugust would be in one place.

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