23 September 2025

New Phone

I'm not one who needs the newest phone every year. I tend to go four to five years between refreshes. The improvements in hardware, and the software that takes advantage of that newer hardware have a much bigger impact over that time scale than the incremental speed/capability bumps that annual phone replacements bring. So this year I traded in my iPhone 13 for a 17. Not a pro, not a pro max, and certainly not an Air. But more storage and much more capable CPU as well as improved battery life make it a worthwhile update for me at this time.

The phone arrived on Friday last, and it took the better part of a few hours to get things re-aligned properly, since it's used as an authentication device for personal and business purposes. One thing I learned - best to remove all the media from the old phone before attempting the phone-to-phone migration. First pass, it was going to take six hours to migrate everything between adjacent phones. After removing the media and restarting the onboarding process, it was about half an hour for the initial transfer, then resyncing the media from Mac to new phone took another ... 45-ish minutes. So that's a win I have to remember a few years down the road. 

But then on Saturday morning, I climbed into the Subi to do the weekly shopping, and realized I'd missed something. The car is a few years old, and only has USB-A connections to use for CarPlay. And all I have is a bunch of soon-to-be-redundant USB-A to Lightning cables. Marcia's phone is the last bit of Lighting port gear we have in the house, and she'll probably only have that for another year or two before it's time to upgrade hers. I went to a couple of the local retailers in hopes of finding the correct cable, but no joy. I found a cable with the right ends on them at Best Buy, carefully unpacked and tested right there - sort-of-connected, but didn't even seem to make a reliable charging connection, and kept bouncing in and out of CarPlay.

The solution: the Anker USB-A to USB-C Cable (3 ft, Upcycled-Braided), Model Number: A82G2 - I bought a couple of those from Amazon. Note that in the title description, it says "Anker Car CarPlay Cable for iPhone 17..."  The Anker store on Amazon has that and one other CarPlay capable cable, but I'm a fan of the braided cable covers for durability.

The cables arrived this afternoon, and worked instantly and reliably in both the Subi and the F-150. I'm pleased to recommend that Anker cable.

Winterizing

One of the things I learned quickly once we moved north is that the earlier you start planning for and preparing for winter, the better things will be. Don't buy firewood or fuel oil late in the fall, prices will have gone up significantly. By early September, I was stocked up on all the house-heating consumables.

In early July, I'd placed my order for a couple of cords of seasoned firewood, expecting it to arrive sometime in September, as it has in years past. But they had good stock and an opening in the driver's schedule, so I was to expect the delivery in about five days. That... that I wasn't quite ready for. 

Each year past, I've cobbled something together (or fixed what I'd done the year before) to hold the firewood stacked in the sub-garage, so it can finish drying (even seasoned firewood benefits from being stacked out of the weather) But using scraps of siding and strapping really was never robust enough to hold the firewood in place, and I had to clean up a couple of stack collapses over the past winter. So it was time to build a new, better rack that could hold more than two cords of wood. But instead of a couple of months to deal with it, I had days.

So I did a sketch on notepaper of what I wanted to build, then headed over to Lowes and picked up some PT 2x4 and some untreated 2x4 framing lumber, and the next day set to building a firewood rack. Had to clean up some of the sub-garage first, so I actually built the rack on the day the truck dropped the firewood, and this is what I built:

The next couple of days, I stacked in the firewood, and this is enough to get us through the winter plus a little...