Ideas from Mark Stout

Four weeks before the Pixel 4a's rumored announcement date my Pixel XL OG died, as I described in my last post. I really didn't want a non-Pixel phone so I waited for the Pixel 4a announcement. Thankfully it was made on August 3rd, the rumored date. I ordered within minutes of its appearance on the Google Play Store and it arrived on 8/19.  This is an awesome phone. At $350 it has 80% of the value of $1400 dollar phones. At that 20%, are things I do not care about. This review summarizes my feelings well. And in adding apps to my new phone, I just found out Automagic has stopped development. That is sad. It was my go-to automation tool for making my own widgets and more.  So I'm biting the bullet and finally learning Tasker. I had bought it years ago, but found the learning curve steeper than I wanted to climb.  It is still steep but there are now videos and more help documents, and I've already had several "ah-ha, that's how it works" moments in the firs

Funny how tech priorities change. In the first 30 years I lived from one PC to another. Starting with a Radio Shack Model I, then an IBM PC, then a long, long succession of PC compatibles; each faster than the last with ever increasing hard drives. The change from one PC to a new one was a sea change. Each so much faster and smoother. Now, I've been content with a laptop built in 2013. It has an i7 processor and 12 gigabytes of memory, so performance wise it is fine. I admire my foresight then to go big.  I do not game play or do high end video processing. I rarely use it as a laptop. Its hooked to two monitors and Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.  My sole tweak to my home setup when quarantine and working from home started in March was a docking station so I could switch easily from work laptop to personal laptop. If I covet anything, its more and larger monitors. You can't go too large, or too many. After the fever of wanting a new PC passed from a every two year event, to three