A few weeks ago, I got an iPhone 6+.  I am not a hard core user of the phone, but I do use it.  Starting with my iPhone 5, I would turn off a lot of background tasks to improve battery life.  Well, the big battery in the 6+ really takes it to another level.  I had noticed that some nights I don’t need to charge it (even while running my sleep tracker overnight).  So I decided to not run it to see how long it would go.  Below is my first attempt.  I had a few hours of calls on the phone, including some speakerphone use.  Didn’t play much music, but did some browsing, messaging, took photos, etc.  All day Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday on one charge.  I could get used to this kind of battery life!

Beatrix has been bugging us about wanting to plant some flowers, so we bought her a planter, and I went with her over to Houston Garden Center.  Beatrix picked out some celosia and zinnias.  And of course, she needed some gardening gloves.  We got way too much, so now I need to buy a couple more planters.  I told her that I suspected that was part of her plan, and she just laughed.

Stylish gardening gloves

Too many flowers

First phase of planting done

Honestly, I am not the biggest fan of Flash. 90% of the time I see it just used for annoying ads. It’s always killing my browser, or pegging the CPU, at least until I install Flash blockers. (Of course, it might not help that I often have 50 tabs open.) And I always have issues with it under Linux.

For the past week I’ve been doing a lot of surfing with my iPad and, honestly, lack of Flash is not so bad. It’s not as bad as trying to surf with Netscape / Mozilla under Linux in the, say, late 90’s / early 2000’s. Always loved those sites that were “optimized” for Internet Explorer. (Read: they used non standard HTML that wouldn’t work with anything else, or, horrors, ActiveX or, as I used to call it at the time, CaptiveX.)

My favorite moment back then: hitting a web site that lectured me that I needed to install Internet Explorer to view the site. I was. From an iPaq running – wait for it – Internet Explorer. Epic fail.

Of course back then browsing from a mobile device was a lot less than mainstream.

Which brings me to tonight’s amusing moment. Went to Ikea’s website and they had a big graphic saying I needed Flash to view that particular content and, not to worry, it was easy to install. Since I was on my iPad, by “easy” I guess they mean “impossible”. Oh well. Luckily I’m able to view much of the rest of the site… So far.