December Daily: Devices

china_shop - Top five devices/appliances/bluetooth thingies/whatever :-)

Am I a thingies person? I guess I am.

5. It is literally unimaginable to me that there was ever a time when I didn't have a smartphone. But I mean it's not that interesting, right? I love my smartphone exactly the same way everybody loves their smartphone. Except that the kidlet tells me I spend more time than average telling it, "No, you may not have that permission, and I guess it's time to go through my preferences and deny permissions that you haven't even asked for yet."

4. I have a red Kitchenaid mixer [cue pause while I reflexively open a new tab and check capitalization, because this is something I do at work and it has become an unbreakable habit) KitchenAid mixer, which I love. For many years I had an off-white one that my parents bought at an auction somewhere, but then I was kneading bread with it and it literally walked itself off the counter and hit the floor so hard that the grounding prong of the plug bent into a curve and couldn't be plugged in any more. It had a more dramatic death than most of my possessions have.

3. A long time ago I was thinking about getting a Bose speaker to play music off my iPod and Consumer Reports said I could save a lot of money by buying an Altec Lansing speaker instead. This was before Bluetooth, so it had a well to prop your iPod in, which contained a connector that would fit into the port of one style of iPod, and then a bag of other connectors to swap in for different styles of iPods -- none of which exist any more. But fortunately the aux cable is forever.

2. This year I bought a two-part keyboard with risers in the middle, so I can set it up so each part tilts outward and rotates outward. My wrists are very happy with this.

1. When they sent us to work from home at the start of the quarantine, I was literally working at my kitchen table, and the closest I could come to an ergonomic setup was to pile a bunch of cushions on the folding chair I sat on to raise me up a bit. Eventually they let us come and bring home our chairs, but the desks were attached to cubicles. I went looking for a work desk with a keyboard tray, and the one I liked best had a motor to raise and lower it. "Oh, that's a silly feature," I thought. "I'll use that once to get the height right and then I'll never touch it again."

Friends, I use that desktop-moving motor multiple times every day. I raise my desktop when work is over so my desk looks out of the way and my living room can stop being an office and go back to being a living room. I adjust it when we're using the laptop + monitor to watch television. I raise my monitor when I have to be in a meeting with the camera on, so I can get that flattering selfie height. (I also roll the desk around so you see my couch and my shelves and my fetching little display of pottery bowls and winter squash, rather than seeing the mess of my table and the door into the hallway where at any moment a newly awakened kidlet may shamble past on their way to the shower.)





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