iPhone 5S - Does it have the resources to upgrade to IOS9? Will it run faster or slower? Will the batteries last longer for somebody who mainly does phone calls and texts?

I'm in a 32-unit condo. Yes, we've got an HOA, but it's just us. We've occasionally hired management companies to do stuff for us, but only when it made sense. And yeah, we've occasionally gotten into arguments, like the current one about what trees need to be cut down (the cheapskate builder who built the place in the 70s did things like planting redwoods and some fast-growing trees right next to the building, so we're having problems with roots and roofs that stay wet all the time, but they are nice for shade. And we do occasionally have people who get grumpy about the monthly fees, but the accountant is one of the residents, you can see all the numbers, and possibly we need to be putting even more into some of the maintenance funds than we do.

I live in a condo. It was built in the 1970s, with the kind of high quality building where right angles weren't really a requirement, just kind of a suggestion, cement subfloor needed to be smooth enough to cover with carpet, not actually good enough to replace with wood later, redwoods and other trees were planted too near the buildings so we're having root problems, etc. Even though some of the folks have been here since the beginning (and it's only a 32-unit complex), nobody's got a bloody clue where lots of the wiring and plumbing is. We know where a few parts of it are, but how the plumbing or electricity gets between the upstairs and downstairs units is mostly a mystery, and when the cable company wanted to replace the old analog system with digital, they just ran new cables on the outside of the building and made holes because they couldn't figure out what was going on inside (so I've got some really convenient cable jacks that aren't on the new system.)

But yeah, conduit is the way to future-proof any communication technology that does need wires. Also, heating/cooling ducts can be really useful (both for themselves, and for adding in wire later if you didn't have conduit.) I currently live in a part of California that has lots of buildings with electric heat (lowest upfront cost to the builder, and my annual heat costs are higher than when I lived somewhere with actual winter), and we don't really know how the 220V line gets from the thermostat to the heater, and don't want to rip out the ceiling and walls to trace it. (Before that I lived in a house with steam radiators, which I liked, but there wasn't a way to put in central A/C.)

Putting in more sockets along the walls than your current electrical code calls for is usually a win, as is home-running them all to the electrical box if you can. I needed more power upstairs, and we had to rip out a bunch of bathroom wall and ceiling to run the cables from the circuit breaker box. Also, you should put in a circuit breaker box that's big enough to add a bunch of random things later, instead of one that just barely has room for the initial wiring.

Some applications care about having nearly 1.5 volts, and this device will make a disposable battery last a lot longer for them; I've had a few electronic or electro-mechanical devices that got grumpy about only getting 1.2 volts from NiMH, so I asked these guys about it.

Their response was that it'll boost the voltage just fine, but may be bad for the battery's life, because they really don't like being drained too low, and the Batteriser is designed to suck every bit of power it can out of a disposable battery, not to treat a rechargeable battery nicely.

Lithium-Ion batteries are even more picky, and need special control circuitry that'll cut off the power if the battery's voltage gets too low (and also cut off charging if it gets too high.) NiMH aren't as picky about it, but you can still shorten their useful life a lot if you mistreat them; back when I was using a lot of them, I'd typically only get 5-10 full charge/discharge cycles from one if I wasn't careful. They could make a model that worked with NiMH if they wanted too, but it'd probably cost them a few cents more in circuitry, and they're trying to make a low-cost retail device.

The best solution I found to that problem was Nickel-Zinc rechargeable batteries, which have a chemistry that puts out 1.6 volts, so almost all of the devices that are picky about voltage are really happy with them, and capacity was similar to NiMH. Unfortunately, they seem to have disappeared from the market a bit after I bought the first batch of them, or at least Fry's stopped carrying them.

Somebody else mentioned Bluetooth, and yeah, I do want that, because my car radio now supports it, so it lets me have a decent speakerphone in the car instead of having a wired headset, and that probably adds $5 to the cost of the phone.

It's apparently more complicated than that. AT&T and Verizon have started offering it, on LTE phones, but it's rolling out slowly on a geography-by-geography basis, rather than being available everywhere at once.

* (Disclaimer: I work for AT&T, so I should probably know this stuff, but I do network security, not mobile phones.)

It's nice that there are cheap 2G phones in India, but I need a phone that works in the US, and wouldn't mind having a cheap phone that can also work in Europe. These days that means at least 3G, or maybe LTE, because the US carriers are phasing out 2G as fast as they can to recycle the spectrum. And it would be really nice to have a $30 spare dumb-phone to keep in the car or to use at times it's not convenient to keep my smartphone charged.

My last dumb-phone had a 2-week battery life. 90% of the time, I want a phone to make phone calls and send text, and I'd rather have something that's 1/4 as large as the pocket computer I'm carrying around. The other 10% of the time, I either want to check my email, or I want a camera, and yeah, I never bother using my camera any more, even though it takes better pictures than my phone, because it is convenient to only carry one device around.

I can read interesting material much faster than I can listen to it on video, and I can differentiate between interesting and uninteresting material much MUCH faster reading it than slogging through a video. Transcripts aren't perfect, but at least they're a start.

Search Engines try to find the most interesting pages that match queries from humans; they do this using robots running algorithms that model what humans might find interesting. "Search Engine Optimizers" try to model what search engine robots will do, and trick them into showing their customers' uninteresting web pages first instead of pages that humans will actually find interesting, because they want to sell you crap. (Doesn't matter if they're good at it, as long as their also-scum customers pay them.)

SEOs will tell you they're not doing the black-hat stuff that got them a bad name, and that they're really providing legitimate services for their customers*. Sure, they'll help you rewrite your web page so Google's robots can find the interesting parts (Google will also tell you how to do this, for free, and I agree that charging a customer money to tell them not to hide their important content in singing dancing Flash-Animated Javascript-requiring Videos is actually a non-scummy valuable service to the public - but most people who sell those services call themselves "web designers" or similar consulting titles.)

Some of them will also tell you how to write actual interesting content for your web pages - but most people who do that call themselves "editors" or "content specialists" or similar titles, and only fall back on the term "SEO" if they're appealing to dumber customers or trying to also offer scummy services.

If Google's changing their search rankings in a publicly documented way, and you're calling it a "mobilegeddon" because it breaks all your little tricks for boosting uninteresting content to higher search rankings, you deserve it. If you're a legitimate web design specialist, you don't need scare tactics like that, you just need to learn what Google wants and offer legitimate re-design services.

And yes, I did RTFA, but I didn't WTFV.

Bah - Yahoo's dumping their maps just about the same time that Google's been making Google Maps much less usable, at least on browsers. Not only does it take a lot longer to load the map of where it thinks you are before it's willing to listen to you type what you really want a map of, it's been getting much harder to actually display directions even after that. For instance, if you want to go from A to B, it shows you a short abstract of the directions, and lets you click on parts to expand them. But you can't just expand the area around B without losing the fat purple line display of the route. Almost all the time, when I'm looking for directions to somewhere, the part I need the most detail about is the area around the destination; I usually know where I am, and how to get to the freeway from there.

For a while I was able to use "Classic Google Maps" and avoid this "upgrade", but that seems to have gone away.

There's really only one thing to eat while reading a story like this (other than Moar Chocolate, for Research Purposes.) It's Scalzi's Schadenfreude Pie. Dark, bitter, sticky, chocolately.

Well, thank you very much, telling me that I'd get better battery life if I installed the new Android version. As far as I can tell (at least with all previous Android versions), Google's instructions for installing the new software are "What? You don't have one of these three Google-brand phones? Then wait for your carrier!".

That's bad enough for my phone (which has a carrier, and Samsung's a reasonably major brand, though my previous HTC phone never got upgraded), but my tablet's Wifi-only, so there's no carrier, just a manufacturer who sold that model 2 years ago and doesn't have that tablet easily located on their website, and as far as I can tell, if I were to dump IceCreamSandwich for Cyanogen (who at least tell you what hardware resources you need for each version), I'd lose access to the Google Play Store?

Are you counting the notes, or the intervals? Are you counting the root once or twice (1 and 8)? Got fencepost errors?

I end up dealing with this a bit more, because I play mountain dulcimer, and dulcimer tab notation starts at 0 instead of 1, counting from the open strings to N frets in a mostly-diatonic scale. (Usually the tuning on the middle string means you end up with at least one more note available, plus most dulcimers these days add the 6.5 fret (which gets you the 7th note in the melody string's scale, as opposed to a flat-7th Mixolydian), which gives you a few more choices.

Last year I was looking into getting either a Raspberry Pi or Beaglebone Black. BBB had a newer ARM rev for the CPU, so it can run more kinds of OS. But the RPi has the removable flash as its drive, so you can easily load whatever OS image you want, change OSs by switching flash chips, and if you hose it too badly you can take it out and reload, without worrying about whether you've bricked the board. Also, the specs at the time said the RPi had a better GPU, and could do 1080p at 60 Hz vs. only 30Hz for BBB, which means I can plug it into TVs and monitors without as much flicker. I chose the RPi.

BBB nominally costs a bit more, but by the time you buy cases and power supplies and flash and such, it pretty much balances out.

Nice to see somebody getting it right.