Amp Up Your Dental Game

I got a new toothbrush, and I really like it, but it has a design choice I feel very conflicted about. It’s rechargeable, which is a step up from my previous one that used a AAA battery (though you easily got more than 6 months of life out of it), but it charges through USB. Not only that, they didn’t bother including a wall adapter.

Here’s what you need to understand about USB: the only consistent standard across all USB ports is that they deliver 5 volts of power. If you know anything about electricity, you know that’s only a third of the equation. Amperage is another third and arguably the most important. You’ll see it on your wall adapters, in that really small print that’s only one shade lighter or darker than the rest of the housing. How they list it may be a little hard to decipher, but you’ll generally see something along the lines of “5V/1.0A.”

Before we move on to explain amperage, let me give you a more real world scenario involving batteries. You’ve probably only had to replace the batteries in your TV remote every few years, and chances are you’re using something like Rayovac, a brand that’s not exactly known for high use applications compared to the Coke and Pepsi of the battery world, Energizer and Duracell. If you’re old enough to remember portable CD players, you know those things went through AA batteries before the end of the week. Obviously, a portable CD player is a very different device than a TV remote, which is practically an overengineered flashlight. It’s not constantly running while you’re watching TV. Both devices can run on a pair of AA batteries, but the CD player uses more amps than the remote.

Needless to say, an electric toothbrush is not a portable CD player. It’s not power hungry, hence a AAA battery lasting several months in my old toothbrush. Even the rechargeable cell in the new one isn’t exactly a hog. In the case of rechargeables, amperage is an indicator of how quickly something can be charged. You might be thinking, “What’s the big deal? It charges faster, so get a wall adapter with a higher amperage.” However, as an old fable once told us, slow and steady wins the race. The race, in this case, is the overall life and longevity of the battery. Without getting into the chemistry of Lithium-Ion celled batteries like those in your smartphone, the first 80% or so of your battery being charged seems to happen pretty fast, even with a fairly slow charger like one rated to 1A. That last 20% though is often going to be a bit slow by comparison and that’s also when you’re probably going to notice your phone getting a little hot. When you pour water out into an empty glass, you slow down and ease off the pour as you get near the top of the glass in order to avoid spilling. That’s more or less what’s happening in that battery when it’s charging.

Now, here’s the problem, the faster you charge your battery, the more strain you put on the whole system because you’re more likely to “spill”. For a time, I was using a wireless charging pad for my iPhone 12 mini. Wireless charging pads, in my view and with the benefit of hindsight, are terrible devices that nobody should ever use ever and you’re an awful person for insisting otherwise. It takes a lot of energy to transmit the electricity wirelessly than through a simple cable, and a lot of that energy is wasted in the process. Despite this inefficiency, this particular wireless charging pad was charging my phone really quickly. Between this and an issue with an app running in the background when it wasn’t supposed to, my battery’s health began declining and my phone wasn’t lasting through the day. It would literally drain in about 4-5 hours of moderate use. Even setting it down on a table overnight would leave it dead by morning. I hadn’t had the phone for very long, so upgrading through my cell carrier was out of the question. I was outside my warranty window as well, so I couldn’t rely on that. I had to pay out of pocket and take my phone to an Apple Store (because mailing it in would have taken weeks) to have the battery replaced. Really, taking it there was the bigger hassle than the 40 dollar cost for the procedure. Since then, the battery health is declining again from routine use, and all despite charging it the old fashioned way with a 5V/1A charger, the little white cube that came with one of my older iPhones. Apple doesn’t make this little cube anymore, and now all of their chargers list the wattage, leaving you to figure out the amperage. To be fair, newer iPhones have more sophisticated charging circuitry in them and can handle faster charging operations if one so desires.

Put simply, if you’re the sort of power user who upgrades their phones every 18 months or whatever your carrier offers, the life and longevity of your battery probably isn’t going to crop up until you’re in the market for a new one anyway. So, for these people, faster charging methods may be more practical. If, however, you’re a moderate user and/or the kind who likes to hold onto their phones until the duct tape holding the glass back together rots away, the two most important numbers you need to know are 5 and 1, which are voltage and amperage, respectively.

So, back to my toothbrush*. It’s using the slowest charger I have, which is going to be fine for it. As for my iPhone 12 mini, I’m just going to start charging it by plugging it into my Mac.

*I should mention in the interest of full disclosure that this toothbrush utilizes wireless charging. That is to say, wireless charging isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but coupling it with fast charging is an utter waste of energy on a phone or comparable device. It’s certainly a waste on an electric toothbrush, hence going the slow and steady route.

Quoth the Elephant, Nevernote

Someone on Threads asked whatever happened to blogging. I thought about it and remembered how after Richard Wright wrote Black Boy and Native Son (among many other works) he learned about haiku and wrote several thousand of his own. That’s kind of what I feel like has happened with blogging in light of social media. You’re able to more or less do the same thing as a place like Blogger or WordPress, but it’s more concise and direct. There’s engagement and dialogue (for better or for worse) With blogging, that still exists, but it’s somehow on a different scale. Some will write comments, while others will write blog entries of their own responding to that original post.

I’ve had a few ideas for longer form entries like I used to, but I simply haven’t had the energy to do any deep dives of late. So, I’m writing this instead.

I’ve decided to part ways with Evernote. I’ve been using them since 2009 back when I had a Windows phone. Back when I had multiple devices from different companies, it was great. A note started on one could be finished on another and they’d all sync up and talk to each other.

Since 11 SEP 22 SUN, I’ve been using Evernote as a journal. I was having some shoulder pain that was severely limiting my normal range of motion, so I used it to keep track of my pain as well as note when I took any Ibuprofen. As time went on, I used it to document when I took my medications, namely my antidepressants and mood stabilizer. The latter makes me a little drowzy, so I have to be careful when I take it. If it’s too early, I fall asleep on the couch and disrupt my normal sleep schedule. If it’s too late, it’s harder to get up in the morning.

In addition to keeping tabs on my medication, it was also a general sort of journal, sporadically documenting the various goings-on in my life, sometimes acting as an aid for me to track my depressive cycles and try to rationalize what I was feeling at the time. It’s easily the longest journal I’ve ever kept (not counting Blogger, which has no real regularity to it) and Evernote was great for updating it. Then, it stopped being great.

Despite only being text, updating it became extremely tedious and slow, especially using the mobile app. The desktop app wasn’t much better. According to Evernote, the file is only a few hundred kilobytes, a far cry from the 200MB max size they say a note can be on a subscription plan. I wrote in to their customer support, but received no reply. Couple this with their price hike (70 to 130USD) at the start of the year for me, and it’s a lot of goodwill down the drain. As for what I was paying for, their scratchpad was finicky to use, not always syncing between devices, and other times when it would sync, it would double-paste whatever was written from one device to another. This eventually got fixed, but sometimes it would still slip. Their worst offense in all this, really, was their pushing of AI features. You bump up the price, struggle to handle a 200kb text file, barely handle syncing on the scratchpad, and now you’re telling me to use the AI features? Finish this candy bar before you go unwrapping another. It’s just poor management, chasing trends rather than focusing on and leaning into your strengths.

Meanwhile, Apple Notes seems to have gotten better, if only by comparison. Before, I always felt like it was fighting me. I’d use it on occasion, but I simply didn’t like using it. Now, though, it seems so much more polished, keeping in line with the Apple fan adage, “It just works.” Besides, now that all of my devices are Apple, I don’t need Evernote’s best feature, which was being a middleman among the devices. In fact, I wrote the draft for this entry in Apple Notes rather than Evernote. I don't plan on migrating my stuff from Evernote on any grand scale, only as needed. As an experiment, I started my meds journal as a new document, then copied and pasted the old one into the new space. No lag on the desktop, but we'll see how it holds up in morning with the mobile app. If Notes has similar issues with large text files, at least I'm not paying an annual subscription to have it not work.