#spectre-x360 — Public Fediverse posts

It’s gotten easier to get away with forgetting to take a laptop charger

SANTA CLARA, Calif.

Eighteen years ago, I managed to forget to pack my laptop’s charger for a transcon business trip, didn’t realize my oversight until reaching Dulles Airport, and then swore that I would never make that mistake again. Reader, you can guess what I did Tuesday morning.

In my inadequate defense, the compact, Wirecutter-endorsed charger I’d meant to bring is so small that its absence from my gadget-accessories bag was easy to overlook until I reached for it at the Capital One lounge at IAD. And the night before, its black USB-C cable was apparently too easy for me to overlook draped across the dark rug in my home office after I unplugged it from my laptop, tucked the laptop into the sleeve in my messenger bag, and then stupidly left the charger plugged into the wall.

But unlike in January of 2007, when I was heading to CES with a Dell laptop that needed a proprietary charger that I discovered was almost as rare in Vegas as a blackjack dealer handing you two aces in a row, this HP laptop charges via the same USB-C port as every other portable computer I own.

So I did not freak out but did resolve to stick to my phone for e-mail until I could get to my layover in Denver, where I knew multiple lounges would offer USB ports for the adapter cable I did still have tucked into that bag.

(That adapter cable is one of the best pieces of tech-event swag I’ve ever collected, as it includes a Qi cordless charger in a pod between its combination USB A/C plug and the USB-C, micro-USB and Lightning plugs at its other end. Whoever at Supermicro marketing picked this thing as a giveaway at HumanX in March, tell your boss I said you deserve a raise.)

After mostly recharging my phone in DEN, when I checked into the Hyatt Regency here Tuesday evening–where the organizers of TechEx North America are hosting me in return for moderating three panels at that conference–I asked if they might have a spare USB-C charger I could borrow. The rep at the front desk said they’d check, and barely a minute after I got to my room, somebody from housekeeping showed up with a new iPad charger.

I have to smile at a hotel bailing me out like this: I’d had to buy that compact USB-C charger after I’d left this HP’s original, larger power brick at a fancy hotel in D.C. during a conference there in February, after which nobody at the hotel was able to locate it even though I’d taped my business card to the thing.

One lesson of this episode is that by ensuring that devices finally use the same connector, the tech industry finally solved the problem of needing to find the right charger for a laptop, phone or tablet. It’s worth recognizing when these companies do something right–even if in Apple’s case, it seems to have required a shove from European Union regulations that made USB-C a required standard.

The other is that since I’m developing a bit of a history of leaving a laptop charger at home, I need to get myself into the habit of unplugging that thing from the outlet before I unplug it from my laptop.

#ACAdapter #charger #HP #Hyatt #laptopCharger #powerBrick #Qi #SantaClara #SiliconValley #SpectreX360 #TechExNorthAmerica #USB #USBC

CES 2024 travel-tech report: a new laptop and an old phone

My messenger bag had less hardware than usual for a CES trip when I flew out Sunday morning–only one laptop and only one phone, plus their charging accessories, and no WiFi hotspots or any other review hardware to back up my own devices. In other words, I was gambling a little in Vegas.

The laptop, a 2022-model HP Spectre x360 that I purchased at about 30% off in August to replace the 2017 model that died at the end of 2021, made battery life one of my lesser worries at the show. I only recall it going into power-saving mode once, at the end of a long day that hadn’t allowed any recharging breaks.

But the HP’s fingerprint sensor became one of my bigger annoyances when it would mysteriously stop working. I’ve seen this happen before and know the fix (the old-school two step of deleting it in the Device Manager app and then having the app scan for hardware changes to restore it), but at CES this happened multiple times in a day because every tech problem gets worse at the show.

I assume that reinstalling Windows would fix this, but CES is also no time for complicated troubleshooting.
Fortunately, none was needed for the other glitch I saw: a confusing minute or two of this convertible laptop acting as if it had been folded up to use in tablet mode, ignoring physical keyboard input, that ended when I rebooted the machine.

The phone was the Google Pixel 5a I had brought to the two previous CESes. It’s aged extraordinarily well overall, thanks to Google software updates that have added such useful new features as Live Transcribe–a kind of magic for interviews and press conferences.

But two years and change is a lot of charge cycles for a smartphone’s battery–on top of which, I kept using the phone as a mobile hotspot to work around spotty or nonexistent WiFi. That left me worrying about recharging this more than the laptop. At least the 5a, like most new phones, also charges quickly, so 2024 battery anxiety isn’t like the 2014 kind.

I took all of my notes at the event in Evernote, having somewhat reluctantly renewed my subscription at the new, much higher rate. (I had thought of switching to Microsoft’s OneNote, but seeing Microsoft make it harder to switch by retiring its importer app did not make me want to fuss through moving over my notes via third-party tools.) Evernote’s new management seem to have fixed this app’s sync-conflict problems, which is great, but on the phone the app would struggle to load my increasingly long CES notes in lower-bandwidth situations.

Which came up often, between T-Mobile’s 5G network appearing over capacity in some places and various WiFi networks dropping my laptop or phone randomly. I was glad I’d brought my ancient USB-to-Ethernet adapter, which let my connect the laptop to a press-room cable instead of having to edit the saved press-room WiFi network setting to add the day’s password.

I tucked one other form of old-school hardware into my bag that I found useful at CES: business cards, a form of analog data exchange that’s stayed in style at this show even as networking at other tech events has been compressed to on-the-spot LinkedIn invitations.

#batteryLife #businessCards #ces #CES2024 #CESTravelTech #Ethernet #fastCharging #LasVegas #Pixel5a #SpectreX360 #TMobile5G #USBC #Vegas

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