The Coefficiencies Newsletter Issue 3

Hey, welcome to issue 3 of the newsletter! I got two new subscribers this week - welcome! I’ve got a couple links and one thought to share this week. Hope you enjoy!

Links #

An Awesome MagSafe Power Bank #

After experimenting with a cheap, functional, but enormous MagSafe battery pack charger from a no-name Temu brand, I picked up the Anker Nano Power Bank this week and it’s glorious. It’s thinner than my phone and has nice rounded corners, so it’s easy to pop onto my phone while it’s in my pocket without standing out too much. It makes the phone feel a little heavier than I’d like while in use, so I’ll probably just keep it on while it’s in my pocket and take it off when I’m using the phone. I did some initial testing, and the 15W charging claim seems to hold up— it charged my phone much faster than the no-name Temu power bank. Really glad to have this for my upcoming trip to Vegas (!) this week for a conference.

A Strategic Video Poker Game #

I’m a full year late to this, but I fell for the game Balatro hard this summer. Balatro is kind of hard to describe. You play against yourself by trying to get the best poker hand possible through various rounds. Each round gets harder (by increasing the amount you have to win or adding complications), but you can use the money you earn to upgrade your deck in various ways (hence why it’s called a ‘roguelike’). There’s just the right combination of strategy and luck to scratch a certain kind of itch for me, and it’s also nice to see a version of poker that’s not the Texas Hold ’em variety that became popular in the 2000s— which I think is the most boring version of poker of all time.

A Surprising Smart Home Discovery #

Another geeky thing I discovered this summer was the smart home brand Aqara. They sell the usual assortment of bridges, switches, sensors, etc., but for a very reasonable price and with surprisingly high quality. They also widely support Matter, the new-ish smart home standard designed to make devices work across platforms more seamlessly. I got a few temperature and door sensors this summer, along with their cheap hubs, and their smart lock.

The smart lock is one of my favourite things ever. It has a pin pad with unique codes per person as well as a reliable thumbprint sensor, and you can add it to Apple Home. Each person in your family gets a virtual ‘key’ in their Apple Wallet, allowing them to tap their iPhone (or Apple Watch) to the door to unlock it. I also discovered that, thanks to Aqara’s Matter support, I was easily able to add the lock to my Home Assistant setup, allowing me to create more complex automations involving the lock. Definitely going to be looking at more Aqara stuff over the next while.

Disconnecting #

My wife and I were fortunate enough this week to see Jerrod Carmichael at our local comedy bar. Despite Jerrod apologizing upfront for saying he was still workshopping the set, it felt tight enough to me that if they had just filmed what we saw, it could have been his next special. It was absolutely hilarious, and it was amazing to see Jerrod’s mastery of the “long pause”— he pauses just enough to make you uncomfortable before following up with a perfectly timed punchline. I’d recommend trying to see him to anyone interested in comedy.

The show was the first time I experienced a performance where we were asked to put our phones in those little locked pouches during the course of the show. We were given a pouch by a person in line, dropped our phones in, and they were locked. If we needed to use the phone, we could step outside and they’d unlock it for us. I initially thought the pouches worked as a Faraday cage, blocking all radio signals, but our watches still got alerts while inside them, so apparently not.

I know it’s trendy to talk about smartphone addiction these days, but it did really feel nice to be (mostly) disconnected for a while. My wife and I aren’t usually the types of people who go out together and stare at our phones, but it was funny how during the pre-show I felt this weird reflex to check mine. It was interesting looking around the crowd and just seeing people talking to each other, without a single lit-up phone anywhere. It’s nice, and I feel like I want to find more moments like that.

This is probably the nerdiest and most counterintuitive way of tackling this problem, but I’m due for a new Apple Watch this year— six years is a very good run for my Series 5— and I think I’m going to try a cellular model and pay for a plan for a bit. It would be nice going out with just the watch, knowing I can get an emergency call or text if I need to, but without getting sucked into doomscrolling on my phone every time I hit a little moment of boredom.

Wrap-Up #

That’s it for this week. Hope you enjoyed it! As usual, please pass this onto anyone you think might be interested.

-Tom