I came from the iPhone X, but I generally alternate between iOS and Android devices with every upgrade.

I am absolutely loving vanilla Android 10 in the Pixel 4. My last Android device was a OnePlus 6. And, while Oxygen OS is lighter on the mods than the likes of Samsung, I still couldn’t get past that it wasn’t vanilla. That’s when I switched back to the iPhone X.

I really love the customization of how the lock screen behaves. I turned off “Always On” pretty quickly–I don’t need to know every second that a notification is sitting and waiting on my device, and it was good that I could ditch that at-will.

Camera is as good as I’ve seen in many reviews. This is, actually, my first Pixel device (having had Nexus devices before), and it’s refreshing to see the vanilla devices with what I perceive to leading cameras from my initial usage over the day that I’ve had it.

Maybe it’s that the iPhone X was particularly smooth, but 90Hz doesn’t really wow me. I mean, interactions are QUITE smooth with the Pixel 4 and I certainly appreciate that, but it wasn’t a complete “wow” to me.

Overall, so far, battery has held up really well. I attribute some of this to the P-OLED display–that particular kind of panel was built with diminished power consumption in mind. Also, I tend to turn off all notifications (social media, etc) except for those directly related to communication–I think I tend to be miserly with my power consumption, so maybe I’m a “best case”.

It’s only been a day, but it seems to be the best Android device and experience I’ve had to date.

So, over the past month or two, I have taken to using a password manager. Right now, I’m using one called LastPass. It’s a client-side encrypted repository that stores not only passwords, but also notes and other important information.

I’ve been beefing up my passwords, making them 50 characters where possible and putting them in the form that’s current DoD standard. Some websites won’t take such passwords, unfortunately, and I’ve had to compromise there. But, even so, if I have to fashion a simple 8-16 character (no special character) password, I do so pseudo-randomly.

FWIW, LastPass has a security challenge where it examines your passwords and attributes a score accordingly. This is probably as good as I’m going to get it, given those limitations of certain websites (I really should give the offenders a talking to so I can get my overall score above 99%…it’s giving my OCD eyes the twitch).

It’s time to get going again.

https://xkcd.com/2115/

Things have been pretty awesome, so far, this year. Sadly, already we are over halfway though. I have dreams about this every year, and always it goes by far too rapidly. I can’t wait to bring little Zoey here and show her the awesomeness.

Anyhoo, went to a few pretty awesome panels yesterday and today. Most of it was Star Trek related. The best one, though, was probably the Patrick Stewart and Gates McFadden one this particular afternoon.

Saw a screening of Prelude to Axanar this evening. That was astoundingly cool. I had seen the video on YouTube this week, but the enthusiasm in this panel may just drive me to contribute to the kick starter to make this thing a full-fledged movie.

About to check out a podcast panel called Night Attack. Never heard of it. Funny, how many things are new to me at Dragon Con that I just lap up and assimilate…I’ll probably be a fanboy by next year 😉

Our first panel today was George Takei. It was kind of a disappointment, mostly because I didn’t realize it wasn’t on the Trek Track. Some of what he said was quite interesting, not the least of which being his involvement in the LA subway system. But, it got mostly political and it just ended up pissing me off. But, it still wasn’t the worst panel ever–the Walking Dead one where the cast didn’t show up holds that honor, but only because of the annoying moderator 🙂

We were going to try to squeeze into a Futurama voice acting panel just after, not the least of which because the current season is the last one for that show. Alas, it couldn’t be. You can’t really do one panel right after the other at D*C, because of how many people attend these things–you generally have to plan your schedule such that you have at least an hour (maybe two) to wait in line. Anyhoo, we ended up playing some Munchkin for a little while.

After which, we waited a couple hours or so to finally get into a successful Walking Dead panel. Unfortunately, the annoying moderator was still flapping his gums before the panel began *sigh*

Our last panel of the evening was the Atlanta Radio Theatre Company. Their feature that evening was a radio version of War of the Worlds; it wasn’t like Welles’ version of it, because it was more congruent to the plot of the novel–with a few twists of its own (e.g., a professor named Moriarity using biological weaponry to take down the Martians).