Miscellaneous notes 2019

This document contains only my personal opinions and calls of judgement, and where any comment is made as to the quality of anybody's work, the comment is an opinion, in my judgement.

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These notes are opinions about miscellaneous (non-computing) topics, often brief informal reviews of products or shops or places ranging from canned food to pubs, and are just opinions.

190928 Sat: Teva Original and Sanborn sandals

TEVA make sporty (hiking, walking) sandals, and the legend is that they started with a simple one made with the sole of a slip flop and Velcro (also known as hook and look) strips. Their range has considerably expanded since, and I have been using for a while their Original and Sanborn models. They are both derivatives of that first model.

Having worn them for over a year they are the same advantages of most sandals:

Sandals by their very nature allow the feet to breathe and stay dry despite sweating (except underside), and I have found very difficult to find any closed shoes that are really breathable.
As a consequence of allowing the feet to stay dry and not rubbing on the toes I haven't had any holes in my socks on the front, just normal wear.
They can be worn easily in winter if used with socks or double socks, as long as the weather is dry; but even if it rains lightly the fee dry quickly.
It is not quite true that sandals with socks look terrible. Non white socks on unobtrusive looking sandals look sensible, especially black socks on black sandals.
Sandals can be washed easily if made of plastic/nylon.

There are only two downsides to sandals:

Not suitable to climates that are both cold and wet, or very cold.
Because of ancient prejudices they don't look classy, or professional, even when they they look more sporty than nerdy.

As to the shared characteristics of these two models:

The arrangement of straps is convenient, quick to use, and does not look nerdy.
Since they are made entirely of rubber/plastic they can indeed be easily cleaned (after scraping their soles) in a washing machine (with water no hotter than 40C).
They are available in black.

They share only two common downsides:

The ankle strap is a bit too short for some people.
The sole is not very patterned and has little grip on smooth wet surfaces.

Comparing the specific characteristics:

The Original model has the straps anchored to the sold a bit off the margin of the sole, and the Sanborn has them anchored right at the edge of the sole, which is rather more comfortable.
The Original model has a much thinner sole than the Sanborn model, and it looks rather likely to wear down quicker.
Both of them have reasonable prices when discounted towards the end of the summer, and the Original is somewhat cheaper than the Sanborn.

Overall I really like the Sanborn model, and I think that the Original is a bit too flimsy for regular street wear, and I use them instead of slippers.

I have read good reviews of another TEVA model the Hurricane, but I cannot see much difference wth the Sanborn, except that perhaps the sole of the Hurricane is more patterned and should have better grip, so perhaps I should have preferred them.

Since TEVA is the premium brand for sporty sandals I have looked at other cheaper but comparable options:

Of these I think I like most the Jack Wolfskin and Camel Crown models.

190921 Sat: Game download is 60GB

So I wanted to try on of the latest technology games, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, and it turns out that he download is 60GB and on a 2MB/s line it takes over 8 hours. That is frankly crazy, but then I checked again and several games that I have take 15-25GB, the previous instalment of Wolfenstein take already 47GB, and DOOM 2016 takes 72GB. That I think is in part because the game developers of that line of games really like huge textures, but such huge sizes and long downloads considerably reduce access to the games: many would not even fit on a standard Blu-Ray disc which can take 25GB.

190510 Fri: Very good cellphone: Motorola One

So I have had for the past year a day-to-day cellphone, model Motorola One and I have been very pleased with it, it is very good. The major good points are, in order of ascending importance:

USB-C connection, and with a high-current charger, like a laptop one, can charge quite quickly.
Pretty good specs: 8 CPUs at 2GHz and 4GiB of RAM (Really!), plus 64GiB of flash storage built in, of which only a few are used by the system. It also can do both 2.4GHz and 5GHz WiFi, can be a WiFi hotspot, and the phone connection is 4G (limited to 300Mb/s), and Bluetooth is 4.2 and can do low power mode.
Pretty comprehensive peripherals: can handle two SIMs, and the optional extra flash storage card can have a pretty high capacity (limit is 256GiB), and it has a physical sound jack. In addition it seems that the USB-C connection is fully bidirectional, as in I could attach to it external storage units.
Very good quality camera: excellent photos and good light sensitivity. It even has a second lens for depth-of-field effect (soft focusing the background) but I have never used it).
The screen is pretty good, readable even in bright light, and it is quite big, at 5.9in. The aspect ratio is rather tall, but that helps holding it.
Overall build quality is very good, with the body made of impact resistant glass like the screen cover.
The size is right: it is the largest phone that I can still hold with one hand comfortably. It is not quite as light and small as the BQ Aquaris that is my Ubuntu phone, but close.
Has the Google One operating system, which means pretty much the same deal as the Google's own cellphone: regular updates, vanilla Android without frills.
Amazing battery life: it can last for days. This does not apply to all variants of the phone, but even those with a smaller capacity batter have a long bettery life.

It has no defects that I can think of, just some quite minor limitations:

The screen resolution is limited to 720×1520 which gives 287DPI. Some higher end phones have more pixels, but that drives up power consumption significantly, and 287DPI is still amazing.
In order to save power the power saving settings are quite aggressive, and the screen gos off very quickly.