This is my first full week of posts in a while and I’m excited to be back! I’m sure you guys can relate, but man, what a crazy season of life we’re in at the moment. And the Holidays are right around the corner (eek!). I’m such a HUGE Christmas person, so I am literally counting down the days (37 and change to be exact). I don’t know about you guys, but at my age (and with no kids yet), the Holidays are all about family, food, and holiday song playlists. We’ve already started our Thanksgiving shopping and my finger is ready to hit “play” on the Michael Buble Christmas album as soon as we wake up on Black Friday (which for the record will not be at 3 am).
But this year we’re throwing a small twist into things…and also planning a wedding. Yep, a wedding! Cody and I got engaged on October 13th (Friday the 13th!) and we couldn’t be more excited. We’re going to do a June wedding in Arizona (where my parents currently live part of the year), which only leaves us with about 7 months to plan. So once the last glass of our engagement weekend champagne was consumed, the planning began. And yowza there’s a lot to do. Like, a lot. But we’re trying to stay positive and remember that this only happens once (fingers crossed!) so we should try to enjoy every moment. Even the inevitable first wedding-planning argument that happened about 9 days post-engagement. If you guys have any tips and tricks for surviving and conquering this whole wedding planning thing, please, please, please leave me a comment and share the wealth. And bonus points if you have any tips that involve using technology to make the whole process less painful. I’ll keep you guys posted — wish us luck!
With that, here are this week’s Tech Bytes!
1. I preordered the new iPhone X at 2 am on the preorder date and received it the day it was officially released (yep, nerd). A little over a week in, and I’m obsessed. I have a ton more to share on that front, but I’ll save it for an upcoming TIRL post — so stay tuned. Apple’s new face recognition technology (Face ID) is one of the biggest changes from last year’s model, and because it is so new there have been all kinds of question about how it will work, if it will it be reliable, and if it can it be tricked. Well, I can attest to the fact that it works flawlessly. That said, you knew there would be people all over the internet pushing Face ID to its limits. And sure enough, it CAN be tricked (but luckily for most of us, this won’t be an issue).
2. Staying on the topic of the iPhone X, while I haven’t posted MY review yet, I compiled a few others from across the web that I think are worth reading:
Daring Fireball (his review roundup + several podcast episodes that cover the iPhone X)
3. One incredibly annoying (yet predictable) consequence of online wedding planning research is that when you sign up for one service or offer (i.e. The Knot) you immediately get thrown onto the mailing lists of dozens of other “partner” companies. Ugh. It’s awful. Junk emails for days. The good thing is that my handy email tool, Unroll.me, has been there to save the day. I’ve been using Unroll.me for the past 4-5 years and it’s the only tool or service that has ever successfully allowed me to climb out from under my overflowing email inbox. One of our very earliest TIRL posts was about Unroll.me, and it makes its way onto Tech Bytes today because they FINALLY released a version for Android. ‘Bout time. Give this service a shot and watch it change your life.
4. I first noticed the bizarre Apple autocorrect bug while scrolling through my social media feeds. What bug, you say? Well, a bug that automatically changed the letter “I” to “A [?]” for some users. Why some and not others? No idea. Technology isn’t always kind. But the best thing to come out of it was definitely the clever Tweets and memes. The internet can be awesome when it wants to be. Apple finally released a fix, and all is right in the world again. However, aside from the bug itself, the most bizarre thing about this situation is that I am still seeing the “A [?]” symbol pop up in people’s social media posts. This means that there are users out there with the problem that haven’t updated their phones to the latest iOS version that fixes the issue. I understand that not everyone gets breaking news about this stuff in real-time, but at this point, if you noticed your phone was doing this wouldn’t you have Googled it and quickly discovered that there’s now a fix? Or are some just accepting it as the new normal. People never cease to amaze me.
Have no idea what I’m talking about? Read this.
Collection of funny memes and Tweets about the bug.
Ohio State got in on the fun too.
5. 140 characters used to be synonymous with Twitter — but no more! The new magic number is 280. Given how much I struggle with brevity, this actually doesn’t seem so bad to me. Plus, when it comes to Twitter I read a lot more than I publish. Some love the news. Others seem to think it signals the end of the world as we know it. Yet some others blame Millennials (pile it on, why not). I think we’ll all be ok.
That wraps up another week! Hope everyone has an awesome weekend. Or if you’re like me, is putting in some short-term pain (hitting the gym for two-a-days), for some long-term gain (eating half my body weight in Thanksgiving food next Thursday). Totally worth it.
Need more TIRL in your life?
I'd love to be your trusted go-to for all things tech!
Sign up for my Tech in Real Life monthly newsletter and you'll get a recap of everything that was posted on the blog, plus other exclusive tech-related tidbits I think you might like! No spammy garbage. Ever.
