Charge Your Phone Faster

Podcast - Charge Your Phone Faster . . .

Such agony! You're forced to stop playing your favorite online video game and plug your phone in to recharge its battery. And face it, some phones can take hours to charge.

Are you a heavy-duty smartphone user? I think this includes just about everybody these days.

According to Patrick Kiger in an article on How Stuff Works, the average American spends 4.7 hours a day staring at and tapping that tiny screen.

However, there is good news. You can reduce your phone anxiety by following this tip.

While charging, switch your phone to airplane mode. This way, the phone won't slow down the charging process by continually burning energy, trying to connect with cell phone towers, and plot your location with its GPS function.

This trick works. So dependably, that mobile provider Verizon recommends it.

The reason why is this, while your phone is in its regular mode, it's continually trying to signal the cell tower and pinpoint your location. Your phone has assisted GPS, which calculates your location coordinates using the cellphone network rather than satellites. This function burns up a lot of power.

How you ask? Because location-finding prevents your phone from going into energy-saving sleep mode.

When you switch to airplane mode, you turn off the reception of those radio transmissions, and as a result, your phone charges more quickly.

But don't get too excited. Because it turns out you don't really save that much time. When CNET tested this concept a few years ago, airplane mode only shaved four minutes off a phone's charging time in one test run and 11 minutes in another.

Try it, what have you got to lose? Well, then again, you might just miss a phone call. Or worse, a text message. No worries, you have voicemail, right? Or is your voicemail full? Well, that's another story.

There's always something. My suggestion, get back to your game.

"Won't you be my neighbor?" If you enjoy our weekly visits, please share them with a friend.

This is Patrick Ball; as always, thanks for listening. See you in the next episode.

Comments

Boy on a Beam

In this special bonus episode, Boy on a Beam. In a world long ago, when the days moved quite slow, Before buzzes and beeps and the fast things we know, A boy sat quite still on a very fine day, Just staring at nothing . . . and thinking away. No tablets! No gadgets! No screens shining bright! No earbuds stuck in from morning till night. No lists, no charts, and no chores to be done. He just sat there thinking—that's quiet-time fun! His name was Young Albert. He sat in his chair, Thinking of things that weren’t really there. “Suppose,” said Young Albert, with eyes open wide, “I ran super fast with my arms by my side! Suppose I ran faster than anyone knew, And caught up to sunshine that zoomed past me—too! If I hopped on its back for a light-speedy ride, What secrets would I find tucked away deep inside?” “Would stars look like sprinkles, all shiny and small? Would UP feel like sideways? Would BIG feel like Tall?” He giggled and wondered and thought, and he dreamed, Till his head fel...

When Fear Becomes the Default

In this special episode, When Fear Becomes the Default. Early Sunday morning, I was cycling past a small veterans’ pocket park in San Marcos. The air was still, the streets nearly empty. On one corner stood a young woman, alone, holding a hand-painted sign that read: “Be ANGRY. ICE agents are murdering people.” I pedaled past, but the words stayed with me. I knew the context—the footage and headlines from Minneapolis the day before, already ricocheting through the country and hardening opinions. Even in the quiet of the ride, the noise followed. Two miles later, I stopped at a red light. A black car with dark windows pulled up inches from my bike. My heart jumped. My first instinct wasn’t neighbor —it was threat . I found myself bracing, scanning, and wondering if the person inside was angry, armed, or looking for trouble. Then the door opened. A well-dressed young woman stepped out, walked to the trunk, and pulled out a sign that read “Open House.” She turned, smiled brightly, and sa...

The Thought Experiment–Revisited

In this episode. The Thought Experiment–Revisited The Boy on a Light Beam In 1895, a sixteen-year-old boy did something we rarely allow ourselves to do anymore. He stared into space and let his mind wander. No phone. No notes. No “Optimization Hacks” for his morning routine. Just a question: What would happen if I chased a beam of light—and actually caught it? That boy was Albert Einstein . And that single act of curiosity—a Gedankenexperiment , a thought experiment—eventually cracked open Newton’s tidy universe and rearranged our understanding of time itself. Not bad for an afternoon of daydreaming. Imagine if Einstein had been “productive” instead. He would have logged the light-beam idea into a Notion database, tagged it #CareerGrowth, and then promptly ignored it to attend a forty-five-minute “Sync” about the color of the departmental logo. He’d have a high Efficiency Score—and we’d still be stuck in a Newtonian universe , wondering why the Wi-Fi is slow. In a post I wrote back in...

Sweden Called . . . They Said No.

Have you ever wondered about the Nobel Prize? Let's look at Where Genius Meets “Wait—Where’s My Medal?” Every October, the Nobel Prizes are announced, and humanity pauses to celebrate the "greatest benefit to mankind." And every year, like clockwork, a specific type of person appears online to complain—at length—that they were robbed. (Well, maybe this year more than most.) The Origin: A Legacy of Guilt The prize exists because Alfred Nobel, a Swedish inventor, had a crisis of conscience. Nobel held 355 patents, but he was most famous for inventing dynamite. When a French newspaper mistakenly published his obituary, calling him the " Merchant of Death, " he decided to buy a better legacy. In his 1895 will, he left the bulk of his massive fortune to establish five prizes (Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, and Peace). Because he was Swedish, he entrusted the selection to Swedish institutions, such as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The only outlier...

On The Fly

Search This Blog