2024 was phone upgrade year for me, moving from my iPhone 13 Pro to a 16 Pro. New phone also means new case, and I have become accustomed to having a wallet/folio case. For my 13, I was using the Decoded Leather Wallet case (no affiliate links, and I have received no compensation from any mentioned company), whose primary virtue was that it left the bottom edge of the phone unencumbered. Not unlike at least one of the ATP guys, I really don’t care for interference on my up-swipe. You can see in the product photo that Decoded thinks the case also works as a stand; I had, at best, 10% success when attempting that maneuver.
Okay, so I obviously want whatever they’ve done for the 16 Pro, right? Sadly, no, I do not. Decoded has chosen to introduce not only a bump on the lower edge, but also a strap. They have further chosen to make the wallet “detachable,” which does not appear to add much, if any, value for me (more on that later).
So, what to do? For a start, I turned on AppleCare+ so as not to push my luck carrying around a phone with no protection. Next, because I couldn’t see anything that checked all my boxes (no strap, not detachable, and no swipe interference), I compromised on the last of those and went for the Nomad Goods Modern Leather Folio. Note that this one does have a strap, but that strap is detachable (and the case is shipped with it detached), so is not a negative for the case. And it’s … fine. It did confirm that I really do not like the bottom-edge bump, though, so I kept looking.
Next up, the Geometric Goods Minimalist 1.0. Definitely no issues with swipe or button access on this one, as the phone is attached to the case (such as it is) magnetically. “Let’s give it a shot,” I thought to myself, having recently heard on some podcast or other that modern Popsockets attach magnetically and securely. Aaand first day in the field, as I folded it over to slide a receipt into the wallet, my phone fell on the table. So, no, let’s not do that. (Side note: a cat who lives at my house found the Geometric Goods case to be a very likely chew toy, in a way that he has not found any other case before or since)
Lastly for this phase of the search, I opted to compromise on detachability (at least in this case, the detachable part is still protecting the phone) and went for the Blackbrook Burkley Detachable Wallet case, only to find that I missed/ignored the subtle hints in the imagery that indicate the presence of a strap, which turns out not to be detachable. Furthermore, with my phone in the case, closing the strap and putting it in my pocket activated the camera two out of two times (and I already changed the camera button to require a double-click because I was picking it up wrong so often, so I’m a bit puzzled how it happened). Add that to the fact that the attachment of the inner case to the wallet was disappointingly unstable, and I’m back to the Nomad for now.
If anybody has any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

So, I got email from Google, whining about how this site wasn’t mobile-friendly, despite it working just fine for my tastes from my hand-held device. Rather than lose whatever tiny ranking I still have, though, I opted to add the Jetpack Plugin and activate its built-in mobile theme. And, really, it could be worse.

You’re welcome, I guess.

I’ve been stewing for some time about the mis-use of the term “digital” to mean something other than “represented as a series of ones and zeros.” Or even “able to express only discrete values.” In this usage, CDs are not “digital,” despite the indisputable fact that they bear digital data. DVDs may include, as a bonus, a “Digital Copy,” indicating that the DVD is somehow not “digital,” despite the fact that the first D in DVD stands for digital! So aside from clearly being an improper use of the word, what does “digital” mean? It can’t mean “not delivered on a physical medium,” as a “digital copy” can be delivered to you on a disk, and my complete Beatles digital collection was delivered to me on a lovely, custom-cased USB drive. It can’t reasonably mean “downloadable to your portable device,” because I can take the exact bits off of a CD and throw them on to my iPod (admittedly, this would be silly, since various lossless formats take up much less space). It can’t reasonably mean “lower quality” (though it usually does), since some artists (thank you, TMBG and Jonathan Coulton) are good enough to sell FLAC versions of their works (the complete Beatles USB drive includes 24-bit FLAC versions, which are even higher-fidelity than their CD equivalents, bless them), though—to further invalidate the “device-downloadable” hypothesis—the most popular portable device will not play FLAC versions.
Of course, my thesis here is that none of this usage is reasonable, but is it even consistent? Can a definition be articulated? What do people think it means?