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It’s no secret that I think Reminders.app from Apple, and Notes from Apple are two of the most underrated productivity tools out there. I suspect people don’t use and talk about these more, because they lack the dopamine hit you get with purchasing a new thing to get better. It’s kind of like buying a gym membership to go walk on an indoor track, rather than walking around your neighborhood. Both accomplish the same thing, but with the gym you get to proof that you spent money to think about fitness, while making your fitness routine more cumbersome to actually do.

Anyways, Reminders fucking rocks.

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For the third installment of ‘State of XYZ Collection’, let’s dive into flashlights. This collection has been in a huge state of change over 2023, so I am constraining it to lights I carry in my pocket only. The big changes are centered around what I want out of a light, and trying for easier to carry lights. Here we go:

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I always write ‘The Best’ lists at the end of the year, but I often note that the best items are not necessarily my favorite items. Sometimes a thing is my favorite for sentimental reasons, or because my use case is a little more niche than the categories I’ve defined on the best list.

So, I thought it would be fun to take a look five of my current favorite items, and why they are my favorites.

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The second installment of my ‘State of XYZ Collection’ brings us to knives. Which is possibly the most boring of these, as I basically use/own very few knives. I went from having piles around the house, to five. And of those five, I use two most days. I’m not counting anything stashed away in emergency bags, but rather a knife I am likely to grab and use for a task. Here they are:

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This is one of those items, where I would have never purchased it if two things didn’t happen: the first is getting to see other items from ‘Observer Collection’ in person; the second was an upcoming trip where I knew I would need to handle more cash and coins. Coins are a huge pain for me day to day with the wallets I already own.

Because, when I am at home in Texas, I have my wallet setup down: drivers license, two cards, a $20 bill, and two $5 bills. Done. This all fits neatly in my tiny wallet, but for travel — even domestically or in state — this quickly blows apart.

Which is where Observer Collection’s Whisky comes into play. This is probably the best wallet for travel (or coin needs) I have ever used.

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I’ve been getting a lot of questions around what gear I actually have/use right now. I thought it would be neat to check in, so let’s start with bags. I am constraining this to only the bags I would put in my EDC rotation, and I am excluding anything I am still reviewing. Here’s the list, and a few comments on each:

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Traveling internationally as a family has a lot of small pitfalls. Being the organizational and bag nerd I am, I take on the responsibility of covering all the little bases. One of those bases involves cash, passports, and vaccination cards.

All three of those are something that you probably, likely, need when you travel internationally. And all three suck if you lose them or do not have ready access to them. So, I carry those items for the family when we travel, and I search for new things to carry them in.

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I recently wrote about the Laulima Malihini Slim I picked up and how amazing it is. The Ion Slim is from another line utilizing the same internals with a different body design. I picked this up in tumbled Aluminum, and it might be the best all-around light I have used.

I’ll tell you why.

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The first time I saw the Rolling Square InCharge cables, I thought they were neat, and perhaps I would buy one at some point — but I was quite happy with the cables I had. And then, I needed to pack for a long international trip, and I was trying to minimize my gear without losing utility. The value of these seemed readily apparent, so I went all in on them and packed three in differing lengths for the trip.

After traveling with these, I’ve found them to be imperfect but good enough to recommend.

Features & Stuffs

These are multi-purpose cables, which (in the latest variants) support up to 100w charging — they are plenty fast. On one end, you have a USB-A port, which pulls off, stays attached, and mostly swings out of the way to reveal a USB-C. On the other end is a Lightning plug, which pulls off in the same way as the USB-A to reveal yet another USB-C. In other words, the configurations you can have here are:

1. USB-A to Lightning
2. USB-C to Lightning
3. USB-A to USB-C
4. USB-C to USB-C
5. USB-A to Micro USB
6. USB-C to Micro USB

The lightning bit doubled as micro-USB in a very precarious way. The cables also worked just fine with my portable SSD, which is USB-C, though Rolling Square does note that the cables don’t support bidirectional data transfer between devices.

The cables are relatively thick, flat, and wide and have a bit of stiffness. They are covered with braided nylon, which feels very nice. They come in three lengths: absurdly short (a few inches), annoyingly short (1 foot), supremely long (6.6 feet), and stupendously long (10 feet). I have one of each of the first three sizes. None are the ‘correct’ size for what I would ideally want (1.5 feet is ideal).

In Use

The first thing to know about these is that they are well done. Every part feels nice. It doesn’t feel like corners have been cut anywhere. But they are bulky. The advantage here is that they take the place of many cables or could potentially be your only cable, not that they are smaller than a dedicated cable.

The big question is whether an InCharge could replace USB-C and Lightning cables when traveling. Yes and no. It can replace them, only if you do not need to use them both at once.

When I laid out my packing list for my trip, I also labeled what devices would need what charger. And I then marked which devices I would need to charge simultaneously. When using this cable type, you must think about how you will likely need to charge.

I sorted out the following:
– I would need to charge an iPad (USB-C) and iPhone (Lightning) each night.
– I would need to charge two white noise machines (micro-USB) during the day and have one cable in my bag.

Once I did that, I realized I needed a set of three cables. But then I needed something longer for the flight, in the case of the charging port not being nearby (as is often the case on the broke-ass planes they charge us thousands of dollars to suffer on). I got the 6.6ft cable — wishing they had a 3ft.

With all that done, I packed all three cables (usually, the two shorter ones are in my office bags). It seemed very clear I needed all three, and I was a tad nervous I was packing light (which means I was doing it right).

Here are my notes on these after using only them on a two-week trip:

• The design is top-notch and hard to argue with.
• The micro USB port bothers me. It doesn’t sit snuggly in the port, and I worry about it breaking the device port. It does work, to be clear, and I had no issues. But it feels precarious in a way that I don’t like.
• These cables don’t tangle, which is nice.
• They feel very bulky when plugged into the device, as they stick out quite far, and the adapter ends are heavy and thick and don’t fully fold out of the way. This was never an outright issue, but it’s likely to bother you if you use your device with the cable plugged in.
• Overall, these pack larger than an equivalent length single cable. So they are only worth it if you replace 2-3 cables with one.
• They can be finicky to plug into specific chargers/devices. And they are sometimes a bit fussy about putting the adapters back over the USB-C ports.
• They did work and didn’t fail me in any way.

I wish I had brought a long dedicated USB-C to Lightning cable in place of one of these, as that would have made things easier overall when I needed to stuff a cable in my day bag and go. While I did carry one of these with me, it was always a little too short for what I ideally wanted, though I did make it work each time.

I packed three of these cables in three lengths. I think it is worth looking at what I would have packed if I didn’t pack these cables.

• USB-C to Lightning 3ft.
• USB-C to USB-C 3ft.
• 2x Micro USB 3”.

That setup would have been lighter and less bulky to carry while performing the same. But it wouldn’t have worked as well. The reason is I ended up needing an extra USB-C one day. The 6ft cord several times for the length. And I loaned the longer cord to my wife as she needed a longer cord to charge her phone and read in bed.

In addition, I could charge three USB-C devices at once the day before travel so that two headphones and my iPad were ready. Something I would not have been able to do with dedicated cables as I would have been short on USB-C cables. That’s the key here: there’s no way to get this level of versatility with dedicated cables for this compact kit.

Overall

But, these are (likely) of declining utility if you are all USB-C on your devices, especially if Apple releases the next iPhone as USB-C. But if you still have a mix of charging ports or want an excellent backup for your family, these are an excellent option.

Where the value ups the ante a little more for me is on the USB-A/USB-C end of the cable. Being able to swap between either end type for different chargers is fantastic. For example, my international 100w Charger from Hyper has a built-in EU plug, two USB-C, and two USB-A charging ports. This meant I could use any/all of the ports when I wanted without needing dedicated USB-A and USB-C cables. That type of charger is great because I can help anyone charge anything, even if the cable is something I don’t have, but the InCharge cables also meant I wasn’t limited on my charging ports available.

And the international travel adapters I bought had a single USB-C port and four USB-A ports — meaning these three cables meant that I would never be without a charger, I could use. That’s a lot of peace of mind when you are traveling in a lot of unknown situations. Redundant? Yes. But I would have packed those items anyways, so the InCharge meant I could ensure I always had the total capacity to use the cables on hand.

I will keep using these cables, especially in my office bags. For travel, I don’t know what I’ll do next time. I never had issues during the trip, but I was never super happy when I needed to use these as they were bulky. Then again, I never had an issue, so that’s a win.

Hard to complain, especially given that these are under $40 each. Recommended, with caveats above.

Buy here.

The final part in my ‘Three XYZ Collection: Budget to Luxury’ series brings us watches. This is actually the collection/post which spurred the idea, since there’s a long held lust among watch enthusiasts to craft the perfect watch collection — consisting of only three. Here’s my take on this classic, without the baggage of my past decisions and life, and of course it is three collections across three budgets.

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I used to be one of those with a desktop and a laptop. That was back in the days before iPads and iPhones. The powerful machine (Mac mini or Mac Pro, aka Desktop) was there to house all the things, with a large monitor and limitless power and storage expansion. The small machine was there to allow me to be portable and to do simple tasks, and it always had limited power and limited connectivity.

Anyone who ran a setup like that remembers how difficult it was to keep things in sync. There was iSync. There was iDisk. There were countless online storage solutions we all used. And, of course, there were thumb drives and floppy disks before them. It was a royal pain in the ass, so if you ever wonder why Dropbox took off so quickly, that’s why.

When the iPad came around, online storage was a little better, and slowly, the laptop became the big machine; the iPad was the portable one. It was for me and many as laptops became powerful enough.

But in December 2015, I leaped to the 12.9” iPad Pro full-time — no more desktop or laptop. And at that point, it no longer made sense to have a smaller device that wasn’t my iPhone. Because, as in the decades before, it was hard to have things magically synced between two iPads. It was mostly there, but not quite. A Mac and an iPad — yeah, you could sync those up enough, as that was mostly syncing files and not settings. But two iPads? Not so much.

So I’ve mostly stuck with a 12.9” iPad Pro since then and used my iPhone when I needed to be more portable. But there’s an issue with that setup: the iPhone isn’t comfortable holding and reading on for long periods. And it’s even worse to connect a keyboard to and write with. It’s not as good as a portable workstation—unlike the iPad or the laptop before.

The 12.9” iPad Pro is incredibly powerful and spacious. But it’s a large footprint and a good amount of weight (especially with a keyboard cover) to take around. If all you do is go from home to the office, it’s not so bad. But when I travel, I notice the weight, the bulk, and it’s frustrating.

So for a big trip, I took with my family to Italy, I knew I wanted to sort something out so I could slim down. I bought a secondhand, base model iPad Mini 6 (64GB, WI-FI only) and took that with me. I knew I wanted the Mini screen size for videos on the plane and writing when I had the time — so I wanted something more than my iPhone.

What I didn’t expect is that all those woes of decades past are truly a thing of the past. And I forgot how freeing a device the size of the iPad Mini is.

I love this little thing.

Size, Form, Specs, and Such

This is an iPad Mini 6 with WIFI only and 64GB of storage. There’s not a lot more to talk about which cannot be said with these images:

In Use

I’ve been putting this through the test. I used it for days instead of my iPad Pro. I only took it on a 12-day trip and used it for 13+ hours of travel (each way) to backup/edit photos and everything else. I’ve written countless articles on it too. It’s been tested.

And it’s good.

It’s not great, the iPad Pro is great, but it is good. The screen isn’t as good, and the speed can lag when you push it. But, the weird thing I found about the Mini — the part I wasn’t really prepared for — was how much I prefer using it over my iPad Pro.

iPad Mini 6

iPad Pro 12.9

You get that impossible feeling when you pick the Mini up in your hand. The how can this thing do that — feeling. I got that with my first iPhone. I got that with the first iPad too. Sometimes I feel that with random other devices — they seem impossible that they can be so good, powerful, and small. The iPad Mini is all that and then some.

It fits perfectly in my hand. If I need to hold an iPad for anything, I want it to be the Mini. Same with carrying it around — even with the bulkier external keyboard I have for it — it’s my preferred device to carry. When I carry the iPad Pro, I know I am carrying the iPad Pro. So my carry of it is intentional: only when I know, I will use it.

The iPad Mini is a device you can toss in ‘just in case.’ It takes up very little room and is very competent as well. It’s good.

Where it’s not good is when it comes to onscreen typing. The landscape keyboard is cramped, and the portrait is too large. So you need an external keyboard if you want to type, and it’s all good. There are countless videos on YouTube of people expressing love for this device, and I get it now.

The iPad Mini quickly became the device I prefer to use for anything but writing. Except mine doesn’t have cellular, so that preference is limited to my house, where the wifi is plentiful and fast. Tethering, sadly, is still as shitty as you assume it is.

Mini v. Pro

I started at the top, talking about desktops and laptops. I brought that up for a reason. The main drawback for a long time was no background sync. So you couldn’t seamlessly move from one device to another and keep going. But with the current iPadOS and if you fully buy into iCloud — you can easily do this. I do it all the time.

I kill my iPad Pro/Mini battery at least once a day. I used to grab a charger to keep going. Now I switch iPads and keep going. It’s seamless. While Settings are not syncing, almost everything else is — you’ve likely experienced this with your iPhone already; it carries over when using two iPads.

But the Mini feels like the older Apple laptops, where they had limited power compared to their desktop counterparts. The iPad Pro has more power than you can harness with the OS/Software. The Mini, you can top out if you try. Toss a dozen 48MP raw files on it, and start processing, and things will jitter occasionally. Not so with the iPad Pro.

Is that an issue? Probably not, because you are editing a 48MP Raw file in Lightroom on an absurdly small device and using an Apple Pencil. What a world we live in.

What the Mini can’t do is replace your Mac. You’ll struggle. The iPad Pro absolutely can, but the Mini can’t. It lacks stage manager and a better screen, and the screen is tiny. Theoretically, it could, as it’s certainly more capable than that 2015 iPad Pro I moved to full-time, but in some ways, the landscape has changed, and we demand more from these tiny computers. I think you’ll struggle to have this be your only computer — I know I have. But as a supplement? Yes, please.

My iPadOS Complaint

This is a section made so I can say: Apple, if you insist on 64GB being the base iPad storage, then at least respect users enough to make iPadOS much better at seamlessly handling offloading to make room locally. Right now, iPadOS sucks at this. Right now, it purges things in apps using iCloud for storage instead of being more aggressive with Music or Photos. There’s very little user control and yet very little action on the OS part. It’s slow to react and slow to recover.

I had 14GB free on the device for over five days, and for all five days, the iPad Mini said it couldn’t sync UP my photos in Photos because the device storage was full. But the device had plenty of space. Try harder, Apple.

Overall

The iPad Mini 6 is the perfect device for someone who still insists they need a Mac for everything. Or for someone who likes to spend money and has a larger iPad Pro — and wants something extraordinary for reading and consuming content.

When/if Apple tosses an M1/M2 into the iPad Mini, I’ll buy another. This time with Cellular and more storage, though. I don’t need a new iPad Pro, but I am keenly watching/waiting for a new iPad Mini.

Buy here.