Thomil's Random Ramblings

So, next in my series on company-provided gifts that I received earlier this year we have… a notebook. Yep, you read that right, and no, I haven’t lost my mind. Well, not recently anyway, that happened a long time ago. And to be fair, it’s not a regular notebook either. This contraption is called Rocketbook Fusion, and it is an erasable, app-enabled notebook. Apparently, erasable notebooks in general are a thing, something that completely passed me by ever since I started using OneNote for all my notetaking needs. Anyway, when that company gift selection came around back in January 2021, this Rocketbook Fusion looked interesting, so I decided to grab one of those. Hey, wouldn’t want any of my gift points to go to waste now, would I? So, what is this Rocketbook Fusion exactly? Essentially, it is just your regular notebook. However, it sports specially treated pages that you can write on like usual, but that are waterproof. When writing with a special pen, you can just wipe the writing a...

If you’ve spent as much time on the internet as I have, you’ve probably come across ads for Grammarly. They’re certainly a staple over on YouTube, second in pervasiveness and irritation only to those Chinese stolen-asset rip-off games that just won’t die! But I’m getting side-tracked here. In recent days, I’ve looked into Grammarly myself and I have to say, I don’t like what I see. In fact, I’d consider this service to be highly problematic, certainly from a writer’s perspective.  On the surface, Grammarly looks like a pretty useful tool. It ostensibly helps you detect errors in your writing and helps you avoid overly complex and intricate phrases, the latter of which should be more than familiar to every reader of this blog. In all seriousness though, I can see the basic utility in such a tool, particularly if you’re not someone who’s used to writing or if you’re someone who’s emails always sound the same, no matter whether you’re writing to your team, your manager, or your spous...

Last weekend, as I was aimlessly browsing the web, I came across an article that outlined how German discount retailer Lidl had started a scheme to hand out free period products to girls & women in need, a laudable and worthy cause. It requires online registration and an app to get access though, which caused a whole flurry of comments and outrage online. Nothing new there. It was one of the arguments used by the detractors that really got my blood boiling though, when some idiot proclaimed that anyone who owned a laptop, or a smartphone was wealthy enough not to need that scheme in the first place. Seriously? Are you fucking kidding me? I do realise that I'm in a position of incredible privilege by being in a position in which I'm able to afford some pretty decent hardware and I'll be the first to admit this. However, this supposed luxury argument hasn’t held any water whatsoever for years, probably for over a decade at this point.  While I’m pretty sure that argument ...

I’ll admit. I never expected to even get the device I’m reviewing in this post, despite being a long-time Apple user, I just don’t take their audio ambitions seriously and honestly, when I want to spend hundreds of Euros on a new set of headphones, I’ll buy Bang & Olufsen, thank you very much. At least there, I can replace most of the key parts of the headphones in question and I know that at least the on-ear and over-ear headphones will last for ages. After all, my Beoplay H8 are still going strong! That being said, my E8 in-ears had been giving me trouble for quite some time, and when the AirPods Pro were one of the options during the company gift selection that also netted the DJI Mini 2, I decided to take the plunge. After All, I was in the market for some truly wireless in-ears. And I wasn’t about to shove Samsung’s in-ear kidneys, the other truly wireless option, into my ears. Several seemingly interminable weeks later, the big day arrived. While the packaging of the AirPods...