Tag: travel

Are charging cables all created equal?

The cords in my truck keep dying. Can you recommend cables to withstand life in the passenger footwell? I found a coupon code for Raycon. Are they a decent brand?

Those dang things! Totally normal lifecycle, though. Raycon is a completely OK brand, along with Anker, Cable Matters, Belkin, and Monoprice. There are others but those are easy enough to find. I definitely recommend staying away from the random weirdly named shlock purveyors on Amazon.

However… I would also steer clear of gimmicks like those “Magic” cables that Raycon offers, that swivel or with the heads that flip off to reveal a different jack. Those are just points-of-failure waiting to fall apart on you. And Raycon doesn’t appear to offer normal cables.

Their chargers themselves – the part that plugs into the wall – are fine, though.

And in terms of which type of cable to get, for the iPhone 15 you want one end to be USB-C to go into the phone, and the other end to be either USB-A or USB-C to match the charger you have in that location. Also look for “fast charging” as lesser cables might not charge at all. I think “braided” is nice, too.

This link should take you to a search that narrows things down to what I’m talking about!

iPhone abroad

I learned something useful about the iPhone when I was out of the country recently. I wanted to use the phone’s wifi Internet, but I didn’t want to make or receive calls on it, and get charged the ridiculous per-minute rates. AT&T tried to sell me the $6/month “World Traveler” plan, in which your international roaming rates are simply somewhat less appalling. (I learned, also, that I would have paid even for incoming calls that I didn’t accept, and data rates for voicemails that I didn’t listen to. Stinkers!)
Anyway, here’s what I did:

1) Upon boarding your plane, ship, hovercanoe, what-have-you, turn on Airplane mode: Home > Settings > set Airplane Mode to ON.

2) Then, when you get to a wifi connection (and your vessel is increasingly likely to have one), go back to Home > Settings > Wi-Fi, and turn on Wi-Fi, then choose whatever network is available, for which you either have or don’t need a password.

This worked like a charm to get me email, surfing, local restaurant reviews, etc. I was only surprised that GPS didn’t work. The major BONUS was that, the day I arrived in the other country, Skype released it’s free iPhone app, so I was able to make calls back to the States really cheaply, whenever I had Internet. ¡Que suave!