Jerome Marhic

Backend developer passionate about building efficient, scalable solutions and exploring open-source technologies.

On the 7th of January, I received this surprising email from Google:

Hi Jerome,

We wanted to let you know about an upcoming software update for your Pixel 4a that will affect the overall performance and stability of its battery. Pixel phones, like other smartphones, use rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that, over time, may experience performance, capacity, or runtime degradation.

In the coming days, your Pixel 4a will receive an automatic software update to Android 13 that introduces new battery management features to improve the stability of the battery. This update will reduce your battery’s runtime and charging performance.

To address this, we’re providing some options to consider. Please take a look and choose which one works best for you.

More details related to this change are available here. Eligibility criteria and other terms will apply.

Thank you,
Pixel team

Like… okay, this update will reduce my battery’s runtime and charging performance, but it must be justified for some reason, right? Care to tell me?
The speculation online is that they reduced the battery capacity due to some issue with aging batteries…

As promised, the update reduced the battery’s runtime a lot. I’m now charging twice a day, and it doesn’t last through the night. The “options to consider” were a choice of $50 cash or $100 toward a new Pixel phone on the Google Store. I’ve applied for the 50 bucks and increased my efforts to degoogle my life: I canceled my YouTube Premium subscription, and I’ll install Graphene OS on my Pixel 4a as soon as I get some free time.

To replace YouTube Premium, I’ve already set up a Tailscale “local network” between my devices, and I’m hosting a Jellyfin media server that I plan to fill up using yt-dlp. The process is pretty manual at the moment. Maybe it’s a use case for a future AI agent that could crawl YouTube daily and download some interesting recommendations for me.

I’m still happy with Gmail, and Google Photos is stellar (especially compared to iCloud Photos, yuck), so I don’t plan on canceling my Google One storage plan any time soon. Speaking of storage, I’m hesitating between buying an external SSD to pair with my Raspberry Pi (keeping everything local, but with a big one-time expense) or using some online cloud storage as a networked drive. I already store some data at Backblaze for $6 per terabyte per month.

On another note, I’ve almost finished Baba Is You, but I’m stuck on a couple of remaining levels at the moment:

  • World 4. Forest of Fall B “Broken Playground”
  • World 5. Deep Forest E “Insulation” and 12 “Lock the Door”
  • World 6. Rocket Trip 12 “Guardians”
  • World 7. Bonus Level “Out at Sea”

And there is some island on the bottom right of the overworld that I can’t reach at the moment (I have some idea, though, but I’m waiting to complete the above worlds first). Let’s try and make some progress on that next sprint, shall we? Can we estimate the difficulty? 3, 5, 8 points, XL, XS?

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