For as long as they've existed, I have made fun of big-ass phones.¹ Who wants to hold an iPad mini sized "phone" to his head to make a call? It looks ridiculous. Yet, something has changed.²

The rumors all point to two new iPhones, a 4.7" and a 5.5". The larger phone is squarely in the giant-ass Galaxy Note size range. It will, if it exists, be huge. And I will at least consider it.

The phone call is nearly dead

My main objection to a huge phone has always been that you look ridiculous talking on one. And that has not changed. However, I spend maybe, maybe, a total of ten minutes per day with my iPhone on the side of my face. It's a computer that occasionally makes and receives calls. If a larger screen makes it more awkward 5% of the time, but more useful 95% of the time, isn't that worth it?

The debate them becomes, is a larger screen more useful for the other 95% of the time. I would bet the answer is yes. Going from 3.5" on the iPhone 4S to 4" on the iPhone 5 was dramatic. Going all the way to 5.5" could be pretty great. Or not - it could be too big to use comfortably. My interest is at least piqued. That's something.

Wow. Thirty two years young and ready to retire from publishing. On top of his game is a great way to go out.

But after 17.5 years of digging, testing, analyzing and writing about the most interesting stuff in tech, it’s time for a change. This will be the last thing I write on AnandTech as I am officially retiring from the tech publishing world.

I remember reading AnandTech way back in high school, trying to figure out which motherboard and CPU would be the best starting pieces for a new computer. It has always been the very best source for in-depth hardware reviews.

Sunil Dutta, a 17 year veteran of the LAPD:

Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don't want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you.

No, this is not from the Onion. It's from the Washington Post, written by a real cop. This, folks, is the problem.

I've long been an advocate of writing down everything. Write it in your iPhone, on your Mac, on an index card, in a Field Notes book — whatever. Just write it down. Capture, if you prefer.

"It" being anything that seems like it might be useful later. An idea, a thought, something you want to do.

This concept extends to reading as well. See an interesting article? Send it to Instapaper. You can read it later.

Eventually, with all the writing, capturing, and Instapapering, you have a giant pile of stuff to deal with. More specifically, you have a giant pile of stuff that a past version of you decided was important.

That's a really important distinction.

You didn't save this stuff for later. Someone who looks like you did. Someone who thinks mostly like you did. Someone who has similar, but slightly different priorities than you did.

This stuff was important to that person. It's probably important to you, but it's not definitely important to you.

Before you put your head down and start knocking out those tasks or reading those articles, take a moment. Take a moment to make sure the thing you're about to do is still important. Make sure that the current you still wants to do it.

If you find out that you don't want to do it, delete the task. Delete the email. Delete the 90 page article in Instapaper. Delete it and move on to the thing that matters to the current you.

Future you will thank you for it.

JD Bentley on city life:

I can say without a doubt that living in the heart of a city is wholly unnatural and unnecessary, unless you really want to give your humility and patience a workout, then by all means have a go at it.

I have never lived in the city, but I do visit on a regular basis. I can't argue with JD's thoughts. Cities, even in the US, will stretch your patience to the breaking point. Maybe I'm crazy, but I still want to spend a year or two living in the city. I just haven't figured out which city yet.

This typographic awesomeness from Stephen Fry is not new, but it is great:

There is no right language or wrong language any more than there are right or wrong clothes.

So good.

A man who works long enough, hard enough, who suffers and struggles, who climbs resolutely, will finally pull his exhausted frame to the top and find not the peak it appeared to be, but the foot of a much larger mountain.

If you don't subscribe to J.D. Bentley's site, you just don't know what you're missing.

In a letter posted to ESPN, LeBron James announces his reasons for returning to the Cavaliers:

I’m not promising a championship. I know how hard that is to deliver. We’re not ready right now. No way. Of course, I want to win next year, but I’m realistic. It will be a long process, much longer than it was in 2010.

Absolutely classy. His reasons are sound, his goals clear, and his promises tempered. James handled this perfectly — I especially liked the college metaphor.

The Cleveland Cavaliers just got the biggest NBA free agent of our generation, and they are now the best team in the East. Wow.

For years, I've used WordPress to make things on the internet. Mostly, I've used the Thesis framework to make things easier. Late in 2012¹, the long-awaited major Thesis update arrived - Thesis 2.0. I love to have the latest and greatest, so I immediately downloaded and set up Thesis 2.0 on a development server.

What a disaster.

This article isn't about bashing Thesis 2.0.² But when I realized how different Thesis 2.0 was from Thesis 1.8.x.... I had to take a step back. Learning the new software would've required a heavy investment. Not in money, of course - my developer's license paid for itself long ago. My cost would be time, something I simply don't have much to spare. Stepping back and thinking things over, I came to three choices.

1. Suck it up and learn the very different and utterly undocumented Thesis 2.0.
2. Finally get serious with the very popular Genesis framework.
3. Branch out into static sites.

The third choice is ridiculous, of course. WordPress has been my automatic choice for every site I've built for several years. I never gave another tool a thought - WordPress was the choice. But I was facing a significant time investment for each of the three choices. No matter which way I went, it was going to be a pain in the ass.

Dynamic means slow

There are a thousand great reasons to use WordPress. But there are plenty of reasons not to use it. For starters, it's slow.³ That's a dangerous statement, but bear with me. Every time you view a page on a WordPress site, it makes various calls to the database. Sometimes it's a few calls, sometimes it's a lot. But it does this every time you visit a page. All those database calls add up, and can contribute to a page loading much slower than you would like.

Yes, there are caching options available. Every one of them is a pain in the ass. Some settings work on some servers, but break your site on other servers. Some settings make your site blazing fast if your server is set up in one way, but bring your site to it's knees if your server is slightly different. Good luck figuring out which is which. Then there are the server issues. All those database calls aren't free, and use plenty of server resources. An overloaded server means slower response times, and at worst, site outages.

If you have enough expertise, time, and patience, (or money,) you can absolutely make a blazing fast, super stable WordPress site. But you'll need to make sure you're on the right host. Make sure your server is set up just so. Make sure you have your caching plugin tuned correctly. Don't forget to use the proper framework. Praying helps, too.

Static means fast

Static sites are generated when you update them. The generators take theme files and a folder full of markdown files, chew them up, and spit out old fashioned HTML files. Yes, .html - not .php. Once the site is generated, your server only has to serve static files. The .html, the .css, and any images. No PHP logic. No database calls. No database. No caching plugins. All the logic is handled at the time you build or rebuild the site. When someone visits a page in your site, it just loads instantly.

It's not all roses and unicorns

Static sites are a pain in their own way. For one, you need to regenerate the site whenever you make a change. Usually that involves some sort of command line nerdery. Putting together a basic script can streamline the process, but that's just more nerdery.

Speed wins

My final choice wasn't all that hard. I didn't want to learn Thesis 2.0. I hated it.⁴ I will eventually figure out Genesis. But more than anything, I wanted speed. Nothing beats pure HTML if speed is your goal. Nothing. So this site is now built on the static site generator called Pelican.

Why Pelican? I could have chosen Jekyll, Octopress, or plenty of similar tools. I chose Pelican because it uses Python, which I am slowly learning. That's it — the other choices may have been better. So far, though, Pelican has done the job perfectly.

WWDC starts today, and we should get our first official glimpse of iOS 8. Here's what I would like to see:

iOS Blocks

Or something like it. This would be fantastic without being overly complex.

Better inter-app communication

I don't know what this will look like. iOS is great in no small part because it is simple. It's time, though.

Polish

This is last on my list, but unquestionably most important. I don't care about Apple adding 562 new features. iOS 7 changed a lot, but introduced some rough edges. It also introduced iOS users to crashes. 7.1 improved this, but my iPhone still crashes about once a day. I want Apple to spend it's time making iOS bulletproof once more.

It's not an exciting list, but that's all I hope to see in iOS 8.