I am a bit of a flashlight nerd, and having any light be less than insanely bright has now become one of my pet peeves. The headlights on my 08 Fit Sport beater were honestly not terrible, but with the seasons changing and me soon to be leaving work at night, i felt it was time for an upgrade.

I immediately went to SuperBrightLEDs, because I’ve ordered tons of stuff from there and they have top notch lights, fast shipping, and good customer service. Every car I’ve owned in the last few years has gotten all the interior lights replaced with LEDs from SuperBrightLEDs. They draw way less power and are far brighter. Anyway, I put in my car info and it gives me the suggestion to use this H4 fanless kit that’s plug and play. I went ahead and ordered them for something right at $75 shipped. They showed up a couple of days later and I finally got a chance to install them.

They are pretty damn much plug and play. I had to trim the rubber ring that covers the headlight bulb a bit to clear the heat sink, and because someone at Honda is an asshole I actually put it on the lift and pulled the front wheels off to install them since you have to pull out the fender liner, but that would apply to even replacing a stock bulb. The difference was immediately evident.

​Here are the stock headlights:

Here is the LED on the driver side with a stock bulb on the passenger side:
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And finally, this is LED on both sides. You can really see the difference if you look at them against the color temperature of the stock fog lights.

It’s still daylight, so it’s super hard to say how well they will do at night, but judging based on how much brighter they look in the shop, they’re going to be awesome. Also, since they’re made to go in halogen reflectors, the beam pattern actually looks correct and doesn’t scatter light everywhere. It looks exactly like the stock headlights, just brighter and whiter. So far, I love it.

The shortcuts app is only a week old, but people are already starting to do some amazing stuff with it. In this shortcut, Federico Viticci has come up with a way to automatically add the device frames to your screen shots to make them look more professional. 

Yesterday, Apple announced three new iPhones. The iPhone XS in regular and "Max" size, and the iPhone XR that comes in at a few hundred cheaper and gets by with an LCD instead of OLED and a single camera instead of the dual cameras. Naturally, I must upgrade my perfectly good iPhone X to one of these new models because reasons. 

Actually, I bought an iPhone 8+ on the iPhone upgrade program last year when they came out because I foolishly told myself I wouldn't get the X until the second year of the design. I naturally also immediately bought the iPhone X. Basically this left me with an 8+ I really might as well trade in (My girlfriend has been using it since I got the iPhone X) and an iPhone X I bought outright last year that I could upgrade my girlfriend to. 

So back to the new phones. The iPhone XS and XS Max (yeah, that's actually what a team of highly paid marketing people decided to call it. For real.) are the only ones I'm considering since the XR is kind of a downgrade from the X in a lot of ways. Now to decide between the 5.8" XS and the 6.5" XS Max (jesus that's a bad name)

My first instinct was to try the new form factor, it's all new and shiny and look how huge that screen is! So I go to do the pre-approval for the upgrade program. Except it won't work. Turns out, you have to do the pre-approval on the phone you're currently making payments on. In this case, my girlfriend's iPhone 8+. Fine, we'll go ahead and switch phones. 

So I make it home, we both do new icloud backups, I unpair my watch, wipe both phones and I hand her my iPhone X and pop my sim card in the iPhone 8+

I. Fucking. Hate it.

The 8+ form factor is WAY too big after carrying an iPhone X for a year. It's unwieldy as hell. How the hell did I ever hold this massive ass thing and make phone calls on it? It hurts my hands to grip it's so damn wide. It barely fits in the big pockets of my work clothes and has no chance of fitting, much less staying in, the pockets of the clothes I wear when not at work. I can't reach the top of the screen even WITH the huge bezels of the iPhone 8+. I keep pressing the side of the phone where my finger naturally lands only to find that the sleep/wake button I'm looking for is over an inch higher. Also, though this isn't really the phone's fault, I keep staring at it expecting to unlock and I keep swiping up from the bottom expecting it to go home and it's making me feel retarded. 

I had a 6S+ and a 7+ before and loved them at the time, but the form factor of the 5.8" edge to edge iPhone X has totally ruined the larger phones for me. They just don't fit my hand and I guess I'm not willing to compromise for the larger screen anymore because I've never felt the iPhone X screen was too small. 

In all fairness, I DO carry a 10.5" iPad Pro with me everywhere, so basically everything other than short text conversations, phone calls, and photography gets done on the iPad anyway. If I didn't have or didn't use my iPad and I sat on the couch and read reddit or something on my phone, I might feel differently, but for my use case, I decided to go with the iPhone XS 5.8" and I don't think I'll be disappointed. I'll report back in a week or so.