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i woke up this morning at 9am; kevin left soon afterwards. i thought there'd be snow outside but it was dry though overcast. the rain wouldn't come until after 12pm and i thought about making a quick grocery run but there was still enough food in the house so i opted to wait until tomorrow. my father called me while i was making lunch. i didn't hear the phone ring but my xiaomi fitness tracker was vibrating. my father didn't call me the regular way but rather via voice dialing from his dashboard mounted phone. i also did a load of laundry, washing my bedsheets as well, just to use up every last drop of tide detergent before throwing out the old container.

i tried the digital zoom feature on the pixel 3XL. at midrange zoom (5x) it looks surprisingly good given that it's actually just software trickery. i read the google camera app uses photo stacking as well (just like in night sight) to bring out the details instead of just cropping and resizing, which was how zoom used to be done. zoomed on the way in (10x) and the image is usable but subject has that overprocessed halo look.

kevin came home at 7:30pm. he must not have eaten lunch (or went out for food) because he came back and microwaved something and went to eat in his bedroom. later around 8:30pm he came out to make dinner, after i'd already taken out my frozen lasagna brick from the oven. while he was finishing up, i asked him for help translating the QQ account transfer directions. he didn't tell me anything i didn't already know, but said i could probably call QQ to get this issue resolved. unfortunately i wouldn't know the first thing about troubleshooting something like this over the phone, but i was confident there was a solution. the sooner i can get my QQ account ported, the sooner i can give my old oneplus one phone to my mother.

one thing i will miss about living in the apple ecosystem is being able to text message from my computer. now that i'm no longer using my iphone, i can no longer do that. fortunately google has a browser-based text messaging service (messages.google.com). it requires turning on the "messages for web" option in the google messages app and scanning a QR code to pair the phone to the browser/computer. it's not as elegant, and connections would repeatedly drop, but it works, and with browser notification turned on, it behaves similar to apple messages. i tried testing it with my sister - who's on an iphone. i wrote her from the browser app, she replied, but the messages showed up in my apple messages, which somehow seemed to be rerouting the messages. i couldn't see any of her replies on my phone. i ended up fixing the problem by deactivating my imessages account, so all text messages would be forced to go to my android phone. that seemed to have fixed it. this is a peculiar problem that only happens when you migrate out of the apple ecosystem and switch from iphone to android.