How do you measure things? Is there a good app for that?
My iPhone has “Measure”. I use it fairly often to measure things.
Yeah - even this Luddite knows where the ruler is on my iPhone. 
May have actually used it once or twice. But if I’m home, I’ll generally pull out a tape measure…
Which is usually one of the things in my pockets.
(My phone doesn’t do that . . .)
Coincidentally, I’m currently reading Blood in the Machine, about the Luddite uprising in 1811 England, and corollaries to modern tech.
Does it actually work well? I’ve found it to be … approximate
For what I’ve used it for (most recently measuring the diameter of an animal’s burrow) it has been accurate enough to make me happy. I’ve measured a ruler and found it accurate, but that was with the ruler flat on a table.
Yeah, this.
Exactly.
I feel naked without my phone. With it, I have the sum total of human knowledge within reach in moments.
A computer is the humble box that sits under your desk, not the monitor or the mouse or keyboard. That’s some serious gatekeeping. A smartphone is 100% a computer.
Nope, not typically.
I work from home so I usually am in sweats (winter) or shorts (summer); not all of them even have pockets or good elastic in the waistband anymore. Only if I’ve gotten properly dressed, gone out & come back home, they it is usually still in my pocket; unless I plug it in to charge.
Take it from a retired programmer. A smartphone is indeed yet another type of computer. For a while I was answering system messages from my phone also and that was over 10 year ago.
I don’t think I actually programmed on one, but pretty much everything else and I know a few people that did some programming on them.
The world people access through cell phones is just as real as anything else humans create, like nations and societies and currencies. These are all fictions that we all pretend are real, which makes them so.
Most of the time, my phone is on the table next to my recliner or on my desk. I’ll carry it with me if I’m going to be in the basement for any amount of time or into the kitchen if I’ll be there a while. I also try to keep it with me when I’m working outside. It only goes into the bedroom if I need an alarm to wake in the morning.
Looking at my phone, I see I’ve received or made 7 phone calls in the past week. That’s actually quite a lot for me. I communicate almost exclusively through text (specifically, WhatsApp). With my wife, my kid, my family, my job, basically everyone. Text is superior to voice in almost every way - no useless chitchat, no awkward pauses, no mishearing; you say what you want, when you want, and get on with your life.
That said, due to the fact that I’m middle-aged, I use full words, proper grammar and punctuation, and I insist that anyone who writes to me do the same. I still have standards, after all.
Yes, I do. Lots of reasons why. I listen to podcasts while I’m working around the house, going from room to room, so the best way to hear it is to have it on my person. If I’m going to the basement I definitely want it on me, lest I fall.
Plus, I get $$ from my insurance company for steps 
No phone, no steps, no cash!
I wear pajamas most of the time at home, and a hoodie in the winter. I make sure my jammies always have pockets, for my phone.
My mom never used to carry her phone at home and it sort of drove me nuts because if I texted her, she’d never see it because she never thought to look at her phone when she got back to where she had placed it. It wasn’t a matter of her not being instantly available, but I needed to hear back from her eventually. Now she has a walker, with a basket, so she’s much more reachable. I’m thinking of getting her an Apple Watch after her surgery, in case she will be off the walker, so she doesn’t have to carry her phone and I can have more peace of mind.
I never could get into the head of people who have dozens or hundreds of tabs open. I simply can’t comprehend. I get antsy if I get into the high single digits and X out of them all.
Ah, the hijack is out of the pit. Okay, didn’t want to contribute in the original thread, but will here. A few points:
@Whack-a-Mole, I’m not in the biz anymore, but it’s a safe bet to assume any phone released by a major carrier in the US has Wi-fi calling and the function is almost always approved by said carrier. It wasn’t always, but as you mentioned, it’s a popular work-around for homes with poor reception and a lot cheaper than most. As a former tech support person though, PLEASE make sure to fill out your e911 info though! It may never be needed (unless your home area has no signal), but if your home is an area without enough connection for your phone to self-locate, it might be needed.
Okay, my personal use… I make it a point to have my cellphone with me every time I go out, because it’s just smart. Not critical, but smart. I’ve used it from everything to trivial to extremely consequential. Having said that, if I got, say, more than 3ish miles from home to someplace else in town without it, I wouldn’t turn around to go get it. I would be kicking myself all day though.
One caveat though, is that I normally carry BOTH my cellular enabled tablet (yes, I’m an outlier) and my cellphone on a daily basis, because reading books or viewing the web on a pocket sized screen isn’t my cup of tea. So there have been times I’ve had the tablet but not my phone, which is fine, I can still handle emergencies that way.
At home though, I normally put it on the charger and out of my pocket as soon as I get home. BUT (another outlier) I still have my paired smartwatch on my wrist, so I can get all my notifications, texts, and even calls as long as I’m within BT range. And even if I’m not wearing it, I have the Alexa units (4) in the house configured for emergency calls / texts / services if something otherwise unthinkable happens.
Still, I fully expect that many of us are going to find that those habits may be required to change as you get older. Oh, not just for the “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” needs (and though I joke, it’s not a joking subject), but because so much modern technology is built around the assumption of smartphone use.
I bring this up because I just got back from visiting my father and step-mother in New Mexico. He just had an updated pacemaker with defibrillator. Unlike his prior one, this one is BLUETOOTH enabled. Thank the FSM (on behalf of my father and the tech) the company called to do the setup while I was visiting (I’m 630 miles away) and I could do it all. The device periodically scans my father, and if an abnormality is detected it sends the information to my father’s phone over BT and then to the clinic over the data connection. It’s very low powered, so the phone needs to be within 5 feet of my father at all times per the tech.
It also means that instead of making an appointment, waiting for a tech, or the like, if my father reports any heart concerns, he can click a button on the app and immediately get a current scan that’s sent directly to the clinic.
It’s amazing tech, if more intrusive than I think most of us would prefer, but it’s a tradeoff I think people may have to get used to as our health technology becomes more sophisticated and our never-to-be-sufficiently-damned health care industry in the US is increasingly over-crowded and hands-off.
And considering I’m in the younger cohort of this board, it’s tech I felt our more senior and respected members should be aware of.
I always have my phone nearby, and use it for pretty much anything not work related (my only computer is my work laptop which I don’t use for personal things). I listen to music off it and like to change things up a lot. Using it right now to type this! I never use my personal device for work.
I have a second cell phone for work, which is the only work number I have (no VoIP or landline) and I carry it as well during business hours and occasionally other times if I’m anticipating particular calls/messages (though rather rarely). I’m allowed to use it for personal use, but in this day and age, why the hell would I? I don’t actually trust my employer.
Please don’t count on that for emergency notification.
I have a pacemaker; and it works with an app. My phone can’t download apps, so they set the app up with my ipad. But I don’t bother trying to stay that close to the ipad except for a while each day – because while the pacemaker can indeed send alerts if something’s weird, it may be hours or days before anybody notices the alerts. The company reading the info works standard business hours Monday through Friday; and they’re not watching any individual pacemaker continuously, even during those hours.
So unless your pacemaker company has specifically told you that your setup includes immediate emergency services – the chances are really good that it doesn’t.
Oh, I’m sorry I wasn’t clear. To all reading, IT ISN’T FOR EMERGENCY NOTIFICATIONS. All caps, because the tech made that clear to me as well. It’s designed so that if there’s an abnormality, the clinic has it for diagnostic reasons, to identify patterns, and to determine if future steps are taken. It also means my father doesn’t have to schedule appointments to go into the clinic, wait (at times over 90 minutes) for some company rep to come in with a desktop sized device to read information off of the thing.
Thanks very much to @thorny_locust for their warning, and to prompt the update.
ETA - gender neutral language added, today is a day of errors for me!
You’re very welcome (and, psst, I’m not a “he”.)