Ask HN: How do you remember to keep all your devices charged?
In my household there are just two of us and I can name at least 20 smartphones, laptops, e-readers, tablets, bluetooth headsets, and smart watches. Some infrequently used devices are at 1% or dead when I reach for them.
Wish I had a dashboard showing the charge of everything and email alerts when they go below e.g. 20%.
I'm not asking for full on MDM solutions. I know there are other metrics folks might want to track, like location, RAM, CPU load, security patch status. Partial solution. "Find my" reported my daughter's dog's air tag was on low (non-rechargeable CR2032) battery from 200 miles away. Not scaleable, but fun to share. I'm not sure that a computer could be (Apple)scripted to BT monitor so many gadgets. Worth exploring? Does some app already do this? Alternately, rejoice in short battery cycles and recharge daily/nightly. Batteries rarely blow up on float charge these days. It was exciting in the past. Never left anything charging when I left the house. “A place for everything and everything in its place”. Each device’s place is on its charger. Done. The exception is my phone, whose place is wherever I am, but I keep an eye on the battery and it warns me at 20% so I’ll plug it in for a bit when not actively using it; and in an emergency can use a power bank and then plug it and the power bank back in as soon as wall chargers are an option. Get a smart plug or basic timer for your electrical socket and set a schedule to be on periodically for a limited amount of time. Plug a powered USB hub into it and connect everything that doesn't require daily charging when they're not in use. I am taken aback by the amount of devices you two people seem to have, honestly. For me I just... use them. And I have a tendency to not forget such things. The unused ones will lose their charge over time, indeed. My phone I use. My old phone, that I use as GPS, I have to remember to charge before I need it. My laptop I use all day, my previous laptop has no battery anymore. My iPad Mini has got the short stick some times, to be honest, because it is mainly a secondary device. I have it always with me, but I rarely use it outside the house. And in the house it's not the top device, either. The Steam Deck I use throughout the week, so I see its charge. But now I used it again the day before yesterday after half a year, or something. It happens, no need to have it charged in the meantime, frankly. Same for my controller. The little Anbernic handheld faces a similar fate. Wireless keyboards I do not possess currently, and the one wireless mouse I have takes an AA battery, and is Logitech, 2-year battery, no worries. > so it falls on me to keep everything charged for her. Assumption worth rechecking. She's an adult with autonomy. Spoonfeeding limits her independence and learning. That does not answer the question. It's also rude, but I'll own fault for that. Edited the post to encourage focus on the technical issue. > encourage focus on the technical issue Can you reframe the problem in non-technical terms for yourself? A great solution could reveal itself in a way you hadn’t considered. I appreciate your socratic approach this time. It's easier to receive than insinuating my wife is acting childish ("she's an adult"). One can certainly encourage others to keep their own devices charged. However, this solution doesn't scale, for example to whole families or people helping their aging parents use a smartphone. Moreover, the issue persists if we only consider my devices. So I edited the question accordingly. > insinuating my wife is acting childish ("she's an adult"). I was actually critiqueing you and defending her. One thing I have found in my own life is that sometimes when I do somethign to help someone, it can undermine their autonomy, sense of responsibility, and independence. I'm going to argue that looking at it the way you're looking at it is death and highly destructive and will at best harm your mental health and make you depressed. I've tried it. Building a good system to chronicle a "fucked up situation" leads to tears. I keep the devices I care about charged because I care about those devices. I plug in my phone every chance I get. I've shown up at sports games with dead batteries in my camera so now I have a huge number of spare batteries, chargers, and procedures to deal with the foibles of my devices (somehow the power switch on Sony cameras seems to frequently get rotated when I put them in my bag.) If your wife doesn't care she's always going to be having discharged devices come to her hands, so your answers are: (1) Get her to use devices that are plugged in. When my wife wants to use the internet she uses a Mac Mini, which never gets a dead battery. (2) Some devices are bad about charging. In particular, discard any Android devices as e-Waste. Frequently you charge up an Android and turn it "off" and come back a month later and it is discharged. Was it spying on you the whole time? Plug it into the charger for 12 hours and you'll find it is still completely discharged, probably if you disconnect it from the charger and charge it for another 12 hours it will be charged. You don't want to be that guy. Apple now has a feature which scares me terribly, which is something that will only charge your device when carbon free energy is available. I believe in climate action as anybody but I've been so traumatized by Sony devices (cameras, portable game consoles) that only charge when they feel like it as well as those Androids that a major reason I like iDevices is I plug them in and they charge and I don't want to go back to the Google/Sony experience. My PS4 Pro has a lot of USB ports and I like the idea of one big device with a lot of ports that you can just plug everything into but unfortunately it turns off the USB ports to save power and even if you set the toggle in the settings to not do that it still isn't reliable, which is sad. Devices that charge only when they want to and chargers that only charge when they want to charge make me pull my hair out. And don't get me started about the $5 USB-C cables that don't really work (get the frickin' $20 cables and throw a cable in the trash the minute it shows the slightest sign of instability such as the device doesn't charge if the cable orientation is wrong) and all the bad chargers. (3) Devices with special charging docks are golden. If you get a pair of Bluetooth headphones that plug into USB-C you will probably put them down and then pick them up and find they're dead. If you have a set of headphones that have a charging cradle you will put them on the cradle and never have dead headphones. There's a particular bit about female nesting psychology that "special places" have a psychological meaning. A lot of middle aged women were blindsided by flat panel TVs because they got a lot of pleasure about getting some piece of furniture to house their old CRTs and when you could just stand up your TV on the side of the room or mount it on the wall they felt really empty. You can put this psychology to work by making some special space for storing and charging the devices she uses. (4) In the end she has to take responsibility, decide she cares about some particular set of devices, and keeps them charged herself. What you can do is minimize the number of devices and make sure they all have good charging and storage situations. Maybe modern houses need a “charging room” like a coat closet with lots of outlets and shelves.