My Nexus 5 phone is three years old. It recently got the Android Marshmallow update, so from a software point of view, it's got a lot of life left in it, even if it never gets another major Android update -- which, if I understand correctly, it won't.

The battery, on the other hand, has been rapidly losing its ability to hold a reasonable charge. And having to recharge the battery during the day is possible, but annoying. And way less than optimal when playing Ingress. :)

Being a modern cellphone, the battery is, of course, not user-replaceable. This has not stopped a large number of people from doing so and posting about how to do it on the Internet. So about a month ago, I ordered a new battery. Today, I decided that things had finally slowed down long enough to try installing it.

It only took about half an hour, happily. And when I finished putting everything back together, the phone started up. (I would say "fired up", but I'm a little squeamish about using that phrase after yesterday's DVD player adventure and the numerous slagged carcasses of Samsung phones that I've seen on the news. :) )

So we'll see how the new battery does. But so far, so good.

Oh, yeah, the DVD player. Well, that fell into the category of things not worth trying to fix, so it is in the electronics recycling box. I ran over to Sam's Club yesterday evening, picked up a $50 Samsung Blu-ray player, and have installed it in place of the late player. Happily, it works too. And the picture on the new set is very nice.

I'm sure it would be even nicer with an Ultra 4K player, but those were 4.5 times the price of the Blu-ray player, so we'll not be getting one of those for a while. And it's not like I have any Ultra 4K media...