February 2021

My husband and I will be celebrating 25 years together later this year. When it comes to capturing memories for nearly a quarter century, our relationship is distinctly “before digital camera” and “with digital camera”. Earl mentioned “we have a lot of photos”.

In my iCloud account I have over 35,000 photos taken since 2005 or so. We have hundreds or thousands of standard photos in boxes and albums as well. And I refuse to get rid of any of the “analog” photos.

Enter Google Photo Scan.

If you’re not familiar with the application, Google Photo Scan is a nifty little app on your iPhone that uses your camera to scan in photos. You center the photo in the frame on your phone, click to capture, and then follow the arrows to capture the corners of the photo. Google Photo Scan puts all of this together into one image that doesn’t have glare or distortion from any bends in the photograph or anything. The photo above was part of a collage put together by my cousin for my Dad’s funeral services nearly a decade ago. While still part of the collage, I used Google Photo Scan to grab the image and save it to my iCloud account.

Technology is awesome.

Now, I’m not usually a fan of Google services simply because it feels like Google drops support of a service as part of a random action from their company. I don’t like that and I still pine for the days of Google+ and Google Reader. But if you have some old photos to capture that you want to preserve digitally, get yourself Google Photo Scan while it’s still around.

It’s a nifty little application.

Oh, and I’ve found my desert hat.

Getty Images.

Inc. is reporting that Target plans to introduce Apple “mini stores” inside of their stores. The first rollout includes 17 Target locations. The stores slated for the upgrade are in California, Delaware, Florida, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Texas. It is a collaborative effort between Apple and Target.

For bringing Apple products, and it’s associated lifestyle services, to the masses this is a great idea. Apple is a leader of user privacy efforts in this always connected world, so anything that can be done to further that experience to as many users as possible is a good thing. This is a step in the right direction for areas of the country that don’t have a full blown Apple store.

One of the first things I looked up when we were discussing our move to Tucson was whether there was an Apple store in the vicinity of our potential neighborhood. Everyone can relax, it’s about a 30 minute drive across town. I look forward to Target adding an Apple mini store to our nearby location someday.

Some Best Buy locations have featured mini Apple stores and they seem successful for the most part. But with our last few visits to Best Buy revealing significantly scaled down locations with some bare shelves and abused displays, I can’t help but wonder how long Best Buy is going to be around.

While the trend is clearly to buy anything and everything online these days, there are times when you want to see and feel a product up close and personal before making a purchase. Having an area of your local Target where you can get an “Apple experience” before purchasing your next iPhone or HomePods or something just helps cement the connection between person and machine. Both companies benefit from the collaboration.

A brilliant move.

On Friday I registered for the BYOD, or “Bring Your Own Device” program at work. With today’s remote work capabilities, we have the option of using our personal devices for business purposes. When we get back to traveling, I’ll have my Mac in tow instead of lugging around two computers, a work Windows 10 PC, and one of my personal devices.

To separate my personal files from my business files I created a second account on my Mac. This helps keep me focused and it keeps my personal data from mistakenly being shared to work folders or something through an errant mouse click. When we move I’ll probably add a second Mac to the stable to segregate the experience a little more and upgrade to something a little faster than my mid-2015 MacBook Pro. For now, things are working great.

Using one platform across my entire computing experience really kicks up my focus. When I’m on Windows some of the day and Mac or iOS the rest of the day I have to maintain two sets of programs and make sure my workflow (task management, etc) is cross platform and think “in parallel”. Getting back to this arrangement helped my brain get organized again; I was very productive at work today and it was a great start to the work week.

I have been using OmniFocus as my task manager for well over a decade. A year or two ago the OmniGroup added a web version for those that had to use Windows at work. Other than the web experience, all of OmniGroup’s software is Apple (Mac/iOS/iPadOS) only. The web experience was adequate but not as cohesive as I wanted it to be. I’m just not wired to quickly add a task to my ToDo list by clicking on a pinned tab in a web browser and navigating around a web page. It’s much easier for me to use the native experience and being able to do this through muscle memory lends itself to my using my task manager reliably and deliberately.

The consistency across my entire computing experience just works better for me. Everyone has their own way of doing things, my way is the Mac way.

Now remember, I make a living using Linux all day long. It’s much easier for me to do this from a Mac than from a Windows machine. Mac OS is based on Unix, Linux’s older cousin.

Anything that makes my day easier is worth celebrating.