apple
- A PC with Windows (since I have no idea how a Mac will respond, and frankly don't care).
- Your iPhone.
- The USB cable.
- Fire up the PC.
- Fire up iTunes (maybe, maybe not).
- Plug in your iPhone.
- Open up Windows Explorer.
- Go to My Computer or, if you aren't living under a rock, Computer.
- Open up the iPhone drive that should be there.
- Open the DCIM folder in there.
- Now, open each dumb folder.
- Select all.
- Press Delete.
- Watch them all go away.
- Lather, rinse, repeat.
iPhone cases & an important charity for Peruvian children
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Phone cases are a dime a dozen.
Well, not literally. They cost real money, but they’re available everywhere for all kinds of mobiles and at every conceivable price point. When it comes down to it, consumers will select the style and price that fits their circumstances and financial wherewithal. Hell, a lot of Chinese phone makers include a (cheap) case in the box that I’m sure a handful of people around the globe actually use.
When I received a press release from Illusion Photograph offering me a review sample of one of their phone cases, I told them up front that they should focus on getting samples to more visible outlets. They insisted, so I did some research and, after learning their story, acquiesced. They sent me a Route 66 case for my iPhone 12 mini, and this, in a way, is a review. So, here it is…
The case comes in a zipper lock sleeve, has a lovely print applied, is glossy, and fits snugly onto my phone. It has cutouts on the top and bottom edges to better facilitate edge swiping, and the button cutouts prevent unintended button mashing while retaining easy access. In other words, it’s a lovely, but otherwise unremarkable case.
Not exactly enough for a full post, but that’s not really the point. Here’s the email I sent Beatrice, the owner of Illusion Photograph and co-founder of the LivingHeart.co charity that illustrates the actual point:
Beatrice,
Tell you what, you can send me a case, but a case is a case. I’d prefer to profile you and your efforts to raise funds for Living Heart. Your words on your website are moving. I fear for the future and my heartache is endless as I worry for our most vulnerable, no matter where they live, how they live, or what they look like. A human is a human. Full stop. And yet we struggle to make any real head-way in human rights around the world.
So, sure. You can send me a case and I’ll give it a nod, but the piece will be about you and your work and your ongoing efforts to find yourself. I fight daily for the same thing, so I feel you.
Sincerely,
Tyler
As I believe I’ve made transparent (see what I did there?), they sent me a case for free and I was planning on posting a piece about their charity. What I would also like to make clear is that I’m doing this for the charity. My only hope is that people either buy cases or donate to the charity.
This seems like a good time to talk about the charity itself. This video, produced in 2012, pretty much covers everything you need to know about how your generous donations are spent.
Most charities focus on much larger targets with narrow goals, but what I believe are the core strengths of Living Heart are its tight focus on a small region of Peru, the education and nutrition of the children of those remote communities, the care to honor and promote local traditions (read: NOT colonialism), and the teaching of sustainable skills instead of just dropping off supplies. By not expanding outward in an attempt to serve more and more communities, the charity can focus its efforts and realize real change in these impoverished regions. Note in the video when they talk about donations of warm clothing they say can be worn underneath the culture’s traditional garb. There’s a level of detail and cultural sensitivity in that you don’t see a lot of.
I urge that you give, or buy a case or five, and/or tell your friends and family to give what they can. I’ll be donating the value of the case I received once I’ve got the spare cash because I think that’s not only fair, but a responsibility I have to my fellow humans on this ever-increasingly miserable rock.
No one has ever asked to be born who they are. We just get the luck of the draw, and these kids aren’t at fault for living in poverty, and by extension their parents. Society has a long, dark history of discrimination and segregation and classism in the extremes, and these Peruvian communities high in the Andes are an example of that.
I think Living Heart is doing something very important here. We should all pitch in.
Happy New Year…
Apple has jumped the shark
It wasn't long ago that you couldn't walk down the street without tripping over some new Apple rumor or buzz over the latest and greatest Apple gear. Now, it's all about the white noise we hear from the tech industry as a whole. Are we living in a politics-style news bubble, is Microsoft beating Apple at their own game, or does the Cupertino megalith have something up its sleeve that would make the ghost of Steve Jobs giggle.
I remember, albeit vaguely, when Steve Jobs rolled out the brand new iMac in 1998. You really had to be there to see it live, but I did manage to see it eventually. I was, at the time, an Apple "phanboi", Ever since my first Apple ][, I had loved Apple. I've had lots of Apple products. I drank the kool-aid, as it were. After all, Apple was just dropping new products like creepy old ladies drop candy on Halloween. The iMac, the PowerMac, then the shift to Intel and the advent of the MacBook. Then, like a bolt from the blue, the iPhone and the iPad. The computer industry was having a hard time keeping up. It looked like Apple had a crystal ball and the competition tried and failed to copy Apple's formula, but Steve beat them handily, time and time again.
Then Steve Jobs died.
I'm sorry if that seems harsh (you might want to have that looked at), but it did happen. Tim Cook was installed as CEO to shepherd along what was already one of the single most valuable companies in the entire world. It didn't take long to see that Apple did not have a crystal ball, though. What they had was Steve Jobs. That's because, despite all of his ludicrous flaws and foibles that are common to genius, he had a crystal ball in his head. He could see the trend-makers and beat the competition to the punch, but the one thing he couldn't do was teach that trick to anyone else.
Even with annoying British designer Jonny Ive at his side, Tim Cook has been struggling to define a course for Apple that still pops out innovations. There was no Steve micromanaging every tiny detail every day, all day long. So, they just plodded along and started to copy what others had done while chasing them. The iPhone got bigger. The iPad got smaller. The Apple TV added voice and games. The Mac Pro got more expensive. Every exercise that used to produce real innovation melted boorishly into iterative microchange with a premium price attached for good measure. Apple, in my estimation, jumped the shark around the iPhone 6s and/or iPad Pro.
While the rest of the industry has now long been hawking the 2-in-1 lappy nee tablet in full awareness that the tablet industry is tailing off, Apple still makes nothing more than traditional laptops. Where you can get a tablet that runs full octane Windows 10, your iPad Pro still runs tablet software. Grab yourself an overpriced Samsung Galaxy S8 and you can take it swimming, where Apple still slaps you on the wrist if you get their gear damp. If you want something hot and new in Apple products, just grab yourself the new MacBook Pro with it's amazing Touchbar, a video strip that replaces the function key row. huzzah.
And, of course, everything Apple does is promoted with breathless intensity. Every event is Bob Hope's presentation of the recently risen Jesus Christ atop a gleaming, floating cloud hovering over Trump's Maralago. Yet, there were few showmen of the same caliber as Steve Jobs, and Cook has not followed in his mentors footsteps. Nobody has. The only person in tech today I can think of who has a presence as compelling as Jobs is Microsoft's Panos Panay. Panos is a natural on stage, speaks in an unscripted manner, interacts well with the crowd, and is enthusiastically hyper about Microsoft's Surface product line like an amp cranked up to 11.
Now Apple rolls out a $5000 iMac Pro?! Is this Apple's response to Microsoft's astonishing, if subtly flawed, Surface Pro? I'm not going to dig into the world of pain that is Intel's i9 X-series multicore mega parts clusterfuck, but Apple has bought in completely. The stupid thing is that the X-series gear is designed for enthusiasts (sorta, more cobbled, but then I'm quibbling) and is meant to be built, not presented. Apple "presents" gear. You are meant to take it as it comes, use it as long as you can, and replace it with another steeply overpriced gadget they've breathlessly announced. In a sense, Apple is lucky that the mobile phone blew up, since that kind of gear is right up their alley.
None of this bodes well for a company that has long been playing at the edges of marketshare. I don't mean to suggest that Apple will go away. Far from it, but it does risk sliding back into the same tasteless, colorless mire it did when they first lost Steve Jobs. It's a fascinating history and if you don't know it, go look it up. You'll be amazed.
TL;DR - Steve brought in former Pepsi head John Scully to make corporate things work better after Apple's early success with the Apple ][. Following the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984 and after a lot of grief in the executive suites later, the board votes to fire Steve and put Scully in the CEO spot to replace Mark Markkula (yeah, Steve wasn't CEO). Steve goes off to found NeXT and Pixar, while Mike "The Diesel" Spindler was screwing up Apple's next gen OS and mobile aspirations. This led to Gil Amelio signing his own pink slip by suggesting Apple bring Steve Jobs BACK to consult. Then iCEO Jobs cut loads of fat from Apple's projects roster, started work on Mac OS X, ushered in the iMac, and began the road to making Apple one of the most powerful companies in the world before he died. Crazy, eh.
Yes, Apple has a huge share of the market in the iPhone, but all of the momentum they built over the years with desktops, laptops, and mobile devices is starting to catch the edges of reality and slow down. I don't think Tim Cook has much longer as CEO, and somebody needs to hand that Ive dude a severance check. His moody crap is really starting to bother me.
The stupid way to delete all photos from your dumb iPhone
So, I gave up on Apple a few years ago and have no ragerts. Apple has simply lost the thread of late and Microsoft is the real innovator these days. For the record, Windows 10 is the bomb and is far more functional than Mac OS X. Regardless of my enthusiasm, however, my wife Rima still insists on using her dumb ass iPhone 5s and it's admittedly sweet 8MP camera. She takes a lot of images, and that takes up a lot of room. She needed to archive the images she had taken and make room for a few thousand more.
But, ahem... iOS only lets you delete images one at a time, or a bunch, but you have to select them manually. One. at. a. time. How annoying, and terrible UI/UX design. Jesus, Apple, I thought you guys were supposed to be awesome at this.
Enough with the griping. Found out a simple-ish way to backup and delete all of your images. YMMV, since I only did this on an iPhone 5s with recent-ish software on it. You will need:
It's likely you'll also need to have the iTunes software installed so you have the mobile device drivers for your iPhone, or this probably won't work.
Now, at this point, you should see a few folders that have stupid names. These are the different folders you have on your iPhone in the Photos app. You can't delete these.
Now, I suggest you copy these to your hard drive before deleting them, or you can MOVE them, which is kind of the same. If you don't, you'll lose every last one of them. In case you don't know, when deleting files from a connected drive, there is no Recycle Bin. It just goes away.
Poof.
So, take your time, be careful. Use checklists if you have to. Mind your surroundings. Keep your guard up.