Archive for the ‘technology’ Category

Part 2 – Picture Hoarder i-Phone Memory Melt Down

August 20, 2015

… to continue with this dumb saga, whew, of my i-Phone memory being all used up with photos and videos, I declared the problem solved when the piconizer arrived in the mail from my super-techno-savvy brother-in-law, Victor.

"Oooo- What's inside the box?"

“Oooo- What’s inside the box?”

Great! Just upload the piconizer app to i-phone, connect gadget to phone like a thumb drive, transfer photos, delete photos on phone, voila!- I’ve freed up storage on my i-Phone. Right? Wrong. I couldn’t download the piconizer app to begin with because my i-Phone didn’t have enough memory, even though I had already deleted scores of photos and videos. Okay … fine. I deleted several apps. Rebooted my phone. 3 times. Still no memory available (in ‘usage’ under settings).

So then, Victor calls… “Did you get the piconizer? How is it working?”

“Uh, yes I did. It’s beautiful.” (Which is was. The piconizer was custom fit inside purple framed packaging like a crown jewel.)

"Are you sure you want to take it out of the package?"

“Are you sure you want to take it out of the package?”

“Did you get it to work?” he asks.

“I don’t have enough memory to download the piconizer app! That’s just bullshit because I’ve been deleting photos and apps like crazy. I’m ready to smash my phone.” (Hey, that’s how type A’s handle stuff like this, when the Universe is screwing with us.)

“Whoa…okay.”

A few minutes later Victor calls me back. “I’ve sent you an email with a link. Go open it.”

It was the link for the Apple search question: “Cannot free up storage space after deleting all photos.” There’s a pretty interesting discussion here about this problem – how comforting to know I have lots of company. Makes me glad I didn’t buy more memory on icloud.

“Okay, Jody. Get your phone ready. We are going to follow the directions on the link, step by step, to delete your (already deleted!) photos.” (Huh?)

Here are the directions contained in the link, which we followed:

First, check the Recently Deleted album in Photos, which is a new feature after iOS 8.1. If it’s empty you may have run into a strange bug, where deleted photos don’t actually get removed. To check for this follow these rather strange instructions:

•Go to Settings/General/Date & Time
•Disable Set Automatically
•Tap on the current date/time and roll it back about 2 years
•Tap <General in the upper left
•Launch the Photos app and go to the Recently Deleted album (even if it says there are 0 photos)
•Is it full of photos? If so, delete them
•Go back to Settings/General/Date & Time and turn Set Automatically back on

In other words, if you were smart, or dumb, enough not to upgrade your operating system past iOS 8.1, then when you delete your photos, they are deleted and you instantly gain memory. But apparently, if you updated beyond 8.1 then when you delete your photos they go to a ‘deleted photo album’ – they aren’t deleted. They sit there for 30 days, still chewing up your memory, until you go to your deleted photo album and delete them. That is, unless your phone contracted that strange bug where deleted photos don’t get deleted. (Try antibiotics?)

Ah … remember the good ol’ days with i-Phones: When you were low on memory, you just deleted photos, and maybe a video or two, and gained the memory back.

Anyway, Victor and I went through the process over the phone step by step. When we got to the deleted photos album sure enough, it was full of photos. 240 photos and 35 videos. “Delete them.” Victor commanded. Dang! I wanted to go back through them one more time and maybe save ones that had been deleted, you know, under extreme duress.

I did actually download a few albums of photos onto my piconizer (okay, with David’s help). Pretty cool. I can carry it with me in its nifty case and anticipate the day I might want to look at those photo albums from 2011, or just stow it away in our buffet drawer thinking I might someday pull it out, attach it to my phone, and see if I can figure out how to look at those photos again. Or maybe carry it with me the next time I see Victor …

There, now you have all the details involving a technologically disinterested Type-A personality embroiled in a picture hoarder i-Phone memory meltdown. Although I’m pretty sure I’m more smart than dumb by not upgrading my operating system.

Am I sounding more technologically savvy yet?

(Maybe just go back to a portable digital camera and a flip phone?)

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i-Phone Photo Hoarder

August 17, 2015

In an effort to keep up with the world of fast advancing technology my hubby and I sprung for i-Phones. Except the new smart phones keep advancing faster than we are and we never have the latest greatest smart phone. One reason is, of course, price. We bought the i-Phone 3 when i-Phone 4 was out (at 1/6 the price or something – 50 bucks). I accidently discovered the camera on the i-Phone 3 and found it so user friendly that I soon amassed 600 photos. I love all my photos. And I learned not to upload my precious photos onto the computer and delete them from my i-Phone, because I never see them again. I just don’t organize or bother finding photos on my computer. So, photos stay on my i-Phone.

When we update our phones I just transfer all my photos and videos to the new phone. So by the time I updated to i-Phone 5 (when 6 came out) – I transferred about 2200 photos and 25 short videos. My phone has a few apps, that I don’t use much. There’s no downloaded music on my i-Phone. 64 GB of phone memory seems way excessive – so I opted for 16 GB.

Soon I had 3200 photos and 65 videos and not enough memory to download the new operating system. Who cares? The current operating system works just fine – ios 8.2 or something. Oh, but I see in my settings that I also have 5 free gigs of memory available on the i-cloud! I can store photos there. Oh, but I have more than 5 gigs of photos and videos so i-cloud wants me to pay a monthly fee for extra storage. No! Okay so I’ll go through and delete my least awesome photos and videos and get some memory back. Which is what I did. Delete, delete, delete, (‘Ouch!) delete…

Meanwhile, my extremely technically savvy brother-in-law, Victor, who knows about my photo hoarding vs. phone memory problems sends me a new i-Phone gadget called a piconizer. It could solve all my problems! It works like a picture thumb drive where you can store photo albums, free up the phone memory, and plug it back in to your phone to view your photos. Great! Except, right off the bat when I plugged it in I got the message: Not enough memory to download piconizer app. What? Okay, fine. I started deleting other apps. Off went dictionary.com, Zillow, i-books and Delta Airlines. I deleted more photos and videos. Then I checked my settings and could not believe how much storage I had gained. Here you can see – I took a photo of the screen showing memory usage:

IMG_1438

Available storage: 0 (Apparently Apple uses up 4 GB storage for their stuff on your phone, because I’m pretty sure it’s a 16 GB phone.)

icloud storage available: 5 GB

What the? How can this be? How did I even take that last photo, then? What about those deleted apps? What am I supposed to do here? I know that the 5 GB available on icloud is not enough. Has Apple Inc. devised some diabolic scheme to persuade old fart technologically disinterested picture hoarders into signing up for an icloud storage plan with montly payments?

Miraculously I still had enough memory to take a selfie.

IMG_1471

Old fart picture hoarder vs. Apple.

This picture reminds me of a previous blog I wrote when I got my first i-Phone. It’s from June 15, 2009. Geesh. 6 years ago. Here’s the link. . Well, if it isn’t the link you can find it easily. It’s the only other blog I wrote under the category ‘technology’ (what a surprise).

There’s a selfie in that one too.

Well, I was younger then, but wiser now. What do you think? How does this get resolved?

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‘Technology – Menoprodigy’

June 15, 2009

It’s pretty funny that I have an i-phone.  I am way over my head with it (surprise! surprise!) – I mostly try to ignore all those colorful icons on the i-phone screen that could be connected to programs, links and  technology – all accessible with a mere touch of a finger!

“What programs, links and technology?” that’s what I say.  Those things only complicate my life.  The only reason I got an i-phone is because my husband got an i-phone.  We were both perfectly happy with our old phones but our cellular company was bought out by AT&T and we were forced (and reaching the deadline) to get new phones. We were at the AT&T store, and my husband started fiddling with an i-phone, and a young, perky female sales associate was on him with her sales pitch like a starving fly to dried jelly.  I saw the writing on the wall, a vision if you will, right there on the spot:  Of me  sitting with him at the hearth at home, craning my neck, watching him play with his i-phone –  checking  on the current weather in London, typing out witty texts to our sons on his i-phone keyboard (with its keyboard sound effects), doing instant  internet fact searches to back up his conversation, listening to his favorite i-tunes …  I … wasn’t having it.  With two i-phones we can have concurrent internet searches and I’ve even beat him to the facts a couple of times.  Well, one time.   I totally text our sons like never before (okay, maybe ten times by now) and I have nearly a hundred photos stored on my phone, compared to his <10.  So there!  He does lots of other stuff quite comfortably with his phone, about which, I am clueless.

We could download God-knows-how-many i-tunes off the, uh, i-tunes website?  I don’t know.  I’m not in a big hurry to know.  I like my CD’s.  I still have two boxes of cassette tapes I cherish by fabulous artists like Supertramp and Carly Simon.  I immediately toss dept. store fliers advertising Wii’s and  i-pods and …  i-pod docking stations (docking stations?  Shouldn’t those be confined to outer  space?)  I still have much to learn about my i-phone, to ‘simplify’ and enhance my life.  Yeah, right.

Okay so I know I should try to learn, be willing to learn, how to better use more technology. For my sake. For my kids’ sake. For society’s sake.  So I can still function (in my home?) and communicate with the outside world in twenty years (ten years?… five years?).   So I don’t evolve  into a  frightened, disconnected, reclusive, geriatric, anti-techno-frustrate-stage-four crazy person.  (Who, Me?)

Wow! That’s  not a pretty picture!  Well, exploring my i-phone is a start. I’ve succeeded in taking my first picture of myself with my i-phone, and yes, it was a fiasco:

the budding anti-techno frustrate

the budding anti-techno frustrate

I’d better go now and throw out our TV with the bunny ears.

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