iPhone

Fandango’s Flashback Friday — September 24th

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Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of your earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.

How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Friday Flashback post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.

If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 24th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

This was originally posted on September 24, 2017.

My Batteries Need Charging

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I do almost everything on my iPhone. I barely use my laptop anymore because it’s simply more convenient to use my smart, handheld device than it is to chain myself to my desk and use my laptop. And, honestly, there’s very little that I need to do on my laptop that I can’t do on my iPhone. I’m even writing this post on my iPhone.

I have an iPhone 6, which is about two-and-half years old. That’s about 75 in human years. So it’s old. But it works.

A few days ago I downloaded and installed iOS 11.0 for my iPhone. I did it not because there was anything wrong with iOS 10-dot-whatever that was previously running on my iPhone. It was working just fine.

iOS 11.0 seems to be working just fine, as well. And it does have a handful of new features, one or two of which might even be useful once I discover what they are.

But I’m not writing this post to brag about iOS 11.0. I’m writing this post to warn you about it. If you have an iPhone, and it’s not the latest, greatest iPhone, don’t download and install the new operating system. It consumes your battery life at an astonishing rate.

You know that little battery icon in the upper right corner of your screen? With iOS 11.0, I can literally see the battery draining. Since installing the latest OS, my iPhone’s battery is usually down to about 20% within just a few hours. Previously, the battery lasted most of the day before I had to set it aside for a little while to recharge it.

And, by the way, recharging the battery back to 100% takes longer with iOS 11.0. A lot longer.

I think the problem is that the new OS is designed to run most efficiently on the newest hardware. So I guess there’s only one viable solution to this iOS 11.0 problem.

I am going to pamper myself and purchase a new iPhone X in November when it becomes available. I’m sure that will solve my battery life problems and all will once again be right with the world.

Written for today’s one-word prompt, “pamper.”

Post script September 24, 2012

I was fascinated when I found this post that I wrote exactly four years ago. Shortly after I wrote it, I noticed that my iPhone 6 was running much slower than it had before I upgraded to iOS 11.0. Apparently Apple had decided to intentionally (and without informing anyone) slow down the performance of its older iPhones in order to attempt to extend the batter life after iOS 11.0 started sucking the life out of the iPhones’ batteries.

I did buy a new iPhone in November, but it was an iPhone 8 Plus, not an iPhone X, and that saved me a couple of hundred dollars. I traded in my sluggish iPhone 6 for an iPhone 8 Plus because it was a larger device than my iPhone 6 and I figured that, as a newer device — albeit not the newest device — the battery would last longer, which it did. And, best of all, it was much faster than my older iPhone. Last year, I upgraded to the iPhone 12 Pro Max, an even larger device than my iPhone 8 Plus.

But what is most interesting to me, exactly four years later, is that Apple just introduced iOS 15.0 and I’ve been debating with myself about whether to install the new iOS or to wait for a while. If I learned anything from my experience from four years ago, it’s probably that I should wait. Unfortunately, I tend toward instant gratification, so the idea that this sexy new update to Apple iOS is available is gnawing at my desire to have the latest and greatest of whatever is available. I have a feeling that I’ll be installing iOS 15.0 sooner, rather than later.

My Last Photo — July ‘21

Fandango11 Comments
Brian, aka Bushboy, posted his monthly prompt that asks us to…
  1. Post the last photo from our camera’s SD card or the last photo from our phone taken in July.
  2. No editing — who cares if it is out of focus, not framed as you would like, or the subject matter didn’t cooperate?
  3. No explanations needed — just the photo will do.
  4. Create a pingback to Brian’s post or link in the comments.
  5. Tag “The Last Photo.”

So here’s the last photo I took on my iPhone in July.

I took this photo specifically for this prompt and I decided to get a little, well, artistic, with this shot by going black and white and shooting it in portrait mode on my iPhone.

Care for a banana, anyone?

Am I Feeling Vulnerable?

Fandango31 Comments

I usually don’t respond to my own Provocative Question prompts, but this week I’m making an exception. Especially when Melanie, over at Sparks from a Combustible Mind, commented, “This is one question I hope YOU write an answer to, too. It’d be interesting to hear your thoughts on the matter.”

My Provocative Question post yesterday referenced Pegasus, the latest kind of spyware that can spy on almost any device and any social media networks and messaging apps without the victim having any knowledge that it’s happening.

When I first learned about Pegasus, it freaked me out that hackers could access my iPhone, monitor my keystrokes, track my location, and hijack both the microphone and camera. I use my iPhone all the time. It’s always on. It has all of my credit card information on it, my bank account information, my retirement account information, my investments information. I use it to talk and text with my kids. If some evil doer can get at all of my information and see me through my phone’s camera and hear me through the phone’s microphone, I’m in deep doo doo.

I told my wife about it and started to have a panic attack. You know what she did? She started laughing at me and said “get over yourself.” She asked, “Are you an activist, an important business executive, a high powered lawyer, a senior government official, a journalist?”

I said, “No, but I am a blogger who has been quite outspoken about….”

She held up her hand to stop me and said, “I hate to break it to you, sweetheart, but you’re a nobody. I don’t think you need to worry about anyone wasting their time trying to track your every move.”

So now I feel much more at ease about the prospect of being victimized by this spyware.

At the same time, though, I’m pretty bummed that my wife of more than 40 years thinks of me as a nobody.

Playing With Blocks

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I have a question for those of you who are knowledgeable about the version of the block editor that is available on the WordPress iOS app for the iPhone. If you don’t use the block editor on your iPhone, feel free to skip this post. And if you’re using a laptop (be it a Windows PC or a Mac) and know how to do what I’m asking about on a laptop, don’t bother responding. I know how to do it on those devices with full-sized, physical keyboards. I’m trying to figure out how to do it on an iPhone’s tiny virtual keypad.

So what is my question? It has to do with removing blocks within a post. Not removing a single block. I know how to do that. I’m asking about removing multiple blocks simultaneously.

There are situations where I want to copy a previous post and reuse some of the content from that post to write a new post. I find the post that I want to copy and then tap “Duplicate” to create a new draft of the post. Below is an example where I want to create a copy of a previous Flashback Friday post.

Once I get to the draft of the post that was created when I tapped “Duplicate,” I will typically reuse the first several paragraphs, but then I want to delete the remainder of the post that I copied and add new paragraphs. But in the block editor, I have to individually delete each block that I don’t want to use.

When I could still use the classic editor, all I had to do was select the starting point of the text I wanted to delete, highlight it and keep highlighting all the way down the page, and then hit “Cut.” In one fell swoop, all of the text I cut was deleted. Easy peasy.

But it seems that in the block editor, I can only highlight the text within a block, not across multiple blocks. And that means if I want to remove, say, ten blocks from the duplicated post, I need to individually remove each of those ten blocks one block at a time.

So, before I reach out to the happiness engineers, who are, I’m sure, tired of hearing from me, do any of you know if there is a way to remove multiple blocks at one time in the WordPress iOS app’s block editor? Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.

It’s Not as Scary as It Appears to Be

Fandango25 Comments

I’m a big enough man to admit when I’m wrong. For the past year I have written a deluge of posts lambasting WordPress’ decision to “decommission” (their word) the reliable, easy to use classic editor and to force us to “embrace” its block (Gutenberg) editor, whether we wanted to or not. And I most certainly did not want to.

As most of you know, I blog from my iPhone. In fact, at this very moment, I am sitting on my couch in my family room, listening to classic rock music, and composing this post.

But I digress. I have vigorously resisted this whole block editor thing for the better part of a year. First, I didn’t see any need for the elimination of the tried and true classic editor. Why, if the developers at WordPress were so thrilled with the new block editor, couldn’t they offer it as a “new and better” option, while continuing to offer the (mostly) beloved classic editor?

Second, the block editor that WordPress first introduced last year was not designed for use on the relatively small screen of mobile device. Maybe it worked well on a laptop, but it was shit on an iPhone. I resented feeling that if I wanted to continue to blog on WordPress, I’d have to do so on a laptop because the block editor was close to impossible to use on an iPhone. I even wrote in response to one of Dr Tanya’s Blogging Insights posts last July, “If the day ever comes when WordPress no longer offers the classic editor, that will be the day I will either find a different platform for my blog or I will just stop blogging.”

Well, that day came for those of us using the iOS app on our iPhones last month, when, as I explained in this post, WordPress removed the classic editor option from its iOS app. And that’s when it was shit or get off the pot time for me.

So I decided that I was going to dedicate myself to figuring out how to blog on my iPhone using the dreaded block editor, as it had become my only option. And it’s now my duty, as a member of this great blogging community, to admit that, in my rants over the past year, I seemed to have been making that proverbial mountain out of a molehill.

The current version of the block editor in the WordPress iOS app is usable. I can pretty much do with it all of what I was able to do with the iOS version of the classic editor. In fact, I can do a few more things with the iOS block editor than I could with the iOS classic editor.

So now I have no excuse to whine and rant about the block editor. No reason to hunt for another blog hosting site to move to. I’ve been able to move forward with the block editor on my iPhone without too much pain.

What I’ve learned is that no matter how dark the corridor ahead appears to be, one shouldn’t be afraid to step into it and see where it leads.

(I hope you appreciate how I managed to fit my FOWC with Fandango daily prompt word, “corridor,” into this post despite the fact that it had no relevance to the rest of this post.)

Written for these daily prompts: Your Daily Word Prompt (deluge), The Daily Spur (duty), Word of the Day Challenge (proverbial), MMA Storytime (mountain), Ragtag Daily Prompt (excuse), and Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (corridor).