The Frug: Live Lean. Work Lean. Travel Lean.

life hacks

It’s Screen Time. Making the most of your smartphone addiction.

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By Brad Beckstrom

I’ve been playing with the screen time tracker on my iPhone. Apple recently introduced screen time tracking in response to legitimate public concern about rampant addiction to looking at our iPhones.

Apple hid this app in the settings section so if you look for it on your home screen or search bar you won’t see it. You need to go to settings and search for it.  I really don’t feel there’s enough data in there for me to decide if I have a smartphone problem but I should keep an eye on it. Actually, I already know I have a smartphone problem. I really don’t need another app to tell me about this. I just want to manage it.

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Never Pay For Cloud Storage Again.

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Claiming your one terabyte of free space in the cloud. 

cloud storage

By Brad Beckstrom.

It’s out there. The land rush is on. Free space. I’m not talking about a few free gigabytes of space, I’m talking free terabytes (1000 Gigabytes).  If you’re like most people you have a lot of photos. They are probably out of sight, scattered around in all kinds of places, shoeboxes, disintegrating photo albums, old laptops, photo apps, and smartphones. Especially smartphones. As cameras in smartphones get better (Over 800 Apple engineers worked on the latest iPhone camera) we are taking more and more photos.  We take photos of family, friends, pets, projects at work, that dent in our fender, photos of our stuff (a home inventory with photos can come in handy with the insurance company after that next natural or household disaster).  

Wouldn’t it be great if we could store all our photos in one place and have them automatically tagged and categorized by date, topic, location, and then easily decide which ones to share with family and friends and which ones to keep private?

I recently got a crash course on photo storage options as I’m working on a project to publish 10,000 images over five years. I needed space for personal photos, work photos, and photographs for the project. If you count photography as a hobby and shoot high-resolution and raw images, up til recently online storage wasn’t a great option. Less than 100 full size image files from a modern digital SLR can take up more space than 65,000 pages of word documents. (about a gigabyte) High res scanned images can be even larger.

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