Tuesday, 13th September, 2022

Let’s just ignore yesterday 😅.

Last night I found a little photobook I’d made. It was a promo thing online for a free book, so I decided to make one with just film photos in it. Taking it off the shelf and looking through it made me smile. So many funny little moments of everyone that I’d captured. It reminded me I need to print more.

My (now) sister-in-law got married last week. She posted some photos on Apple Photostream and I printed one of them this morning. Just a 5x7” from the HP Tango, but it’s nice to stick on the fridge or put on the side.

I read up on the new iCloud Shared Photo Library. Its use case seems fairly limited, i.e. families wanting to see each other’s photos and have one master library. That does sound like a good thing, although it seems like you can only be a member of one Shared Photo Library. I worry that the bulk of users will get tripped up with it and not quite follow how it’s moving photos around or how anyone can edit and delete photos. I’ll make one for my wife and I, as she’s with the kids all the time and takes pictures when I’m not there. Means I can get those into DayOne more easily. Another little reason why I want all our photos in iCloud.

Upon reflection, I think that a new TV is excessive. Yes, the old one in the playroom uses more power, but we don’t actually use it that much. I’ve just got into an upgrade cycle:

• get a new TV to reduce power consumption
• oh it’s 4K. Maybe it should be the main TV
• Get AppleTV 4K to stream stuff and photos.
• maybe we need a sound bar too
• if it’s the main TV then maybe it needs to be bigger. Or a higher spec model.

Before I know it, the cheap TV becomes an expensive TV, with several hundred pounds of accessories.

When they’re older, and if they want an Xbox or something, then that’ll be a more suitable time for the TV upgrades. I’d be better off building a low powered server to replace my current one. Which reminds me of my lunchtime walk today where I started wondering if a Mac mini could be my home server. But it mostly just turned into “I want to buy a Mac mini” even though that wasn’t the problem.

I could still get an Apple TV for the HomeKit hub. Seems a more useful box than their smart speaker. I could use it for photo viewing. Still seems excessive for just that. It has lots of cool features but I don’t need any of them. But is it less excessive than the smart speaker which we don’t need whatsoever. It would just sit in my office.

Think on that one. Anyway, found the smart thermostat on sale, so once I measure some stuff up to see if I need the back plates, I’ll order it. I need to find something suitable for the underfloor heating. Mostly as the current one is so annoying to program, it seems to reset itself and just isn’t very clear what it’s doing. No one (main brands) seems to make a controller though.

All this smart stuff has got me thinking about what else I could do.