iPhone | At Home with Tech

March 6, 2022

How to Pack your Streaming Apps for your Next Vacation Movie Night

After a fun vacation day on the slopes, my family settled in for a movie on our hotel room TV. Here’s how we did that using my existing Apple ecosystem.

I recently returned from a little skiing vacation with my family at Mount Bousquet in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. We hadn’t been on the slopes for a couple years due to the pandemic, so it felt great to practice some downhill again. (That’s our son having fun on a snowboard in my above photo.)

Pack your Apple TV for your Next Vacation
During our time in the hotel room, I tried using a particularly useful vacation tech trick I’d learned a while back. I had brought our Apple TV puck with us with the intent to jack it into the hotel’s WiFi network. This would allow me to access our entire arsenal of streaming apps and create movie nights using the room’s big TV screen. (Doing this effectively sidesteps having to purchase anything additional from a hotel as long as the base-level WiFi can handle streaming.)

Sadly, the streaming apps on my Apple TV didn’t work this time, because the hotel’s WiFi required a multiple-step login process, which the Apple TV couldn’t access beyond the password step.

Fortunately, I had also packed a lightning to HDMI adapter for my iPhone. (It’s always good to have a backup plan, when vacation movie night hangs in the balance.)

Apple Lightning Digital AV Adapter

Using this dongle, I was able to substitute in my iPhone as the streaming source and connect it directly to our hotel room’s HDTV via its HDMI cable. Then, my iPhone effortlessly served up the Disney movies we wanted via its Disney+ app.

Tech Ethics
You could say my streaming strategy unfairly took advantage of the hotel’s WiFi network, possibly slowing down WiFi speeds for others. But my iPhone ended up tethering to its cellular connection using its AT&T wireless data plan. So I don’t have to debate tech ethics here (not this time).

I pay for unlimited data on my AT&T account. So, in a sense, I’m already paying full price for my movie tickets while streaming. That said, I’m very happy not to be concerned about blowing through any data limits while on vacation!

Ensuring that Screen Time = Family Time
And why all my effort to project a movie onto a hotel room’s TV? Can’t an iPad or iPhone screen suffice during vacation? Not for me and my family. If you’re also a parent with kids, I imagine you might agree that screen time is a complicated topic.

The last thing I want to do is generate more opportunity for little eyeballs to stare at little screens, separate from the larger family focus.

If there is to be movie screen time on vacation, it’s great when it’s part of a larger family activity…experienced together.

Vacation Tech Joy
When bringing extra tech with you to create your family movie nights on vacation, please don’t forget to pack up all of the pieces before you leave. (Adapters have a way of disappearing if you’re not careful.)

And do put the hotel TV cabling back together. The next family may just want to turn on the TV without ‘Frankensteining’ together their own mini movie theater.

Nevertheless, I do enjoy screaming “It’s alive!” whenever I get my vacation TVs to work. A little tech joy always adds to my overall vacation experience.

In fact, I highly recommend it.

February 27, 2022

How to Save your iPhone when It Runs out of Storage

Don’t panic! Take these steps when you see that your iPhone’s storage is almost full.

I once pondered why anyone would ever need an iPhone with 512GB of storage. Now, three years later, I know that answer. My 256GB iPhone is packed, and I want more space. Sure, my media files can (and do) live in any number of clouds or hard drives, but of course there’s a cost with maintaining that solution.

If you’re in the same situation and considering upgrading to a device with 512GB or a whopping terabyte of storage, you probably should look at the other side of the same equation and ask yourself why do you really need to carry around that much data on your smartphone.

Let me answer that one… You don’t.

I don’t. (That said, my next iPhone will have more storage. But honestly, that’s a band-aid solution.)

The real problem and solution has to do with media management.

This is not about having enough space to maintain your media library on your smartphone. It’s about not having enough time over the years to thin out the files you don’t need. You wake up one day to realize you’ve got tens of thousands of disorganized photos and hundreds of home videos dancing about.

They’re clogging up your phone, and the irony is many of them are throwaways, minor variants of better versions. You just never found the time to go back and delete them.

iPhone Storage Almost Full
You can ignore this reality for only so long. Eventually, your device will force you to respond. You have to go through all of your media files and hack away at them.

I’ll go out on a limb and say that nobody really needs tens of thousands of photos to represent their day-to-day lives. So it’s time to roll up your sleeves and put on your media management hat.

The Good News
In the process, you might come across some unexpected fast lanes to free up space.

To do that, first review your iPhone’s storage report:

Click on iPhone Storage in Settings.

You’ll see a graph illustrating what types of files are sucking up your phone’s memory. You might spot a category that can be easily cleaned up. I did…

Delete All of your Downloaded Podcasts!
I found that I had 40GB in old downloaded podcasts that I could quickly eliminate. (That was a huge surprise.) I hadn’t realized when I started ‘following’ certain podcasts a couple years back that all of the new episodes would continue to download, regardless whether I ever listened to another one.

40GB gone! Whoa!

So, if you’re a podcast listener, you should definitely check that category.

And don’t forget to change the settings to stop your iPhone from automatically downloading new podcast episodes.

Go to the Podcasts Settings on your iPhone
Turn off Automatic Downloads: Enable When Following

Your iPhone’s storage report also offers a few quick and easy methods to free up memory, such as offloading unused apps. So don’t miss those opportunities.

But sooner or later you’ll need to face all of those photos and videos. It’s time to do the hard work.

Reversing Course Takes Time
You’ve slowly brought yourself to this precipice. And it may feel like death from a thousand nicks. It’s overwhelming.

So give yourself some time to dig out. Five minutes a day can do wonders. As long as you’re deleting more media files each day than your creating, you’ve found the right path.

Take control. Your smartphone will thank you.

September 26, 2021

How to Use an Apple Watch as a Remote to Snap a Better iPhone Photo

If you should come upon an amazing vista and desire a picture of yourself using your iPhone’s rear-facing camera, you can use your Apple Watch as a remote viewfinder to frame the shot. Here’s how.

I’ve often found when using my iPhone’s camera that one of my biggest challenges has been framing enough of the environment into a selfie pic. This has been especially difficult when I’m also trying to jam several people in. Sure, capturing all of the faces is hard enough, but if you can’t see where everyone is, the picture has limited value.

Of course, the solution is to move the iPhone to a distance beyond your arm’s length, which will get you the wider shot. But then, it’s not a selfie anymore. Well, not exactly. Let’s call it an ‘extended selfie.’

But how do you take the picture if you can’t touch your iPhone?

Camera Remote App
If you also have an Apple Watch, you can use it as a remote for your iPhone’s camera. The Apple Watch’s native Camera Remote app essentially controls your iPhone’s camera and offers a convenient 3-second countdown after you tap the shutter button. That should give you plenty of time after your look down at your Apple Watch and tap it to then look up at your iPhone’s camera in the distance.

Easy Activation
To turn on your Apple Watch’s Camera Remote app, you can simply proclaim to your iPhone, “Hey Siri, take a picture.” Or if it’s too noisy around you, you can also tap the app’s icon on your Apple Watch’s screen.

The Value of Using a Remote Viewfinder
This Apple Watch app can control the front or rear-facing iPhone camera. So that means you can take advantage of the better quality of your rear-facing camera for your extended selfie. That’s because even though you can’t see your iPhone’s screen when using the rear camera, you can still frame the shot using your Apple Watch. It effectively becomes a remote viewfinder.

Removing Yourself from the Picture
Using the Camera Remote app also opens up plenty of photographic options beyond selfies. If you’re able to position yourself far from your iPhone (but close enough to maintain the Bluetooth connection), you can erase your presence from the environment. And that should allow you to capture more natural moments.

Bring Along a Tripod
All of these options will give your iPhone photography a lot more flexibility. That said, you should also bring along a tripod. Propping your iPhone up against an object to get the right angle can be a really difficult and potentially risky exercise for your iPhone.

I know that using a tripod doesn’t exactly match up with the spontaneity of pulling your iPhone out of your pocket to take a quick shot. But a little Joby tripod with an iPhone grip should fit easily enough into any bag or backpack.

Shooting Beyond the Distance of a Selfie Stick
Yes, using a selfie stick can also help to get the shot you want. But performing this remote Apple Watch trick will offer even more opportunity to create a really great photo.

Just be careful not to put your iPhone in harm’s way… now that you no longer maintain physical contact with it. (I’ve have a tendency to do that with my cameras.)

To date, I’ve been successful protecting my iPhone while using it as a camera and found that using my Apple Watch as a remote viewfinder is a nifty tool to enhance my iPhone’s photos.

Tag: iPhone

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