From a new toaster wanting WIFI access, to the family car being near impossible to work on, our modern world has become something of a luddite’s nightmare.
This topic is for us to share our 1st World Tech Problems & Solutions.
My current problem is: How does one deal with the monstrous number of images generated by a family when trying to compile a family photo history?
Once upon a time I scanned my photographs & filed them. Later, I uploaded from my camera & filed them. Then came smartphones which resulted in big messy dumps requiring a ton of picking through & filing.
Now, with everyone in the family using a smartphone; downloading pics, taking pics, sharing pics, screenshotting random info, collecting random memes & just general junk… very quickly a single phone has thousands of images & most are just garbage.
I just deleted about 3000 crappy images while going through a single phone’s data-dump & I’m thinking there has to be a better way to deal with good old family history photos, than just sifting through hours of digital detritus…
Add to that the process of transferring all sorts of older data from one PC to a newer one & there’s litterally days of sorting, if one doesn’t plan on just repeating the depressing mess all over again.
So how do my fellow Etarcians deal with their truckloads of digital shit? Carefully upload & file weekly? Upload to the cloud? Store it on a hardrive?Kick the laptop under the spare bed & pretend they’ll deal with it later?
I’m interested to know…
Also post your own 1st World Tech Problems as I’m sure there are plenty this old Luddite hasn’t even encountered.
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Back in the day, before digital photography, through my work in both archaeology and accident investigation, I became at least a semi-pro photographer. Quality cameras, lenses and lights were expensive - by far the cheapest thing you used was film. The object of a shoot was to produce one or two really good images. So you developed a discipline - you used lots of film. You might shoot hundreds of pictures of the same subject - all from slightly different angles, at different exposures, or in different lighting. 99% of these would be ruthlessly discarded, and only the really good ones would be kept.
That’s at least half the secret of being a pro photographer - not so much taking great pictures, but discarding the bad ones.
It’s a trick i continue to use in the digital age. Most of what comes my way is garbage, and I don’t even attempt to save it. Only the good stuff gets stored. And for that, I have a stack of USB pluggable hard discs.
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I was reading a while back of people’s digital security being compromised by their light bulbs.
Apparently you can get colour-changing LED light bulbs. The colour change is controlled via an app, through your home wi-fi. To do this, the bulb needs access to your home network.
Trouble is, the bulbs are cheap and disposable, so the manufacturers haven’t spent a lot (or even anything) on security. And they have access to your network.
If bad actors can get inside your network, they have access to everything connected to it - and the light bulbs provide an open door.
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There is a similar issue with the Wi-Fi connected thermostat control for central heating and air conditioning. The solution to that one is easy. Don’t get one. I still use the older digital no-fi model.
I don’t understand the whole house connectivity thing. Just turn off your lights when you leave the house and set your thermostat as you pass it in the hallway
There is a big issue here with Ring doorbells. Communities now have Facebook groups where they share the videos and images of people coming to their doors or walking by outside and they all try to discover who they are. It’s not safe to even walk down the street in those neighborhoods. And they can hear everything you say too. So any time you go for a walk, a bike ride or jog, you are likely being recorded and discussed by a group of strangers.
Solution, walk, bike and jog someplace else.
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I saw a short interview where this fellow was explaining about the considerable number of cheap devices that record local ‘handshakes’ between connected devices & this somehow provides a backdoor into your network.
Seriously makes me wonder why everyone wants this tech so heavily integrated into their homes & lives, if it so easily permits spying, hacking & general privacy breaches.
Very 1984 feeling.
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I’m not at all sure they do. It seems to me it’s the manufacturers who are pushing this technology, rather than customers demanding it. It seems very much a solution looking for a problem.
Thing is, 99% of these things are made in China - which means that the the ultimate manufacturing decisions are being made by the Chinese government. I can’t imagine why they would want a world-wide network of surveillance devices.
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Ah, “The internet of things.” Lightbulbs are just one example.
It can be vacuum cleaners, baby monitors, door bells, door cameras, pet food dispensers, displays built into your fridge door to display advertisements, health or sports watch, car door and selfparking apps, car repair, weather/air quality sensors, heat/aircon control, shower and carseat prewarmer…
They come with preset passwords that are publicly known and they have accessible API (accept commands via internet and respond back).
Each item by itself seems harmless, but you have a dozen of them and each one has a vulnerability, and they add up. 
This guy (experienced developer) accidentally got access to all floor plans and audio of customers using the same vacuum cleaner.
(I have no such devices. If I needed one, I would enjoy getting an arduino or raspberry pi and setting it up myself.)
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Good point, who is asking for it? Most people only notice these features afterwards. Many carelessly switch them on because they think it’s required (“It’s a vacuum cleaner, of course it must scan your house in audio and video, how else could they navigate, silly?”)
I’m not sure what for though? A first test how many fall for it? A Chinese company is not in the business of spying on criminals in other countries (context: the German police installs spyware on criminals’ PCs).
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Heh, we were all typing at the same time, bringing up almost the same examples.
The door cameras now advertise, when someone abducts you or kills you, you’d wish your videos were public because then the police would sure help faster! (I’m exaggerating…)
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The Super Bowl ads contained one for doorbell cameras. If you lose your dog your whole neighborhood can search for it by linking all the cameras together and searching everything (and one) who pass your house.
There was such negative backlash, they pulled the ad and scrapped the whole idea.
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Hmm. Is your problem too many real photos, or real photos mixed with too much junk?
My phone and my mac’s photo app has a filtering tool by keyword (also machine learning based*). It suggests to recognise faces, would looking into something like that help?
Real photos also have location tags that other downloaded images not necessarily have, that could help you sort.
Or do you have too many similar ones of the same motif and need to pick one? Trainable Clustering algorithms exist, but I don’t know how accessible they are (like, do we still need a bachelor’s degree?).
I don’t understand why the images on my phone are not presorted in the first place.
- If the phone owner takes the photo themselves, it should be in a special category.
- When I download an image, it should go into another. My own cat is different from a cat pic I downloaded because I’m doing a drawing exercise.
- Jokes/memes/cartoons and real life photos should not be mixed…
- And game screenshots are also a completely separate category.
Allegedly machine learning can tell them apart…
(* hm, I don’t think I use Apple cloud, but will it tie photos, faces, contacts that you linked in the photo app and accidentally leak it one day?)
My favourite example is still Facebook, which has my phone number – which I never gave it. First it asked me to add it, then “is this your phone number, add it?”, then “we have added your phone number, confirm it”… that was at the time when they told everyone to upload their address book to “look for friends”. One of your friends clicks yes on anything like that, and it’s out of your control anyway…
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Android Google photos has started sorting my pics. They are now in a file called collections. This at least sorts them into camera, downloads, screenshot.
Then it periodically asks me if I would like to group similar photos.
One very interesting thing it has done is group all pics of the same person into 1 file. When I was using Ancestry to work on the family tree, it began to group people. It used facial recognition, I assume, and did a good job of sorting my pics.
Google will also group things. My flower and mushroom pics have also been sorted.
Then it likes to give me a video with music of these collections which I can then name. I can also order a printed book of photos, which I have done once.
This has proven to be very handy. All the pics of my dogs are grouped together. People are grouped, flowers, mushrooms etc…
I have also made it a habit of going thru my pics once a week and trashing junk. I take a lot of screenshot to help people. These are sent and received in text messages. The grouping helps simplify this task since my screenshot have their own file under collections.
One thing it is doing that I do not like, is stylize my photos. I sweep it away when it asks me if I would like to see my photo stylized.
Of course, all of this means that every day, my phone starts chatting with me about my pics.
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That is, of course, becoming a major problem. It doesn’t matter how secure you keep your own access and data, when the same information can be harvested from anyone you’ve ever had social contact or done business with.
The same thing is happening with DNA (has major implications for health insurance). It used to be that your DNA could only be traced or analysed if you had submitted a sample. Nowadays, your DNA can be identified by samples from your relatives. You have no control.
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Surprised Hamish’s neighbour in Small Proohets didnt get a ring camera. He must not know about em yet 
They had an ad during tje super bowl about how the doorbells help people find lost pets. If they cant convince us with logic theyll surely convince a lot of people by using our fears and emotions against us.
@Mad-Hatter i have about ten folders on my pc called “phone dump” followed by the year. Im just gonna keep bucking the respinsibility of curation to future me. I’ll need something to do when the ring doorbells rise up and take all the jobs.
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I do wonder what we’ll leave for the future. Our parents had photo albums, letters, and kept diaries. We could look on their shelves, and see the books they read. What are we and our kids going to leave?
There was a time when I backed up digital date to DVD. Now I find that standard recordable DVDs don’t necessarily last very long - and in any case, modern computers don’t have DVD drives. I have stuff on MFM and RLL hard discs - and there’s no modern computer that can read them. Somewhere in my loft there are boxes of recorded floppy discs - probably no longer readable, even if you had the equipment to do it.
We’re being encouraged to back up our data to the Cloud - and hand control of our entire history to faceless corporations who can pull the plug whenever they like. Who will write tomorrow’s history?
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Sci fi got Weyland-Yutani. Reality got Zuck-Musk-Bezos
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My mom has albums filled with photos that spans decades. Each one is written on the back. Who, where, when. They are all arranged by years.
When we bump off, all these digital photos may have dates atttached, but not the valuable info needed to fill in the knowledge gaps
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I always knew pretty well where our dog went when he decided to hit the town. No cameras required…
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Sort of inspires me to start a dedicated series of printed annual photo albums before I shuffle off to Valhalla.
Feels a bit sad to think that a great-grandchild might not be able to flip through a dozen pages & see a snapshot of a year of his family’s life from decades past.
Probably cost a small fortune these days although I have heard of companies that actually print albums now, like a book.
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There are a number of companies here that will produce high-quality physical prints from digital photos. They’re pretty cheap, and offer a number of advantages over the old film processors. Firstly, you get to choose which photos are printed - so you only pay for the good ones - secondly, they’re printed with high quality durable inks, so they don’t fade like the old photos did.
I have a number of albums I’ve put together this way. I’m not sure who will want them after I’m gone - but at least they exist. I’ve done my duty to the future.
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