hummus

hummus in a bowl garnished with whole beans and olive oil

Maybe it has something to do with the big 7-oh coming up all too soon, but I have been having a lot of “why didn’t I do this sooner” moments lately.

Hummus and tortilla chips has been a favorite “recovery food” for after my Wet & Sweat exercise session or intense shopping. (Tip: Aldi has the best price for hummus around here.) This week I decided to try to make my own. I soaked a pound of garbanzo beans overnight then cooked them in my 6 quart Instant Pot.

A challenge was using a stick blender instead of a food processor. The first batch I put the cooked garbanzos and a little bit of the cooking liquid in the cup that came with the blender to see if it would handle them OK, then added the rest of the ingredients to the puree. It came out a bit too thin but the prep blender handled pureeing the beans just fine. Second time I squeezed the lemon into the cup, then added the rest of the ingredients, then put drained beans on top. It was much thicker, needed to add a bit of the warm bean water to thin it down.

The hummus photo is from my iPhone. Still learning what all it does and asking myself “Why didn’t I get one sooner?”

On Wednesday I went to the park in Kittanning with my iPhone and Canon PowerShot SX530 HS digital camera while my car was in for inspection. It was a beautiful day and I learned about using both devices. I needed a couple days to recover from being on my feet that day and have been working on combining clips and photos in iMovie. I used to use QuickTime Pro to edit video, but it is slow going on iMovie. It and Garage Band are two Apple apps I struggle with.

Anyway, got a charming chipmunk picture with the Canon PowerShot:

chipmunk

Although the iPhone has a great camera sometimes zoom is nice, especially for skittish critters.

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better pictures

This gallery contains 4 photos.

I transferred these photos from the iPhone and uploaded them in Safari on my MacBook Air. Looks like we will be tethering for image intensive posts.

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Things I miss

It took over a week but really getting comfortable with using the iPhone 6.

There are a lot of things that are familiar from using macOS 10.13 High Sierra on my MacBook Air and my Kindle Paperwhite. Most of the things I miss have to do with data entry, in particular keyboard shortcuts.

  • Click then shift-click to select text
  • Arrow keys to move insertion point
  • Click and drag to select text
  • Double click to select a line of text
  • Triple click to select a paragraph
  • Tab to move through form fields and spreadsheet cells

I’m still working on how to add attachments in the iOS default Mail. Looks like a work flow change might be the solution: prepare a photo or document then use the share button and pick email.
I am posting from the WordPress app. Adding images is super easy but selecting the size to display (i.e. thumbnail) doesn’t work as I expected. I saw this in some earlier posts and the HTML editor shows that the original size is used, just labeled as a thumbnail.
Looks like three standard sizes of images are not generated on uploading as they are on the desktop/laptop browser versions. I noticed this was an issue on my posts in the past few days.

Small dog napping with his toys

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Apps etc

I bought my first app today and it wasn’t Angry Birds!

I hadn’t thought to look for scanner apps before today. I have been taking pictures of documents, usually when at my dad’s house. Flatbed scanners do a great job but tend to be quite bulky. The app I got for the iPhone today includes OCR and seems to work quite well. Thinking that it might be great for recording genealogy documents instead of making paper notes.

This is a geezer/mito thing — it is difficult to read my own handwriting.

This second week of smartphone usage I continue to be impressed by what functionality that used to take an office table full of devices is contained in a handheld object.

Small can be beautiful!

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Oh look, there’s an app for that

After a couple days of picking up iPhone basics I seem to have settled into a routine of visiting my favorite web sites or Facebook where I will discover that there is an app for that! Downloading from the App Store and installing is simple. Then you fire up the new app and fill in your user ID and password from the keychain (tap key icon in the bar above the keyboard). There are quite a few of them available now from logging in with Safari browser.

One handed typing hasn’t been much of an issue since I have been doing that on a Kindle Paperwhite for several years. Still getting used to looking up at the word suggestion bar where a tap on a word can save keystrokes.

I am posting from the Automattic WordPress app again today. Adding images is a lot easier than the web browser version I have been using on my laptop. Took a while to find how to get to the post options (category, tags, etc.).

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