Good morning. ⏰🫘☕

13 August 2026

We received our new iPhones via UPS yesterday evening, and I spent last night getting mine set up. The process is simple enough, but it still makes me feel like a rocket scientist once everything finally transfers over. It’s mostly time‑consuming because the phone has to download every app I use — and I use a lot. Then comes the ritual of logging into each one so it’s ready when I need it. I can never remember all my passwords, so I end up flipping through my little book of hints. I use a personal code when I write them down, so even if the book fell into the hands of someone unscrupulous, they wouldn’t be able to decipher it — and not just because my handwriting is terrible.

Our old phones were iPhone 14 Pro Maxes, perfectly good devices except for one growing annoyance: charging them became a chore. Something in the Lightning connector had worn down, and I often had to spend several minutes plugging and unplugging the cable just to get it to start charging. Annoying at best, and a real problem if we were away from home and woke up to a dead phone. Hard to imagine dealing with that in simpler times. The new iPhone 17 Pro Max uses a USB‑C port, which is far more reliable and doesn’t wear out the way the old Lightning connection did.

I still don’t have cases yet, but I ordered two from pixels.com using a couple of my photos — flowers for my wife and a Caribbean sunset for me though I'm thinking about getting one with a recent pic of flying ibises.

“The biggest part of our digital transformation is changing the way we think.” — Simeon Preston

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” — Arthur C. Clarke

“The greatest achievement of technology is not how it changes life, but how it improves it.” — Satya Nadella

#photo #photography #photographer #photographylovers #wildlife #nature #bird #birds #birding #birdwatching #birdphotography #morning #redbelliedwoodpecker #iPhones #technology