Thinking out loud

Do I need a new phone? Or do I need a wireless charger? Do I need to stick with the Dropbox I know or move to a file sharing service that doesn’t keep changing the rules on me? Why can’t I get this external backup drive to automagically back up?

I don’t really need a new phone, but I am coming up on the two year mark for mine, which is the four year… no, wait, six year? mark for That Poor Man’s (he’s not as into tech as I am) and my phone needs to be recharged about twice a day, and his almost needs to be plugged into the charger 24/7 to keep running.

I always evaluate a few months before Fiber-In whether I think my phone is going to make it through the three-day show or not. One year, before I had a portable charger for it, I had to keep plugging it in, and there wasn’t a plug near my booth, but I needed my phone to ring people up, and… that was just hella awkward.

For some reason I thought wireless chargers were stupid expensive, but it looks like they’re not – and I wasn’t looking forward to keeping my external battery attached to my phone for the duration of Fiber-In, because it takes about five hours to charge my phone. So if I had a wireless charger at my register station, I could just set my phone down there whenever I’m not using it to ring people up. Much less awkward than either handing someone my phone AND it’s attached charger when getting their signature, or unplugging the charger every time I have to ring someone up.

Solving my battery worries doesn’t solve That Poor Man’s, though. And the fact that his phone is like a thousand years old in Phone Years.

So would it be better to start looking for BOGO phone sales, or buy one get one half price? We were talking about that yesterday, and Verizon has some deals like that…. provided you add a new line. We’re two people. We don’t need a third line. Unless I got a third line with unlimited data for, say, a tablet, and then used that as a dedicated mobile hotspot for the Roku, and then we could catch up on all these Hulu and Netflix shows all y’all are always on about….

Or just get That Poor Man a new(ish) but not top of the line phone, and a wireless charger for my phone?

SO MANY CHOICES.

I’ve also just worn through part of the rubber on my Otterbox case – I didn’t even know you could do that – so I’m also weighing the duct tape fix vs a new case vs why buy a new case if I’m going to get a new phone soon vs but do I really NEED a new phone (divided by That Poor Man really needs a new phone).

… and I do really, really love my Note 8. Maybe I can find a refurbished, say, S9 for That Poor Man, and keep my Note 8, nursing it along with strategically placed chargers in my house and studio (and craft show booths).

ANYWAY.

The external backup drive I mentioned yesterday is, I think, going to work fine disguised as a large and awkward flash drive. I’ll just keep it at either my studio desk or my home office desk and plug the laptop into it once a day and backup my fiction. I’m tired of fussing with downloading a bunch of software for it that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do.

SO! On to file sharing!

Thanks to a thread on my personal Facebook page yesterday, my nerd friends really chimed in on a discussion of Dropbox alternatives.

See, I take work pictures with my phone, cropping and editing them using Snapseed. Then I upload them to a folder in Dropbox. Later from my computer I organize them into dates and times for upload to social media posts throughout the week. I need to be able to access a file sharing service on at least three devices (phone, laptop, desktop). Since I move them to my desktop’s external backup once a month, the cloud service does not have to be very large; 2-5 gigs is fine. I do not need to share with multiple people for work, nobody else needs access to these files for editing or co-work, I do not need fancy-pants work-sharing multiple-user bells and whistles.

Most of the answers were… Dropbox (even though the people that recommend it say that they don’t even like it that much), Google Photos, Google Drive, and Amazon Prime…. or a combo of all of those.

I experimented with making a work social media folder in Google Photos, but it helpfully organized it by when the photo had been taken, not by the name of the photo (which I change to let me know what day and what order photos are to be scheduled, for example: 0616a, 0616b, 1616c). So now I also know that I need something that lets me see the name of the photo, or at least sorts it by name. A la Dropbox.

Why am I hating on Dropbox? I don’t remember when exactly they dropped the size of their free plan, but it’s 2 gigs. Which as I said above, is about what I need because I delete/move/store photos at the end of the month… but sometimes I get really close and am bombarded with offers to accept monies from me in return for larger capacity. Hey, I get it! They’re a business! They would go out of business if they gave everything away for free! But it really sticks in my craw to get something for free, and then have it taken away from me, but get told that if I pay them I can have that previously free thing back. Like, just charge me from the get-go!

Then about a month or two ago, they went from unlimited devices to three (unless you want to pay them). Now, I really only need it for three – my desktop, my laptop, and my phone. But … I don’t know, see what I said above about having something and getting it taken away and then asked for money for it. It starts to make me wonder… what’s next? And if I sign up for the lowest $ thing, will something be taken away but then offered back to me for just a little more $? WHERE DOES IT END I ASK YOU.

Then yesterday I was reading an article about how they’re rolling out a new/updated desktop version (the version I primarily use now) and how much RAM it takes, and how much slower it made the reviewers computer, and I was like… OK, check please. Time to go.

So this week I’m testing out pCloud. Which so far seems to work in a very similar fashion to the Dropbox I was used to, and lets me see the file names of my photos so I can easily sort and upload to social media in the order in which I planned them. I know you are all still reading this post and are glued to the edges of your seats so I will definitely not forget to tell you in a couple of weeks what I think of the service.

And that’s all, folks! I wrote a lot of words, and now I have to go write a lot of words for Patreon (it’s Sandhill Sunday), and then I have to write a lot more words of fiction for Patreon. Maybe by that time the cat will have gotten off my arms and I’ll be able to feel my fingers, and type freely.