Clear. Images.

Reading glasses

I’ve hit that point where I don’t absolutely need glasses, but late at night tired eyes appreciate a mild set of readers. I have some cheap ones¹ I picked up from Zenni that work fine, but over six months or so they got foggier and foggier no matter what cleaning spray (Residual Oil Remover, Koala Eyeglass Lens Cleaner Spray, ShaggyMax OptiMist Prime, &c.) I tried. All of those are great screen cleaners for laptops, monitors, TVs, iPads ... But they just seemed to move the smudges around, no matter how fresh and clean the microfiber cloth I was using was. Somewhere I read that a drop of Dawn dish detergent and a bowl of warm water would get the job done. It absolutely does. I lightly rubbed the lenses with my fingers in the bowl, and used a Koala cloth to dry them, and they’re like brand new again.

In somewhat related news, my 512GB iPhone 16 Pro is low on storage, and I have ~160GB of videos and photos. Need to offload them. Not going to pay monthly for iCloud to keep my stuff. Enter immich, which I’m running easily under Rocky Linux 9.7 on my little NAS box, using Docker. immich has its own iOS app, which is backing up my phone’s camera roll as I type this. (Over 65,000 individual pieces of media. It’ll take a minute.) So far it’s ... Good, not great. Facial recognition seems to be working well enough, and my slow old Xeon hasn’t processed enough to really put it through its paces yet, but a few rough edges so far, the most notable being it consistently incorrectly identifies a location in Culver City as being in Inglewood, which in fact starts about 2 ½ miles to the south. (In the L.A. area, that’s 30 minutes away!) Anyway. I’ll have to play with it more before I have a final verdict. So far it’s better than just dumping the photos into folders, but nowhere near the level of sophistication Apple has in its Photos app on the phone. But the price and level of local storage/control certainly moves the divining rod towards immich, which does have some features I think will be useful, like a locked folder and an archiving function.

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¹ With no oleophobic coating.