{"id":12161,"date":"2021-08-24T06:31:24","date_gmt":"2021-08-24T13:31:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/?p=12161"},"modified":"2021-08-24T06:31:24","modified_gmt":"2021-08-24T13:31:24","slug":"a-conspiracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/2021\/08\/24\/a-conspiracy\/","title":{"rendered":"A Conspiracy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The story goes something like this:\u00a0 I tend not to upgrade things until I have to.\u00a0 I&#8217;m convinced there&#8217;s conspiracy at the highest levels between the software companies, the computer companies, and maybe the government to force us into upgrading things that 25 or 30 years ago we didn&#8217;t even need.\u00a0 I thought I had taken a huge leap into the future when I bought my first cell phone. It quickly was obsoleted numerous times and then I thought I was absolutely state of the art when I bought an iPhone 6s just a few years ago.\u00a0 Wow, that thing had features.\u00a0 \u00a0A phone like that, I thought, might last me the rest of my life.<\/p>\n<p>You read the blog a ways back about me getting down to one motorcycle.\u00a0 I sold the RX3 and the TT250 and got good money for them.\u00a0 Geico, my insurance company, told me I would get a refund for the unused portion of my policy because I had sold the two bikes.\u00a0 I knew it wouldn&#8217;t be much, because my annual premium for all three bikes (the RX3, the TT250, and my Royal Enfield) was only $77.\u00a0 It wasn&#8217;t; I received a check in the mail for $25.<\/p>\n<p>You might wonder why I switched from talking about conspiracies and cell phones to motorcycles.\u00a0 Bear with me; this is where it gets interesting.\u00a0 A couple of years ago I started depositing checks using my iPhone 6s.\u00a0 It had a cool banking app that basically took a picture of your check and saved a trip to the bank.\u00a0 The 6s did that well, although the last time I used it, it told me I needed to update my software.\u00a0 I didn&#8217;t.\u00a0 Screw this upgrade stuff.\u00a0 It was working okay and I don&#8217;t intimidate easily.<\/p>\n<p>Except when I tried to deposit this last check from Geico, the phone wouldn&#8217;t do it.\u00a0 It told me who&#8217;s the boss.\u00a0 Time&#8217;s up. You need to update your software from ios 12.5 to ios 13.0.\u00a0 So I tried, but then when I went into the 6s settings, it told me I already had the latest software.\u00a0 A bit more digging, and the conspiracy I alluded to above became obvious.\u00a0 A 6s can only go up to ios 12.5\u00a0 I needed to get a new phone to go to ios 13.0.\u00a0 Sonuvabitch.\u00a0 They got me again.<\/p>\n<p>Okay, so I shopped around online, which is pretty much how I do everything these days, and within minutes I was confused by all the iPhone options.\u00a0 Gresh did a blog last year about upgrading his iPhone and at the time, I think he got whatever was the latest and greatest from Apple.\u00a0 I did the same and I ended up with an iPhone 12 Pro, which is about the same size as my old 6s but a little heavier.\u00a0 After screwing around backing everything up to the Cloud (it was the first time I ever used the Cloud) and then downloading it to my new phone, I was in business again.\u00a0 I tried the banking app, it worked, and that&#8217;s when it hit me:\u00a0 I had just spent $1300 for a new phone so I could deposit a $25 check.<\/p>\n<p>The 12 Pro has more features than I&#8217;ll ever need, or use, and you and I both know that within another two or three years it will be obsolete.\u00a0 \u00a0But the new camera feature is kind of cool.\u00a0 It has a wide angle, a portrait, and a close up lens (which they designate as 0.5, 1.0, and 2.5 on the camera app).\u00a0 \u00a0I&#8217;ve just started playing with it.<\/p>\n<p>On a walk around the neighborhood, I grabbed that wide-angle shot of the &#8217;54 Caddy Fleetwood you see at the top of this blog, and I shot another with the portrait lens of my Colt Python and five rounds of hollow-point .357 Mag ammo below.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-12162\" src=\"http:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/IMG_9400-002-600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"900\" srcset=\"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/IMG_9400-002-600.jpg 600w, https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/IMG_9400-002-600-200x300.jpg 200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The camera in the 12 Pro is good, and it looks like it might be a little better than the camera in the 6s I retired.\u00a0 The images are still only 72 dpi, which is okay for blogging and other Internet stuff, but not for print publication.\u00a0 But it&#8217;s not bad, and it might eliminate the need to lug my Nikon around. I like using the Nikon, though, so I&#8217;ll probably still take it with me on my adventures.<\/p>\n<p>I suppose I could start studying all the new features on my iPhone, but I&#8217;m not going to bother.\u00a0 By the time I make a dent in doping out everything on the 12 Pro, it will be obsolete.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>Never miss an ExNotes blog.\u00a0 Sign up here for free!<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The story goes something like this:\u00a0 I tend not to upgrade things until I have to.\u00a0 I&#8217;m convinced there&#8217;s conspiracy at the highest levels between the software companies, the computer companies, and maybe the government to force us into upgrading things that 25 or 30 years ago we didn&#8217;t even need.\u00a0 I thought I had &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/2021\/08\/24\/a-conspiracy\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;A Conspiracy&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12164,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[1783,2245,2247,2248,2246],"class_list":["post-12161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gear","tag-conspiracy-theory","tag-iphone","tag-iphone-12-pro","tag-iphone-camera","tag-planned-obsolescence"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/IMG_9386D-900.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12161"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14263,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12161\/revisions\/14263"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}