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Review: Anker 5-Port USB Charger
These days just about everything is powered by USB, and I never seem to have enough ports to charge the items. If I used individual chargers, I'd have a bunch of chargers on power strips and when I travel, I'd have a bunch of pieces to bring. So, when I started reading about multiple port chargers that would handle iPhones as well as the increased power required for iPads, I was quite intrigued. After further research, some chargers required me to plug iPads into certain ports and other devices into the other ports. This is cumbersome and when I saw the Anker® 40W 5-Port USB Charger
where it would intelligently figure out what output is required for each port, I jumped at this.
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Never enough charging ports
This past summer my family went on a vacation to the Grand Canyon and a few other destinations in Arizona (yes, it was hot!). For the driving trip we packed a lot of devices. Between the 3 of us, we had 3 iPads, 3 iPhones (my son just uses one for its camera), 2 Apple Watches, AirPods, a mobile hotspot, and an Anker PowerCore 26800 Power Bank
. After I bought and reviewed the Anker 5-Port USB charger several years ago, I realized that the Anker 6-Port USB Charger
was a better device as it didn't add much bulk to the 5 port and gave me an extra port. Since then I've bought a few of the chargers and put one along with cables in a small bag I take when I travel. While I don't need to charge everything at once, 6 ports just isn't enough to keep everything charged especially since the power bank uses 2 ports to charge faster. After we got back from the trip, I ordered another charger.
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Removing geotagged info from a video
When I post pictures to eBay or somewhere else that I've taken at my house, I strip the geotagged information in it as I'm a bit paranoid. I wrote a small app which basically does this for JPG images. The core of the app is below.
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Porting an iOS app to macOS
About six weeks ago (2 weeks or so before WWDC), my client asked me to port an enterprise app I wrote for iOS to macOS. I haven't done macOS work for a long time, but how hard could it be? In the last few years, a number of iOS-like technologies have come to macOS; while they aren't named the same, many things function similarly like NSViewController (UIViewController), NSTableView (UITableView), NSTableCellView (UITableViewCell), etc. All of my iOS apps for this client are written in Swift, so it made a lot of sense to use Swift for this macOS app.