Last night’s iPhone adventure

—Anyone reading this blog knows Yrs Trly purchased a new iPhone a few months ago, an i11-Pro.
It has three camera lenses; an i11 (non-Pro) has only two.
That third lens is telephoto, and cost me $400 more. The total cost of my i11-Pro was 1,000 smackaroos, thus reprising the joke about charging $1,000 for an iPhone.
I don’t know if the lenses are zoomable optically or digitally, but I’ve used all three.
Like all smartphones it has a touchscreen. Caress the telephoto icon, and I can zoom the telephoto. Caress the other lens icons, and I can zoom those lenses.
Great! Check the viewing window, and see what you get.
The i11-Pro replaced my i6, which produced fabulous photos, but its battery was acting wonky.
The techie at my Apple-store noted my battery was swollen, victim of an overly heating closed case. I could repair my i6, but an i11 didn’t cost that much more.
It was about time to retire my i6 anyway.
What really sold me was login by facial recognition. No more failed attempts at textual login ruined by sloppy keyboarding — a stroke-affect.
I set up fingerprint login on my i6, but it fails after maybe six months. It needed to be renewed.
Facial recognition would circumvent the failed logins.

Last night my i11-Pro locked up. It happened before; my brother showed me how to reboot my iPhone trackside in Altoona — out in the middle of nowhere.
Lotsa noisy blustering about how a reboot reorganizes your smartphone’s hard-drive, making it more efficient.
LA-DEE-DAH! So I rebooted my iPhone (I forget why), activated by a touchscreen icon.
Except now my iPhone touchscreen was dead = “frozen” as they say.
So NOW WHAT? How do I reboot my phone without its touchscreen?
Years ago, well before my wife died, and I was still using an ancient Motorola G4 Apple tower, instead of this laptop……
A girl who worked at the Mighty Mezz as a photographer when I was there (she no longer was at the Mighty Mezz) came to visit and advise regarding my ‘pyootering.
We came upon a technical logjam, so the girl fired up YouTube to query it.
VIOLA! Great idea! I’ve done that ever since — hundreds of times.
YouTube has hundreds of little video-clips about how to solve various technical problems: e.g. how to finagle Facebook insanities, retrieve logins, etc.
So I wrote up a YouTube question regarding how to reboot an iPhone with a frozen screen. Thankfully I can use dictation with my Apple “Pages” software, which gets around my erratic post-stroke keyboarding.
(Thousands of times I’ve asked when Gates and his cronies are gonna make their Microsoft software friendly to us stroke-survivors? Apple does.)
I got my iPhone to reboot by engaging Siri; that still worked = my screen was dead except for Siri. “Reboot my phone!” I screamed.
YouTube came later, and none of my hits mentioned Siri.
But now, thanks to YouTube — and that girl — I can reboot my i11-Pro, even with a frozen screen.
Thank you AM!

• My brother and I photograph trains down near Altoona PA, where the old Pennsylvania Railroad crossed Allegheny Mountain. The railroad is now Norfolk Southern. Every year I take 13 of our 89 bazilyun photographs to assemble into a calendar — I do it with Shutterfly. I give those calendars as Christmas presents.
• My brother, whose company I enjoy, is an all-knowing, know-it-all, knower-of-all-things. He lives near Boston.
• The “Mighty Mezz” is the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, from where I retired almost 15 years ago. BEST job I ever had. I was employed there almost 10 years — over 11 if you count my time as a post-stroke unpaid intern. (I had a heart-defect caused stroke October 26th, 1993, from which I recovered fairly well. That defect was repaired.)
• My wife died of cancer April 17th, 2012.
• “AM” is ****** ******, my Messenger photographer friend.