I don’t like using Apple’s applications and proprietary file storage types for photos. I like it old school where I can just drag photos from my devices to my external drive in a folder and organize them manually via folders.

Here’s how to do that process to transfer photos from an iPhone to an external drive, or anywhere on your Mac for that matter.

1. Connect Your External Hard Drive To Your Mac. First, connect the hard drive to your Mac and make sure it shows up in the Finder’s sidebar.
2. Connect Your iOS Device To Your Mac.
3. Launch Image Capture.
4. Select Destination.
5. Click Import.

What to do if you already have your photos in the Photos app

If you had already used the Mac Photos app to import your photos from the phone, and you now want to export the individual photo files, you should follow these steps:

1. Launch Photos on your Mac.
2. Hold down the Option (⌥) key while dragging images to the Finder.

All of the original parameters of your images will be entirely preserved. In Photos 1.0, dragging an image out of the app would save your selection as a downscaled JPEG file. In the most recent release, dragged images retain their original resolution but are still recompressed as JPG files.

Note that I’ve had problems copying a whole album at once if it has a lot of photos in it. I’m not sure if it’s a general issue or just a local thing on my setup. What I do in that case is just select smaller batches of photos to move over.

It is very important for your site visitors and for SEO to have your site load fast.

Here are a few things I do to make things fast on my site.

Fast hosting: Kinsta

Content Delivery Network: Cloudflare

I use the following performance-related plugins:

• Perfmatters

Of course, it is also important to use quality plugins on your site. Quality is more important than quantity. Ignore people who just say that many plugins installed and activated slow down your site, it all depends on the quality of those plugins. Sometimes you install just 5-10 plugins and the plugin slows down immensely because of what those plugins actually do or how they are coded.

Manual optimizations worth mentioning

I like to set up cron via the server instead of WordPress cron. I also use Perfmatters’ script manager to selectively load scripts on every page of my site, instead of letting plugins load their scripts on every page indiscriminately.

Another optimisation that can be done where possible, is to avoid using third-party fonts like the Google Fonts, you can easily do away with them unless you have specific branding guidelines to follow. This will provide a further speed boost to your page.

Testing

I use the following tests to make sure everything is running smoothly:

• GTMetrix
• Pingdom
• Webpagetest.org
• Google Chrome’s Audit feature
• Google Analytics’ Page Speed feature

Also make sure that you test both the desktop and mobile versions of your site, as they might be loading different content and thus merit the need to be tested separately.

Hope those speed and site optimisation tips help, let me know if you think I missed anything.

I’ve had a wish to learn electronics for a very long time, and this year I took the plunge and bought some kit to get started. Here’s the stuff I bought and some other resources I found useful.

Hardware

• Keyes electronics kit SMP0051
• NodeMCU ESP8266 Lua WiFi Internet Development Board (alternative to Arduino)
• Raspberry Pi3 Official Desktop Starter Kit 16GB
• XL830L Multimeter

Books

• Eléctronica para makers – Guía completa
• Hacking Electronics
• Make: Electronics
• Make: More Electronics

Websites

• Startingelectronics.org – used their tutorials to build my first real circuits.
• Sparkfun.com – Great tutorials and quiz to learn the basics.
• Programming Electronics
• Building Electronic Circuits
• Electronics-tutorials
• Thingiverse
• Predictabledesigns

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Gmail is the preferred (and free) email address solution for individuals using email in a personal capacity. Everyone should have a personal email address, even if they have additional professional email addresses they use in their business dealings. It’s always better to keep things separate. If your name is Joe Bloggs any of the combinations are great:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

If you have a very common name (a la “Joe Bloggs”) you will probably find that the obvious combinations mentioned above will be taken. In that case, you might want to add a number, for example, your year of birth. This is up to you, some people don’t want to make that public so that would not be a good choice for their email address. A favorite number might also be another option to go for.

You might also have a name that is not easy to pronounce, very long or that can be misinterpreted (e.g. Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor). In such cases, I would suggest you go for something simpler than your name. Here’s when things might go south. The first rule you have to keep in mind is that you might very well be keeping the same email address for the rest of your life, and it’s not that straightforward to change the address at a later stage.

To give you an idea of bad choices people do, [email protected] might be OK for a teenage girl, but chances are she will be regretting the choice when she is applying for a job a few years later.

If you want to use your own domain name with a free Gmail account, I suggest the forwarding service Improv.mx as a solution.

In this post I’ll be sharing the apps, websites and tools I use on a daily basis. What’s the point? Well, I’d like to look back to this lineup on a yearly basis and see whether I can improve the way I work online.

Moreover, maybe you’ll find a new app/website listed here and you’ll decide to try it out based on my recommendation.

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