The Latest on ThinOPTICS, Volume-Limited Headphones, Google's PhotoScan App. and More

Do you sometimes forget to take your reading glasses with you? If you need reading glasses, you know how important it is to have them with you wherever you go (just in case). Unfortunately, for me, I always seem to think that I can get by without them, only to find myself once again being stuck in situations where I wished I had decided/remembered to bring them with me.

Fortunately, I recently learned about and purchased a pair of “ThinOPTICS” reading glasses and now it’s almost impossible for me to forget to take a pair of readers with me wherever I go. The reason I can say this is that my ThinOPTICS reading glasses fold up into a keychain case! I no longer need to remember to bring a pair of reading glasses with me as I now always have a pair attached to my keys. The ThinOPTICS keychain case is an option that works for me, but you may prefer to get the other case option that is small, flat and can easily be put into a pocket, purse, or possibly be attached to your Smartphone! If you want to learn more about ThinOPTICS reading glasses, please visit and explore www.thinoptics.com.

People of Color (Stock Photos)

How ethnically diverse are the photos on your website, social media pages, marketing collateral, etc.? If your sites and marketing materials could use some more diversity, I would encourage you to visit and review an article/blog post titled “Where to find free stock photos with people of color” at medium.com. The article identifies several sites that will help you to find and acquire ethnically diverse photos. While reviewing the article and exploring the sites that are mentioned, also pay attention to the comments area as additional resources are mentioned there as well.

Consider Protecting Children’s (And Your Own?) Hearing With Volume Limited Headphones

As Smartphone use increases, so does headphone use. Unfortunately, many people are losing varying amounts of hearing due to listening to things through headphones at volume levels that are too high. In recent years, increasing numbers of children are being diagnosed with early hearing loss. To address this problem more and more manufacturers are developing volume-limited headphones. If this issue interests/concerns you and/or if you want to learn more about it, please visit thewirecutter.com and review the article titled “The Best Kids Headphones.”

Save Your Windows Computer’s Desktop Icon Organization

Many of today’s notebook computers/desktop monitors come with very high screen resolutions. Because of this, some computer users find themselves having to adjust their screen resolutions to better accommodate various types of application viewing, desktop recording and/or projection needs and preferences. A common problem that’s encountered when changing a computer’s screen resolution is that the organization of the desktop icons is often lost during the switch. To combat this situation, you may want to consider getting a free (windows) software program called “DesktopOK/” What DesktopOK enables you to do is save and restore different Windows computer desktop icon layouts. If you regularly (or even just periodically) find yourself needing to change your computer’s screen resolution, and you want to be able to save your desktop icon layouts between changes, please visit and review the DesktopOK product information.

Google’s PhotoScan App

If you (or your customers) have old property photos (non-digital photos) and you want to make digital copies of them to be able to show what a property looked like years ago, you may be able to satisfactorily accomplish the goal using a free Android/iOS Smartphone app from Google that’s called PhotoScan. In a nutshell, you take multiple photos of the print photo and the PhotoScan app automatically merges them together, applies some automatic photo optimizations and outputs a new digital image (that sometimes looks better than the original). To learn more about this handy app and to view a short video that summarizes things fairly well, please visit the following web page https://www.google.com/photos/scan.

Tips: 1) If you’re not yet familiar with Google Photos, I encourage you to learn more about it! Google Photos is an easy to use service that offers a lot of powerful photo management, storage, sharing and editing capabilities.

2) If you do a Google and/or a YouTube search using “Google Photos tips tricks” as your search phrase, quite a few helpful links/videos are presented in the search results. I mention this because these resources can help you to learn how to use Google Photos both faster and better!

If you have comments, suggestions, tips, questions or just want to say “Hi”, you are invited to contact me at john@johnvrooman.com. I always enjoy hearing from you!

John Vrooman
John Vrooman keeps an eye out for cool new hardware, software, apps, gadgets; SaaS solutions; social media developments, trends as well as personal/SMB productivity and related solutions. He gathers information for his column from a diverse range of resources and he enjoys sharing his discoveries with others. He has been authoring this column since August 2000 and welcomes feedback from his readers.