Magnifying Life Hack for us oldies.

[Baitball Blogger]

I have at least three magnifying glasses in my house and they are never nearby when I need them. And I definitely needed one of them to read the phone number on the back of a credit card. (Those numbers are so tiny!) So, instead of getting up I used the camera feature of my smart phone as a magnifying glass.

It took a while to keep a steady hand for the numbers to finally focus, especially when I needed a free hand to write the number down. That's the one problem with this life hack. If you're losing eye sight due to the advancing years, your short term memory probably isn't that good either.

[cyberswede]

1. ...or take a photo and then zoom the photo

then you wouldn't need to write it down.

[Baitball Blogger]

2. I would definitely do this the next time.

Because, seriously, it took me a few tries to steady the one hand to get the number in focus, that I could have found a magnifying glass in the same amount of time.

[mainer]

3. I use my camera phone to remember where I left my car

When I park it at the airport, I snap a photo of the nearest posted row number. When I come back a week later, I won't be wandering all over the garage looking for my car.

[femmocrat]

4. That is a really great tip!

I need to do that at the mall! LOL

[Skittles]

5. plain old reading glasses do the trick too

[Baitball Blogger]

6. My experience with losing eye glasses is epic.

[RebelOne]

7. Me too. I have a spare pair in every room,

but can never find them when I need them.

[hay rick]

8. Short term what?

[elleng]

10. HAHAHAHA!

[kentauros]

9. My magnifiers are usually handy.

I keep one map-viewing magnifier right here under my monitor stand, and I have two in my device-satchel. I don't own a smart phone (yet) but even then, I doubt I'll always have it on me. My current cell stays in my satchel, and so will the smarty-phone

There are plenty of pocket-sized magnifiers out there, so you might consider getting one of those instead of using the phone and draining its battery even more

[Manifestor_of_Light]

11. I don't have a problem with losing glasses.

I am so dependent on them that they are either on my face or on the nightstand within arm's reach when I am asleep.

I am extremely nearsighted (my entire life) and in bifocals at my age. My parents had perfect vision and only wore reading glasses. I thought that nearsighted people didn't wear bifocals. To read tiny print, I just take my glasses off, because my focusing distance is something like 4 to 5 inches. And with micro-print, sometimes it's hard for me to read stuff in 4 point font or whatever they use on boxes of food.

Contacts are awesome, because with the lens sitting on the eyeball, that knocks off a couple of diopters to my prescription. And no frames in the way. I had one eye doctor tell me I couldn't do bifocals in contacts. Then, I went to another optometrist, and my new one told me she could give me contacts with one eye focusing on distance, and the other one on closeup, and my brain would merge the images. She called it "monovision". So I think she's a genius.

You ever wonder what those numbers mean? A diopter is a meter. If you have a minus, say minus 5, that means your focal length is a meter divided by five, so that would be 39.37 inches divided by five in English units, so that would be about 8 inches, since 40 divided by five is eight. Oculus Sinister is O.S. or "left eye" and Oculus Dexter, or O.D. is "right eye" in Latin. You're welcome.

[dixiegrrrrl]

12. Bifocals drove me nutz....

could not bear to drive the car looking thru a tiny slit, so got distance glasses.
Actually, 2 pairs of distance glasses. One polarized sunglasses, which are necessary down here in the land of glare, and one clear, for night driving.

and 1 pair reading glasses.


And then...
my vision changed.
Don't know if it was the meds I started taking or the cataracts that are developing,

Or maybe all that time I spend looking at the LED puter screen and the Nook.
but I do not need my reading glasses now.

Apparently the eyeball changes as we grow older.