When my buddy John traded in his old Windows box for a sleek new Chromebook, he quickly fell in love with Google Drive. When he added ScannerPro 7 to his iPhone there was no holding him back. Credit card statements, receipts, you name it. Last week he reported he had scanned the contents of his safe deposit box. That’s something I’d thought about but never got around to it… until today.

At my age a safe deposit box is something of a time capsule. The loan repayment schedule on your first home; the receipt for the engagement ring; draft registration card; birth certificates; high school diploma and on and on.

I’ve got it all in Google drive now (as well as in the safe deposit box). Some of you are scrambling for your keyboard to alert me to the dangers of having some of these docs in the cloud. I appreciate your concern. And your caution might be well founded.

But banks get hacked; credit card companies get hacked; the federal government gets hacked; my Blue Cross-Blue Shield insurance provided was penetrated a few years back. So all my shit is already up there somewhere. And on the really sensitive stuff, I’ve added and extra password in the the unlikely event Google gets compromised.

For me the key to this kind of task is a good scanner app and I’ve found none better than ScannerPro 7. It would have taken me three or four times longer to scan all those docs on my flatbed scanner. With the phone app, it was as fast as I could click, name and upload.

Most flashlights I’ve owned haven’t been very good. By that I mean they weren’t very well made and they weren’t very bright. Tiny incandescent bulb, couple of D batteries. Okay for looking under the couch but that’s about it. A couple of months ago I started reading about “tactical flashlights” and came across the Shadowhawk X800. From one of the company’s promotional pages:

“If you’ve ever had someone take a picture of you at night with the flash on, you’ll know how it takes a minute or two for your eyes to re-adjust. Now imagine that flash is 100x brighter and is strobing directly into your eyes. You wouldn’t be able to see a thing, and would most likely lose your sense of balance.”

I would have called bullshit on that before getting my hands on one of these. The company rates this flashlight at 800 lumens. I don’t know if that’s a lot but this thing is incredibly bright. I wouldn’t want to shine it directly in someone’s face.

The focus is control by sliding the lens housing (?) forward and back. All the way back and the light filled up my front yard. All the way forward produced a tight (square) beam that illuminated the power transformer on a pole a couple hundred feet down the hill.

I haven’t played with the strobe setting which (according to the promotional material) has some self-defense use. You can also set it to strobe an SOS signal. Might be handy if you were injured and lost in the woods.

I tried to record some video but it didn’t come out. I’ve saw both positive and negative reviews on the Shadowhawk X800 and decided to give it a try. I’ve been impressed so far.