meish dot org: life, unfolding

Hot on the heels of my chapter about iphone photography in lomokev’s new photo project book, and inspired by Heather’s list of apps (and my [not so] recent upgrade to an iPhone 4) here is my list of favourite iPhone photography apps, with some examples of each in action…

I’ve tried a number of photography apps over the past three years of iPhone usage, but these three have come to be my stalwart accomplices. Crucially, they all allow me to be creative, and enhance my existing creativity, without getting in the way and making something which I don’t recognise as “my” work. I formula for a good photography app is: my skills + app = better result. So in an app I tend to be looking for something which doesn’t take over.

1. Autostitch

Unlike other panorama apps (like PhotoStitch for desktop, and the original version of Pano) which only allow you to construct a panorama from horizontally-connected image (perfect for panning around a horizon), Autostitch lets - no, encourages you to get creative with multiple overlapping images, in any direction at all. This can lead to some interesting - and sometimes quite unintended - effects.

I still boggle that this amount of intricate and elaborate processing power is packed into a tiny app on my phone. And available to anyone for less than $3. We truly live in the future.

2. Camerabag

I’m not crazy about apps that only exist to add retro effects to images, but there’s something about Camerabag’s filter settings that seem to be able to turn a lacklustre image into a much more rich and interesting one.

It’s telling that of the twelve filters available, I only use two with any regularity: Helga (which mimics Holga contrast & vignetting) and Magazine (which seems to flatten and punch things)

FWIW, I’ve also played with Hipstamatic and can see the appeal, but I’m not wild about it. For me, the fun is somewhat limited by the fact you have to take images through it, rather than being able to use it for post-processing, as well (as you can with Camerabag)

3. Diptych

Relatively new, this one allows you to quite simply combine multiple images according to a number of templates. Bosh.

I don’t use this one a lot, but it’s handy to have on the phone when I do (and a damned sight easier than downloading, opening and editing in photoshop).

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I’d love to know which photography apps you use, and rate….

I love camphones. I love “real” cameras, too - I own and regularly use a number of digital and analogue cameras including a Nikon D80, a Canon IXUS, a Holga 120N and a Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim. But the camera in my phone is always with me, and as a result, over the years I’ve found myself using it a lot to capture odd and interesting things spotted during my daily commute and everyday life.

Because some of the most interesting things which we come across in our daily lives aren’t pre-planned or anticipated, the camera in our phones is sometimes the only way of capturing an image, even though it can be very frustrating in terms of quality and available functionality. That makes it even more important to know how to get the best out of the tool which happens to be at your disposal.

I don’t claim to be an expert in mobile photography, but I do take a lot of pictures, and some of my mobile photos are among the most viewed in my Flickr photostream, precisely because I was able to capture something fleeting and interesting, but didn’t have the “proper” equipment.

The photo below, for example, wasn’t taken with an iPhone, but with my rather pedestrian Nokia 6230i, on the tube from Heathrow one afternoon. It now regularly appears (without attribution, I should point out - *seethe*) in those emailed/blog collections of “trick photography” or “neat optical illusions” or whatever, alongside others posed intentionally and taken using decent kit.

The thing about this photo is that if I’d used a “proper” camera, it would have undoubtedly have caused too much attention, and would have spoilt the composition. As it was, I was only able to get this picture by holding the camphone at a most strange angle by my face (perhaps the other passengers thought I was very short sighted, and just reading a text message?) but the crucial thing is that this photo simply couldn’t have been captured in such a spontaneous way without a piece of photographic capturing kit which enabled spontaneity: A cameraphone.

Anyway, with that in mind, I thought I’d share my tips for squeezing decent photos out of your iPhone, with examples where I have them - please add your own tips in the comments if you think I’ve missed something!

Read the rest of this entry »

Being on the road in various places, and out of the office at events a lot recently has made me realise quite how power-hungry I have become in recent months.

In fact, you could say that over the last few years I’ve been increasingly obsessed with power, as my working and personal lives have collided and colluded to mean I crave power more than ever.

It grabs me at random times and always in unexpected places. On the tube. At conferences and events. In airport lounges, conscious of a long stretch of bored hours ahead.

My need for power has even started to influence my packing decisions - at first it was just when I was going away for holidays and conferences, but increasingly, I find myself carrying around chargers and converters and cables just in case I need to jack in, plus peripherally scanning conference venues, hotel rooms, airport departure gates and even train stations for power-points with the half-formed thought of being able to boost energy levels for a short while.

The thing is, previous phones (mainly Nokia) and devices (e.g 80GB video iPod, Macbook) were built with decent batteries which gave (at worst - macbook about 6-8) several hours or (at best - my most recent nokia could handle a week, easy) several days of power to the device.

My more recent iphone and msi-wind/advent netbook cloud-computing and wifi-dependent/enabled lifestyle, combined with taking and publishing a lot of photos makes me incredibly power-hungry.

My netbook battery gives me 3 hours of use without wifi turned on, and a paltry 1.5-2 if connected. The iPhone can eke out a couple of days (as long as I don’t use it and it stays in one place so doesn’t need to hunt for a new cell) or drain out in mere hours if playing a game. Useless!

I feel like I spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking about and looking for cables and battery levels and converters and power points, and my packing lists regularly start these days with assorted cables and chargers rather than being the tedious nearly-forgotten scrawl at the very end.

When we went to California in December, I took:

1. A power cable for my netbook
2. A usb power cable for iphone and ipod
3. A charger for my nikon camera battery (and spare battery)
4. A charger for my nintendo DS
5. oh and spare battereis for the Flip

That may not sound like much, but it’s ridiculous to have to heft all these things around with me whenever I take a trip of more than a few days. Bear in mind that I usually carry the first two and the last one with me every day in my handbag, too.

It’s good that I can charge the iphone via USB, but then I need to carry the netbook power lead, which is way bigger and bulkier than necessary, and doubles the bother of lugging it around. I’ve had people recommend a spare battery for the netbook, but that doesn’t solve the business trip problem. What I need is a lightweight, compact power charger for the netbook. Does such a thing exist?

Either that or a decent battery life for both netbook and iphone. Is that too much to ask?

In the meantime, until I can find a more portable or longer-lasting solution, I’ll just have to continue being a power-crazed geek. Welcome to my life.

On my last trip to the US, in early May, I picked up a Flip Video Ultra and I love it so much I want another one, even though the one I have is fine and I clearly can’t use two at once.

(You know what I mean: sometimes you just want to get something again to be able to experience the joy and excited jolt of discovering how nice it is in the first place all over again. Like a [insert gadget name here]-virgin, touching it for the very first time. That’s what I want, every day.)

Anyway, I thought it was worth jotting down a few of my thoughts about the camera specifically (in case anyone fancied getting one - they went on sale in the UK today) and also a few broader thoughts about my approach to video in general (after the jump).

Let’s start with the bad stuff.

Less good things about the Flip:

• No real zoom - it’s understandable, given the form factor of the device, but it’s a little weedy nonetheless. You can at least zoom while shooting, though, which puts it one step above the video I can get from my Canon Ixus.
• The big red light on the front when recording makes candid stuff hard. Not that I would creep up on people, obviously, but it’s very clear that you are recording.
• It seems to have a tendancy to record its own operating noise when really quiet (see the mesmerising waves video for example)
• Apparently there have been compatibility problems with OS X 10.4 though I’ve experienced no problems with that opertating system along with Windows XP.
• It feels a bit plasticky and it attracts dust like a magnet. This might say more about the state of the bottom of my handbag than anything else, of course.
• You’ve got no fine control over video settings etc. It’s point and shoot…and that’s it.
• The quality not that much better than a newish camphone (at worst) and on par/worse than a decent point & shoot.

Good things about the Flip:

• Cheap: mine was about US$150 from Best Buy, though they’ve just gone on sale at Amazon UK for £99 - yet again, the UK loses out when it comes to pricing…But even at under £100, it’s just cheap enough to be not an enormous tragedy if it gets trodden on at a festival.
• It’s stupidly simple: It Just Works. Big red button to start. Big red button to stop. Up and down to zoom (or volume control in playback mode). Left and right to browse videos on the disk. The bin icon to delete and, play to, er, play.
• It doesn’t look like a camcorder, which means I feel better about carrying it around and whipping it out in odd places. In fact, it looks like a phone, sort of.
• It’s been designed to be held like a thing you hold at the end of your arm, as people do these days, rather than as a thing that is like a camera and needs to somehow resemble an old camera with a viewfinder etc - it’s vertical and fits nicely in your hand which makes it more stable, though a friend pointed out that the location of the on/off button is unfortunately probably slightly better situated for right-handers (I don’t think it matters, myself, but then I’m not sinister…)
• It’s very portable - light, compact, no fold-out screen, which means less to break or damage. That also means it fits in places other cameras wouldn’t like - bluetacked to the dashboard of my car, mounted via gorillapod to a bike helmet or possibly even a kite. Actually, I haven’t tried it on a kite yet, but I bet it’d work - it’s light enough. Hmm..
• No cable or software required to get video off the device. It’s got a (rather phallic, admittedly) flip-out built in USB connection, and it just works like an external drive. It comes with its own video management software built in that interfaces with YouTube and the like, but if you don’t want to use that, you don’t have to.
• You can record up to an hour in one go - most camphones/p&s have a file size limit which means you can’t do that. So it’s more useful for recording interviews, presentations, journeys…
• It takes two AA batteries, so no chance of running out at a crucial moment and being unable to replace them from just about any shop. No charger required (and since I travel these days with about eight mains and/or USB chargers/cables, that’s quite a relief) and the battery life is surprisingly good, actually - definitely several weeks of light use, and it does give you a good amount of warning before it conks out.

On balance, like the Asus EEEpc (another thing I got a while back and yet have singularly failed to write about here…sorry), the benefits (and cost) definitely outweigh the negatives, or at least they did for me. And besides, it’s a gadget. And we all know how I feel about gadgets.

I’ve cobbled some of the videos I’ve taken with the Flip into a set on Flickr, here, which is apt because Flickr starting to allow video is actually one of the reasons I got the camcorder in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

For some reason, my phone suddenly decided to stop sending text messages this morning. It seems to have forgotten the Orange Message Centre number.

So I pop over to the orange site to find the number, and attempt to use the “fixing basic problems” menu to resolve it.

It asks a series of questions, and after each provides two choices: Yes this has resolved the issue, or No it hasn’t.

Are you roaming?

Do you have Line2 selected?

Do you have enough signal strength?

To each I answer “no, this hasn’t resolved my issue” until I get to one which reads

Have you checked the message centre number to ensure this is correct?

The message centre number must be correct in order to send text messages

This is, indeed, the problem I need to fix, but unfortunately Orange provide no way of actually helping me to fix it.

If I click “Yes, this has resolved my problem” I get a message saying “glad we could help” but if I click “No this hasn’t resolved my problem” I get presented with another potential issue (”Is the destination number valid?”) rather than any way to resolve the previous problem.

Please look at that screenshot and tell me how, from that information, anyone is supposed to know:
a) how to check the message centre number
b) whether it’s correct
c) how to correct it.

It seems that “fixing basic problems” is actually “diagnosing basic problems” with no attempt to actually fix them at all. I don’t want sympathy, I want a working phone. Most irritating!

(for anyone else suffering this predicament, I can recommend you find reputable and helpful orange network related answers elsewhere)

For the avoidance of doubt, for Christmas/birthday/Festivus/Winterval/etc I would like:

• An Asus EEE PC 701 with optimal RAM etc
• A DAB Pure Evoke radio
• A Lomo LC-A
• Some stripy socks
• Some extra RAM for my iMac
• …and that’s it

Geek, much?

This is a fantastic idea: Technology in a teapot keeps watch on elderly:

His electric kettle, an “i-pot” (for information pot), not only boils water for his instant miso soup and green tea, but it also records the times he pushes a button and dispenses the water. A wireless communication device at the bottom of the i-pot sends a signal to a server. Members of the service can see recent records of i-pot usage on a Web site. In addition, twice a day the server e-mails the most recent three usage times to a designated recipient.

Presumably also works for people who make tea a lot, like most of my relatives.

I suggest a product line extension, the i-Spod. The software could automatically send an alert to relatives of geeks when they touch the keyboard for the first time each day, to reassure the family that their nerdy loved one hasn’t expired in a pile of takeout menus in front of a downloaded episode of Lost, or been strangled by a rogue USB cable while reaching for a miniature screwdriver.

Phone rings. I answer.

“Hello?…. Hello? Hello? Is anyone there? Hello?”

The sound of silence. But no, not quite silence. Quietly punctuated by faint laughter, the distant, distinct sound of Chef from South Park singing Chocolate Salty Balls.

Someone must have sat on their phone, and dialled our number. This has happened before, and it’s frustrating and mystifying because obviously you can’t make a call (e.g. to 1471) until they hang up - and since the phone is probably wedged between the sofa cushions, there’s not much chance of that.

Ten minutes later, through careful, studied listening to the occasional muffled guffaw, P manages to identify one of his mates from the North East, and calls him on the land line. Faintly, through a sofa cushion, we hear the phone ring. We are hiding in his living room and he has no idea. We hear his mum walk to the phone, and then loudly shout for F to come and answer it. P speaks:

“Hello mate, enjoying South Park are you?”

*Sound of stunned silence, which we get in stereo, on both land line and P’s mobile*

Click.

Watching QVC (I’m ill, OK? I can be excused) I am stunned into silence at the demonstration of a PC keyboard which has all sorts of hot keys, allowing you to use your computer without resorting to drop-down menus, mouse clicks and other GUIs developed over the past twenty five years.

No no, now, instead of merely pressing, say, ctrl+z to undo something, or using the edit>undo drop down menu, you can simply press the “undo” button. And to save a document, just press “save”, or to switch between apps, press the “switch between apps” button. Is ctrl+s or alt+tab so hard?

Products like this dumb down the population, and undermine the notion of a consistent interface. If you get used to pressing hotkey #1 to print, becoming dependent on special idiot technology, how do you transfer to a machine that has a different keyboard, or transfer knowledge to an application that doesn’t feature on your smart keyboard?

People buy these things because they think they make life easier, but in fact they make life process-driven rather than concept-driven.

It’s like always using a teasmade and being unable to figure out how to boil a kettle, or constantly emailing friends and mailing lists in order to find the answers to simple queries that Google would be able to reveal in less than a second.

Learning how to use technology makes you more able to apply that technology over a broad range of challenges. You put in the effort to learn it once and then can use it hundreds of thousands of times, just like learning a language means you don’t have to depend on translators and dictionaries and speak-and-spell widgets any more when you go away.

Knowledge sets you free.

Related note: If google ever started charging users per search, I would be so screwed. I do it constantly - song lyrics, research, answers to things which are bugging me, just finding things out because I’m interested. How did we ever satisfy these curious urges before the internet came along? Scratching curious trivia and knowledge itches is probably the second best thing about the Internet, after communication. Oh, and pr0n, obviously.

I’ve got to agree with Zoe Williams about people abbreviating words when sending text messages. It smacks of laziness, and besides, there’s no real need when so many new mobile phones have predictive text input. So using text abbreviations now is an affectation - and a rather droll one, at that.

There are only a handful of people who send me messages containing strange TXT shorthand - 2morrow, l8r, CU nxt wk and so on - and it bugs the shit out of me, for reasons I’m not entirely sure of. What I do know is this - I usually take as much effort in replying to them as they have in messaging me in the first place - i.e. very little.

My other friends, however, the ones who know how to make 160 characters speak volumes, get the replies they deserve - full of care and attention and proper spelling.

While we’re on the subject, can I just point out something else about text messages that I don’t get? Those little books - The little bk of txt msgs and whatnot, which retail on cardshop counters for £1.99 and contain lots of little messages, chat up lines, insults and jokes you can put into your phone and send to all your friends.

The mind boggles. What lack of originality must a person have in order to require a book telling them what to send to their own friends?

I’m very much looking forward to seeing “The little book of postcards” for next time I go on holiday - full of such gems as “weather is here, wish you were lovely” and the like. *Yawn*

And another thing. I think I need to get myself a predictive text plugin for my boyfriend - I seem to spend an awful lot of time these last couple of weeks going:

Me: “Honey, could you get me the….the…”
Him: “The what?”
Me: “The…thingy…the…you know…the…the telly guide”
Him: [looks at me strangely] “Right. Where is it?”
Me: “It’s in the….the….”
Him: “Where? The kitchen? The living room? Where?”
Me: “…the….the bedroom! Aha!”
Him: “Sure.” [looks at me strangely]

Bless him, he’s trying so hard. I think I need a….a…you know…one of those things….a… bugger, you know what I mean…a….ah yes, I remember. A holiday.