Square is the new black

Published on by Phillip Drawbridge Category: Photography, Web Site

Instagram, it’s gotta be cool right?   All the iPhone users can’t be wrong twice can they?     Not to mention that Facebook just paid $1bn to get hold of it.   Maybe just to get rid of the competition, or they actually saw something valuable, very valuable there.  They paid $1bn for an App that doesn’t actually generate any revenue.

I’ve had my face pressed up against the glass for a long time, seeing what the iPhoners were playing with and longing for it.   Christmas finally came in March and we Android users got our hands on the new toy.  Only to find that we already had a dozen apps that could do the same thing, only better.   I was initially disappointed. Camera FX, which I was using while waiting for Instagram, is a far superior app.  More features, better filters, and uploads to twitter and facebook.  But what it does lack is the social networking side.

Instagram is more than an app, it’s a social network in it’s own right.  More akin to twitter than Facebook, allowing users to upload easily images of what ever is going on around them.    I like the social side.  Browsing through photos of people I follow.  Checking out ones of those I don’t.  It’s just fun.

Then I found out that the Android version has a little, somewhat hidden, feature that lets you turn off the default camera.  This means I can use my beloved Camera FX to take bad photos and upload them to the Instagram site!   Perfect match.

Then came my next disappointment. Unlike twitter, it’s really hard to access the images you’re following and indeed see your own from the main website.  You can edit your profile, but there’s really no way to see the images. AND there’s no way to share your instagrams with non users.  But luckily they released the API, which means a slew of nice programmer types have created websites that CAN access your feed.  I use followgram.me  it was the first I tried and does what I wanted, so I looked no further.

 

I’m excited again.  Check out Instagr.am if you have an iPhone or Android and check out my feed if you just want to see my pics.

 

June 2014 Update – Instagram goes from strength to strength and now has a decent website. The API is still available, which means I’ve been able to add a feed to my blog.  Check out the menu to the right.

 

Meaningless RAID Ranting

Published on by Phillip Drawbridge Category: Off Topic

begin rant

Drobo is a great idea.  On paper.   It’s a small simple  RAID (redundant array of independent disks) solution for information storage.   Gale won one in a competition a few years back.     It has multiple hard drives that mirror each other.  So as you put files on one drive, they are copied to the other.   This has the HUGE benefit that if one drive should fail, then you just pop out the bad drive, insert a new one and keep working without any loss.  The downside is, as we have found out multiple times now, is that if the Drobo itself fails then you have lost both drives.

Which means that Gale now has two 1terabyte hard drives with information we can’t access.    Obviously the warranty has expired and the replacement power supply (which I suspect is the problem) is $60.   I’m unsure what to do next.  Luckily, kinda, this is the second time it has failed, so she had copies of pretty much all the important stuff.    Oh, and the other thing, the drives are formatted in such a way that only a Drobo can read them, so I can’t just plug it into a computer and copy everything over.

/rant

Update: They just emailed me back. Which was very quick. The tech thinks i’m right. He suggested things I already tried and then suggest I buy the out of warranty plan for the replacement. $269 please…

Camera FX

Published on by Phillip Drawbridge Category: Photography

Today Gale and I went on our photo trip armed only with Android cameras, Camera FX app and a 3G signal (for the most part).

We traveled down to Brown County and drove around and took a few snaps, but it was only when we got within 5 miles of home that we really started to use them.   We came across a small graveyard near Fortville and the sunlight was perfect.

Camera FX is an app that replaces the android camera and allows you to add a number of filters, such as changes in hue, saturation, composites (scratches, warps etc), and other effects such as faking tilt-shift.   It really is a good app and I suggest everyone download it.   At least until Instagram is ready.

My gallery has more photos.

Camera FX

Published on by Phillip Drawbridge Category: Photography

I’ve been waiting for ages for Instagr.am to get their act together and release the Android version.   Then today i saw that Camera FX is on sale for 25c!   What a bargain.  So I downloaded it.   It’s fun more than anything else.  but fun is good and the ability to put filters and effects on photos AND upload to Facebook and Twitter is great.  There’s even a wordpress option, but I haven’t worked that out yet.

Here are a few photos I took with it.

Gale and I have decided to go on a photoshoot later in the week.  Armed not with the $3 grand of cameras we normally lug around, but just with our two droids, Camera FX and imagination.   I’ll post the results once we get back.

eReader

Published on by Phillip Drawbridge Category: Off Topic

My 2 day adventure of being an eReader owner is at an end. And I actually feel I have regained my integrity.

I got it because, I wanted a tablet, it was cheap, it ran Android, so I can run my fave apps on it and Gale wanted to be able to read magazines on it.

It was cheap(ish), compared to other tablets. Because it’s not a tablet. It’s an eReader made by a company famous for their ground breaking work in digital picture frames and just happens to use Android to run the 3 apps it comes with.  As for the processor, I don’t know what it is but I can hear it ticking.

See how nice and shiny it is?  Unfortunately the picture has about the same computing power as the actual tablet.

It had a REALLY cut down version of Android that didn’t have Market Place on it! So I couldn’t download Gmail, Kindle, Angry Birds or pretty much anything else. It did have Barnes and Noble, but not the cool Nook app.

The magazines that Gale really wants to read are graphic art and they are not available electronically. The one thing we did download didn’t have pictures, but rather a URL which opened up the picture.

I did manage to hack it so it was rooted, had the market place, kindle, facebook, gmail and was Android 2.0 rather than 1.5 it came with. But damage done. It’s slow, low resolution (my phone is a quarter the size and has a higher resolution screen and even with the nice discount I got (40% off off half of the retail) it’s still a POS. And I don’t mean Point of Sale.

So, back it goes. Of course, it’s my department at work, so I have to resell it. So I won’t mention any of this when I sell it. I will say that it’s a good budget e-reader that lets you surf the web.

That said, it’s still rooted and has Android 2.0, has the full marketplace and Kindle installed on it. So it’s actually better than when I got it. I’m doing them a favour.

Back to my trusty netbook that has a bigger screen, runs windows 7 and has a keyboard. I’m so sorry, why did I ever consider pushing you aside for something that had a veneer of glossiness about it? Please forgive me.

Now once a Xoom comes into the store…….