Enough already with the Notifications

I had planned to use instagram and twitter via my phone during the periods when I was travelling for my Endless Summer project. However leaving data on and getting hundreds of notifications from instagram and less from twitter I quickly discovered that I had used over 60% of my monthly data allowance in just 4 days! Wow, I seemed to be getting notification even though the apps where not running on the phone, The twitter beeps and tweets where the most annoying since they where not related to my posts or even things that would interest me anyway. they were just trying to grab my attention. The deeper worry is that in all this activity I feel like I am just yelling into the wind, not joining a “conversation”. So the solution is simple just log out of Instagram and twitter and turn off data. Silence … …

My cartoon creation Alvin people was actually one of the earliest Australian Twitter accounts, predominantly to link to and later post cartoons. My cartooning is having an extended holiday, but I decide to consult Alvin as he would probably know what to do. He readily admits he hasn't posted in years and after going through the forgotten password dance to resurect his account he managed to set off a cacophony of chimes, beeps, tingings, chirps and other electronic sounds. Clearly he could not find how to turn off the notifications either.

He did find you can unsubscribe from twitter using a link on the bottom of the web site

A bandwidth comparison as the photo upload race continues …

Its no secret that I am disappointed with google photos and particularly in the crippling of picasa’s wonderful sharing capabilities. However I am trying to be fair in the comparison and thus want to try and follow as much detail of the race between google photos and flickr apps on my phone as I can. So here is a comparison of (mobile) data use for last month including the period I was travelling (the light blue area of the usage graph on the right).

In theory the same photos have been uploaded to both services (in practise there are differences BUT more photos have been uploaded to flickr!). So the observation that google photos has used almost three time as much of my bandwidth for essentially the same task, is another stumble for google photos. The better news is both have used only a fraction of the space taken up by the actual photos, so they are obviously doing good things in terms of compression and effective image size/quality trade off.

Bloating the Bandwidth

rapware is what I call it, and its getting worse. It has been a round for a while piggy backing on items you download from shareware and software distribution sites. Usually you have the opportunity to not downloaded them, but now you have to be diligent and deselect options to avoid then being auto installed or tick the no thanks item in very fine print. There is also a good chance these freeloaders might have a malware payroll. They are just simply to be avoided, a waste of time and are annoying.
   
However now a lot of legitimate software come with similar crapware items you probably don.t want. Like adobe sneaking in McAfee anti virus, Java adding Ask and Google bar to your browser or Internet Explorer changing the default search to Bing. Once it was buyer beware, now it is downloader be very careful.
  
If any software distributers are listening please stop!
With special thanks again to Jessica Hische of Daily Drop Cap for the wonderful cheese C start to this post.

Photos in the clouds

This is not meant to be a comprehensive list, just a starting point, prompted by the recent upgrades to skydrive & google+. The following services all offer free cloud storage, have a decent TOS (terms of service) that mean you still own the copyright to your files (unlike other  Social Net service like Facebook & Instagram who assume they own the copyright to anything you upload, others strip out your metadata) . They have private/public sharing options that you control.. All can be used from a variety of computers and mobile devices (apps are available for most devices) and all have the ability to mirror the cloud storage across your own computer device (desktops, laptops, phones, tablets). In other words all offer a decent service.

Drop Box	2GB
Box	5GB
GMail, Google Drive Picasa/Google+ Photo	15GB*
SkyDrive/Outlook/(Hotmail)	25GB*

* Shared space

Cleary Forty Seven gigabytes of space is a lot. How does that relate to how many photos you can save, its approximately twenty four thousand  (or more) jpeg files of the size taken by compact cameras and smart phones, Around three thousand three hundred full sized RAW files, as taken by recent high megapixel model DSLR cameras or four hundred & seventy five-ish HD movie clips (30second to 2minues) or eleven and three quarter eight gigabyte SD cards. So if your an occasional IPhone snapper that’s probably a life time of memories but for a professional photographer it could be just.a few days or a weeks worth of their photographic work. The rest of us will fit somewhere in between and I suspect it will be bandwidth that arbitrates how quickly our photos fill the clouds, but I’m now sure they will.

  

Home Sweet Home

As well as trying to keep down the amount of Photo and Art stuff I carried while travelling I also put myself on a software diet. I was travelling with a new but very small Toshiba notebook and I wanted to avoid the over installation of unused software glut, that inevitably slows down any computer (well any of my computers) eventually suffers from. So I deliberately only installed Picasa and some Pentax drivers (notably Remote III so I could tether my camera, which I never did) and a few utilities on a Portable App memory stick (I used Autostitch a lot , Picturenaut and  Noiseworks  less so). The one thing I didn’t have which I might have used (and tried unsuccessfully to achieve) was creating massive panoramas and photosynths. Admittedly you can do the photosynth thing by any browser but uploading all the images could take forever on a lower bandwidth connection. You also have to download some software. So I was glad to get home, get my photos onto my stora (there archive location) and do a bit of reorganizing with Windows Live Photo Gallery (again I could have downloaded any of the windows live stuff while I was travelling, if I got desperate). Finally I was glad to get back to a dedicated flickr uploader facility, rather than wait on the web browser based upload tab with flickr. What I enjoy most of all was the wider bandwidth

Notice I haven’t loaded either Photoshop elements of Lightroom onto my desktop yet.