Upgrade Time!

I've now had a cell phone for 20 months, and am eligible for an upgrade through Verizon. It's tempting, because the Motorola Droid X (which was not my first choice, but was what I got after being sick of the unavailability of the Droid Incredible and the HTC Evo) is slow and getting slower. There are probably fixes to this, including rooting (which I've never attempted, although that was one of the things that attracted me to Android in the first place). The slowness would almost be worth demonstrating on video, but instead I'll use words. Touch the Wi-Fi toggle widget, as a for instance, and it will take five, ten seconds -- or longer! -- to even register the touch. Then the little impeller icon spins and spins for... thirty seconds? Longer? Before turning off the damned wi-fi. Touch a contact icon to make a phone call, and you get a similar wait. When I need to make a phone call quickly, this becomes maddening.

So be it. It's a damned space age minicomputer. But it's human nature to want something to work the way it's supposed to. A hammer with a wobbly head is also annoying. The worst thing about the Droid X, though, is that the headphone jack is so sensitive that it renders the FM radio (an app I use five days a week during my commute to and from work) nearly useless. If you so much as breathe on the jack when the FM radio is playing, the phone starts the music player. It happens over and over.

As of March 15 I'm eligible for an upgrade. The Galaxy Nexus is appealing, but I have the sneaking suspicion it's not really a Nexus. And it's got a mediocre camera. I don't want another Motorola. The HTC One series looks pretty sweet, but they're not out yet and no word on whether they're coming to Verizon.

Thankfully, the Android community came to my rescue in the form of Headset Blocker. This free app solves the most frustrating problem of my phone: the sensitive headphone jack. Turns out that the phone senses a disturbance to the jack as a signal from an in-line pause/play button (that some headphones, but not mine, have). This is a hardware issue, but the app fixes it by telling the phone to ignore any "signals" from the headphone line. Bammo! The phone is still annoyingly slow, but at least I no longer want to throw it into traffic three times a day.

So I will wait another six months or so and see what comes along. I want my next phone -- if I even renew the data contract and keep owning a smartphone -- to be a quantum leap forward in functionality.

We'll see.

The Canon Color-Temperature Curse

I've owned two point-and-shoot digital cameras: both Canon SD digital elphs. Both awesome, after a fashion (and this coming from a dedicate Nikon guy back in the film era). But both of my Canons have suffered from a chilly blue color temperature that drives me nuts. The picture above is the way the Canon sees things. The one below is the way it looks after I've cranked the color temperature up to 11 in Picasa. Way better, no?

Maybe next time I'll buy a Lumix.

HDR Camera, Part II

I've gone HDR Camera crazy!

This app has now made the Droid X my preferred camera for landscapes, easily beating my Canon PowerShot SD940 IS. The Canon has a spotmeter, which is a huge advantage in any camera. But for landscapes, where 95% of the time the sky is at least two stops brighter than the land, HDR Camera wins every time.




The disadvantages of this app are:
1) you take four photos, slowly, to produce one picture;
2) it takes a while for the app to load;
3) you are shooting through a phone's camera lens, meaning it's slow and tiny with no zoom.

The advantages are:
1) awesomeness!



You can even take portraits with it, but you need to advise your subject(s) to hold still as if they are being daguerreotyped circa 1849.


Otherwise you end up with grotesqueries such as this:

HDR Camera

The camera on my Droid X is pretty good: it's an impressive 8 megapixels (which seems better than, for instance, the iPhone's 5MP, until you come to understand the Myth of Megapixels), but more than that, the pictures turn out quite nice. They're sharp, with good color, etc. More than acceptable for a phone camera.

But recently the camera stopped working. Actually, the default camera app stopped working. Retro Camera still worked. So while I was trying to figure out how to fix it, I downloaded HDR Camera, a free (but ad-supported) replacement for the standard camera app. It doesn't apply funky filters like Retro Camera and its ilk. However, it does do HDR (high dynamic range) photography. I've been interested in HDR ever since I discovered what it was and saw the pictures.

Basically, HDR takes three or more shots of the same scene at different exposures, and uses the best bits of each. So rather than having a well-exposed Elizabeth against a bleach-white sky and next to a dark blot of tree-shadow, the sky is dark blue, Elizabeth is still well-exposed, and the dark blot is revealed to be rich green grass under the tree. Nothing is burnt-out, nothing is under-exposed.

HDR in the hands of a really good photographer, with professional grade hard- and software, produces some pretty startling effects:


So I tried HDR Camera for the first time today and it works very, very well. With "real" HDR, the camera needs to be on a tripod so all three or four pictures line up exactly, and can be blended together. Somehow, HDR Camera gets around this. It takes four pictures and somehow calculates better exposure ranges for different parts of the pictures.

I've only used it twice, but it worked well both times, even though my handheld phone/cam was moving around quite a bit. Obviously, it's not going to deliver the goods like professional equipment and software would, but it's exciting that it can provide any HDR effect at all.

The first picture, below, is with the regular camera app, the second is with HDR Camera:

I was excited enough about the results to buy the "pro" (i.e., ad-free) app for $0.99 on the very first day I used this app. It's only the second Android app I've ever paid for.

Finally, Game Night!

I went a little boardgame crazy this year. In December (OK, technically last year) I bought Arkham Horror for Anson for his birthday. It was expensive, but worth it not only because he's my oldest friend, but also because it has the most pieces of any game ever made. Then in May when we were in New York I bought Settlers of Catan for myself. We didn't play it for the first time until last weekend (that's more than three months later). Somehow, two vital pieces had gone missing by then, although I'd only opened the box once in NY, under strictly controlled conditions. (My suspect: Elizabeth Rose Larrison! How, when it was on a shelf way above her reach? Answer: she's a three year old! Why? Answer: she's a three year old!)

I really like games. I like them more in theory than in practice. This is evidenced by the numerous obscure role playing games on my bookshelf (Anyone remember Skyrealms of Jorune? Didn't think so.) that I never played. This thesis is further supported by the videogames I bought cheap from ebay and never played, or played very little. (Sorry, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.)

Even without the missing pieces, Settlers was awesome. It's complex at first, but the rules make so much sense that you only need to hear them once before they set into your mind. Amazingly, there's no conflict in the game. It's all about cooperative trading and development. Needless to say, Aaron, Barb, and I enjoyed it and can't wait to play it again.

Maybe in another three months.

Windmill, Southeast Portland

Until a few weeks ago, I would walk Suzanne to sleep almost every night: tuck her into the sling, and walk the streets of Woodstock up and down, round and round, trying to avoid crossing the major thoroughfares, enjoying the sites and sounds. The skies at sunset are awesome at this time of year.

This windmill was one of the things we encountered. I like it.

(And this video, brief though it is, is a textbook illustration of why tripods are important.)

The True Long Island

 

The title of this post is an oversimplification, but this image (might be worth clicking to enlarge) sums up a day's frustration in trying to get to the beach. The shoreline in New York is private. In Oregon it's public. One day when we were driving around, looking for a beach to go to (besides the private beach the Braccos have access to), we ran into either $20.00 day use fees at State Parks, or this. Streets that dead-ended above the beach with No Standing signs everywhere.

Kind of a bummer.

Lessons of the Newborn, Pt. I

Newborns teach me how wonderful it is to have two upper extremities. Life becomes a deceptively challenging exercise when one of your limbs is occupied more-or-less constantly with cradling a beautiful, sleepy infant child.

Have you ever tried to wash your hand? Have you ever tried to type a blog entry one-handed?

Fun With Digital Photography

 

As someone who has been a pretty serious photographer since the mid-eighties*, I am often astonished to the point of laughter by how digital cameras have made the craft so ridiculously simple.

Which doesn't mean easy. In some ways, the plethora of choices can make digital photography tricky.

On Christmas day, Aaron encouraged me to use the black and white option on the camera. I never had before because I always figured I could convert any picture to B&W later if the mood struck me. But, as AWK rightly pointed out, you never do. So I snapped some virtual Pan-X and messed around with the color select feature and was pleased with the results.

*I remember reading in Popular Photography about the first commercial use of digital photography. It was a newspaper photographer snapping a 1.2 megapixel (I'm guessing here; but it looked like a PixelVision still) pic of a Mike Tyson fight and then submitting it over a payphone line while feeding dimes to the phone for 20 minutes. All so the paper would have art for their early edition a few hours ahead of the competition. But more, I guess, to be in the van of this inevitably transformative technology.

Video Solution

Last weekend I finally (with Barb's help) figured out how to shrink the widescreen videos my phone takes to fit in the rather narrow Blogger panel.

After uploading to YouTube, you change the dimensions of the video in the embed HTML code. I learned of this dead-simple solution through a Google search, naturally. Barb was enlisted to do the math necessary to maintain the correct aspect ratio.

The big winner here is Elizabethtown, where I post the majority of my phone videos.

Plus, it's always nice to solve one of life's many niggling little problems -- and this relieves one of the disappointments of the Droid X.

So, cool.

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