It’s time for another pocket camera

Photography, Tech

I’ve had quite a bit of bad luck with my pocket cameras over the last year between a couple of bike crashes that busted two of them and losing another. Last year, I was excited about the new batch of cameras that were about to be unveiled including the Panasonic LX7, the Samsung EX2-F and the Canon S110. The Sony RX100 was the special option but the cost relative to the chance of it getting smashed was too big a risk for me to take. Looking with new eyes over the compact supercamera landscape, one new option has appeared and looks very interesting indeed. The Nikon Coolpix P330 has just been released in March and the initial impressions look very encouraging. It’s cheaper than most of the camera’s in its class and it has increased the size of the sensor from the previous P310 version.

DXOMark summarises that the P330 performs above its paygrade.

I think I may be tempted to give it a try.

Flickr just announced one terabyte of space for every user!

Mobile, Photography, Tech, Web

Very interesting coming one day after they announce the acquisition of Tumblr and their promise not to screw it up. The look and feel of the site has also been updated and places all of the focus on the images. I wonder how this will affect the pro model that they use?

The BBC reports

“It puts Flickr back on the agenda making it relevant to both hobbyist and professional photographers alike, but it also reignites the whole storage capacity war that started with Gmail and that we are now seeing with cloud file sharing services.”

Google offers users a total of 15GB of free storage across its core cloud services. Facebook does not impose such a limit but downgrades the quality of high-resolution photos.

Reasons you need your own website

Business, Tech, Web

Just saw this post and many of the reasons also apply to organisations and individuals outside of music. I don’t understand why many business point potential customers to a facebook or myspace page.
Especially, when they are not controlling the experience.

It’s your’s… forever

I’ve said this more than once in this post.

You get the point right?

Your Facebook Page and your Bandcamp page are NOT yours. They belong to other people and cannot be forced to do all the things that you might want to do.

Text editor inside the browser

Tech, Thought Provoking, Web

Type the following text into the address bar of your browser.

data:text/html;charset=utf-8, <title>TextEditor</title><body contenteditable style="font-size:2rem;font-family:monaco;line-height:1.4;max-width:60rem;margin:0 auto;padding:4rem;" spellcheck="false"><h1>Text Editor</h1><p>Start Here.

Voila, a text editor inside your browser.
Thanks to Jose Jesus Perez Aguiaga and the commenters. There may even be better suggestions in the comments later on.

Facebook may be building a web search engine in addition to their Graph Search

Tech, Web

Why do I think this? I have created some new sites in the last two weeks, some of which I have not publicised or linked to on Facebook. Very soon after publishing new pages, the site has stats from what looks like a facebook crawler on the site. Very interesting. It seems to be much more active in crawling the site than Microsoft or Google. This would suggest that they are collecting their own map of the internet outside of links that are posted within Facebook. What else could it mean than building data for a generic web search engine? Haven’t really seen anyone else mention this so far.

App for Adding Watermarks to iPhone photos

Arts, Mobile, Photography, Tech

Just read this article on Petapixel about a new watermarking app. Something that I have been looking for in the last couple of months.

Photojournalist John D. McHugh was sick of having his photos stolen and infringed upon the moment he posted them online. And even though he can, of course, put watermarks on his photos in Photoshop, he found himself wondering if maybe he couldn’t come up with a better way. Enter Marksta, an app that allows you to watermark photos right on your iPhone before posting them to Facebook, Instagram, and other places where they may be easily stolen.

It’s currently free but not forever. Act fast!

Instagram Conditions and the new Flickr app #Instagram #Flickr

Arts, Mobile, Photography, Tech, Thought Provoking, Web

I haven’t used Instagram a lot for sharing photos although I do like going through the photos of my contacts. Today they announced they updated their terms and conditions which has resulted in the internet going crazy. One of the best posts I read was on Business Insider.

If you want to stop social networking services from exploiting your likeness for advertising, you’ve got to start paying up.

Within the article, a reference was made to a post last year from the founder of pinboard.in which basically boiled everything into “Don’t be a free user”.

So stop getting caught off guard when your favorite project sells out! “They were getting so popular, why did they have to shut it down?” Because it’s hard to resist a big payday when you are rapidly heading into debt. And because it’s culturally acceptable to leave your user base high and dry if you get a good offer, citing self-inflicted financial hardship.

So where does that leave everyone? Well, there is an alternative that offers a paid option for enhanced membership. Co-incidentally, they also added a new app this week that rivals Instagram in design and surpasses it in interoperability with other sites.Yes, it’s Flickr. Nice that they include a post clarifying the ownership and rights of photos

In fact, when you upload to Flickr you set the kind of license that you want to apply to the photos, ‘All Rights Reserved’ is the default, or you can select one of the many flavors ofCreative Commons licenses. The choice is yours and you maintain control over how your photo can be used by others. If you want to make your photo available for use by everybody in the world, license it using Getty Images, or to license it to a fancy magazine, it’s up to you..

New version of Flickr App

Photography, Switzerland, Web

New version of Flickr iOS App copies Instagram.

Marissa Mayer is taking action on revitalising Yahoo with this update to the Flickr App. Is it soon enough? Let’s see but the app looks good!

Unlike Instagram, Flickr provides support for Twitter, in addition to Facebook, Tumblr, and email.

Smart move in expanding the reach of the to as many other portals as possible.

Sleeping with the enemy – Getting in Bed with Gadgets #insomnia #sleep

Health, Tech, Thought Provoking

From OnlinePsychologyDegree.net:

New studies show that not only are most people sleeping with their smartphones in the bed with them, they’re also struggling to sleep well, even if they don’t realize it. Not only does the light from your gadgets suppress sleep-inducing melatonin, there’s a good chance that you’ve been woken up by a call or text message in the middle of the night recently.

Badgets in Bed Infographic