Tag Archives: Android

Smartphones – A Valuable Photographer’s Tool

“What’s in your bag?” seems to be an often asked question.

Typically, this question means “What do you have that I can lust after?” or “What do you have that isn’t as good as what I have?”, but it also has another connotation.

Of course, the gear is important, don’t let anybody ever tell you otherwise, but it’s not about having “the best” camera, lenses or flash equipment, it just means you need the right ones for the task at hand.

But what about the other stuff?

There are so many things that, while not absolutely required, make life a whole lot easier during a shoot, and they’re often ignored when “the question” is asked.

I’m going to compose a series of posts that will attempt to address some of those things.  I suppose this could be considered “Part 1”, and I’m going to talk about some of the various ways my iPhone (but it applies equally to Android) has become an essential part of my kit.

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Turn off Facebook’s Auto-Playing Videos

It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Lifehacker recently posted a way to turn these off, but at the moment Facebook only really allows you to do it on the desktop.

We can turn it off for Android and iOS devices, but only if they’re using GPRS/3G/4G (ie, not WiFi), which is understandable, but unfortunately it doesn’t help my issue.

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Adventures with CubieBoard

Oh boy, what a day.  Where to begin?  Well, how’s about the beginning?  I suppose that’s the usual order of things.

I’d been looking at the various CubieBoards that are available for a little while now, and have had my heart set on a CubieTruck (it satisfies a few hardware needs for something I want to do that I don’t think the Pi will be able to handle without a USB hub, a few extra gadgets & gizmos, a handful of extra USB batteries and a lot of faffing around).

Other than the one specific example mentioned above, the Pi can handle pretty much everything I would need such a device for, but there I was on Boxing Day, minding my own business, when I see an original CubieBoard (the CubieTruck is version 3 of the CubieBoard) for sale on eBay at an absolute steal of a price (even less than the cost of a Raspberry Pi, so how could I not?).

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Tiny computers are taking over

I’ve been using and working with x86 based PCs for a little over 21 years now.

I started off with MS-DOS 3.3 and Windows 3.0 on a 286.  The 40MB hard drive I had in there was so huge it had to be partitioned across two drive letters as the maximum partition size that MS-DOS 3.3 could see was a whopping 32MB.

I made the natural progression to MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows For Workgroups 3.11, then Windows 95, at which point I learned about networking, and sometime in 1996 I discovered Linux.

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