#oneaday, Day 91: Hipstamatic-o-matic

It’s been a while since a photo post, so I thought I’d treat you all to one. (As if you care.)

Now, we all know that mobile phone cameras are crap. Put that hand down. All mobile phone cameras are crap. You can have all the megapixies in the world painting the little pictures inside your camera, but if you have a lens the size of a pin head and a sensor to match, you’re going to get crap pictures. You might get slightly bigger crap pictures, but still crap pictures. You may well have a flash, which means you can take crap pictures in the dark. But they are still crap pictures. If you want to take good pictures, buy a proper camera and stop pissing about with phones.

With this in mind, some enterprising young individuals have created the Hipstamatic app for the legendarily-crap iPhone camera, promoting it with the tagline “Digital photography never looked so analog”. The app simulates the titular 80s camera, complete with a selection of virtual lenses, films and flashes available for use. A few are included with the app, and others are sold via microtransaction within the app itself – though a friend discovered that by using the “shake to randomise” feature, you can actually make use of the premium equipment without having to pay for it. Sometimes it takes a bit of shaking to get the effect you want, though.

Anyway, the fact that the app is deliberately trying to simulate a thirty-year old camera means that the normally-crap cameras of mobile phones can be put to good use for once. Namely, rather than being in denial over the fact the iPhone camera is crap, the app embraces its crapness to produce a selection of stylised shots, most of which are way too dark, or overexposed, or coloured completely wrong, or have burnt edges, or too much vignetting, or… You get the idea. It basically gives you the opportunity to create the sort of pictures you see all the time on Tumblr at the touch of a button.

With that in mind, I went out for a little walk in the glorious sunshine today and ended up spending an hour taking pretentious photos of absolutely nothing of note whatsoever. But, should you be interested in the results of this clever little app, take a look at the gallery below:

There’s more info on the Hipstamatic app here, and it’s currently available from the App Store for the very reasonable price of one-pound-somethingorother.

#oneaday, Day 64: Act Your Age, Fanboys

Why does the phenomenon of fanboyism still exist? And more to the point, why does it exist amongst men (and it pretty much is always men) who are old enough to know better?

The simple and easy answer is, of course, that it’s always been around. I remember growing up as an Atari-based family and all of the Atari magazines at the time belittling the competition with stupid names like Spectrash (Spectrum) and Crappydore (Commodore 64). Then came the schoolyard arguments – SEGA vs Nintendo. Sonic vs Mario. “We’ve got Street Fighter II! Hah! …Oh wait, now you have, too.” It got pretty silly.

Once the Dreamcast came out, it was hard to justify fanboyism because, certainly once SEGA’s wondermachine came out, it was so far ahead of its competition – the 64-bit Nintendo 64 and the 32-bit PlayStation – that half-hearted attempts to call it things like “Dreampants” always came across as more than a little desperate.

Things then kicked off again with Sony vs Microsoft, with Nintendo kind of relegated to “background observer” by this point. The PS2 and the original Xbox both had fiercely loyal supporters when, in fact, you’d have a far better experience if you bought both systems, played the relevant exclusives on their respective platforms and played multiplatform titles on the Xbox. That’s what I did, and I never felt the need to slag off any of the systems.

And it still goes on today, despite each of the consoles arguably offering a more distinct and unique experience from each other than ever before. The Xbox 360 offers its legendary ease of online play, the PS3 is home to a variety of unusual and interesting games (like Flower, flOw, Linger in Shadows, the Pixeljunk games) and the Wii is the family-friendly bundle of fun.

Still the hating goes on, though.

But nowhere is it more apparent than in the world of smartphones, particularly between the owners of iPhones, BlackBerries (let’s pluralise it properly, please) and Android-based phones. iPhone owners are either Apple fanboys who bang on about how great Apple is all the time or jailbreakers who bang on about which ludicrously-named hack they’re installing this week – and, of course, which apps they could get for free rather than paying for them on the App Store. BlackBerry owners seem to be updating their OS every night. And Android owners seem to be particularly sore about the iPhone for some inexplicable reason.

The question is: why? When it came to the early console wars, slagging off the systems your friends had was just schoolyard banter. You didn’t really think that the systems were inferior, otherwise you wouldn’t have gone around to their houses and played those games with them. The fact that this juvenile banter has grown up with people who have been using gaming and other consumer electronics for years is utterly baffling. Even people who started gaming at the same time as me – or before – are still bitching and moaning about how much better their handset is that [x]’s handset, and blahblahblah open source, blahblahblah build quality, blahblahblah BlackBerry Messenger, blahblahblah… You get the picture.

Am I alone in thinking that all of this stuff, without exception, is seven degrees of awesome and we should appreciate the brilliant things we have? Yes, some of them have more features. Yes, some of them are objectively “better” in terms of capabilities, power and technical specifications. But is that really any reason to act like 5-year olds telling each other that their respective Mums smell of wee?

No, it’s not. So why does it still go on?

One A Day, Day 15: Blips

Blips today. Nothing that interesting to say, so I’ll go with the snippet approach.

Back to work today. Boo. But at least I could get away with making them all do a writing test this morning, so I didn’t have to do very much for the first hour or so. Hooray! I also tidied my classroom and filed the bajillion bits of paper that were littering the top of my desk… some (well, most) into the bin and others into actual files with dividers and everything. Suddenly, by doing that, I feel a bit less incompetent. Still doesn’t make me want to carry on though – teaching’s had its chance.

Took me two hours to get to work this morning. It’s usually an hour’s drive. The last hour was taken up by the last three miles of the journey. It was one of those annoying traffic jams where it wasn’t at all obvious what the problem was – and there probably wasn’t anything at the front of it. It had snowed a little bit, but not enough to make the roads perilous, so I’m not sure that could be an excuse. I could be wrong though.

Currently installing Mass Effect 2. I’ve been replaying the prequel as a Renegade (went as a Paragon on my first playthrough) but overenthusiastic tweets from friends have made me want to jump on board and import my old Paragon character.

Also found one of the best apps out there for iPhone 1st gen/3G owners – iVideoCamera. It’s 59p and is a fully-functional video camera with export to camera roll, Twitter, YouTube and Wi-Fi. The quality isn’t quite as good as with a proper 3GS, but it’s certainly acceptable. You can use it in either 160xsomething mode at full frame rate for unlimited recording, or 320xsomething at 10fps for “high quality” mode. Both look just fine, and are certainly enough to shoot a quick video and post to Twitter or something. So if you still have a 3G like me, then it’s a great app. And cheap.

Well, that’s about that for today. Sorry I don’t have more to say. But the whole thing with “one a day” is that not every day is vastly interesting. Go and look at my photos from yesterday if you haven’t already. The low-level pebbly beach shot with the nice depth of field is currently my desktop background.

One A Day, Day 6: LOADING…

I’m writing this while I’m waiting for BitMob’s idiosyncratic blog editing software, MyBlog, to load. The tag database on BitMob is now so big that it takes 2-3 minutes to load the editor now. It was irritating the first time it happened, but I’m sort of used to it now. You quickly get into the habit of doing something else while it loads. And talking of BitMob, if you haven’t checked out my “Bayonetta as a text adventure” article over there yet, go take a look. People who have read it seem to dig it, so thank you so much to those of you who have read, commented and retweeted it. There will be more along those lines sometime soon.

Today has been a pleasurably useless day. Got up late, played a bit of Demon’s Souls, including beating the second boss first time thanks to the assistance of a phantom I summoned in to assist. That is a fantastic feature – players being able to mark themselves as available for assistance, and other players being able to “borrow” them to help them through tough sections. It’s a nice idea, and the fact the other player enters your world as a phantom at least goes some way to justifying the difficulty in voice chatting on the PS3. Sort of.

Then I had lunch and played a bit more of Star Trek Online. The open beta is coming to an end soon, and they’ve unlocked the other sectors and removed the level cap for now. The intrepid Mike Minotti took an expedition over to Deep Space Nine and immediately suffered an intense nerdgasm. I’m looking forward to seeing it for myself – going to play a little more tonight. Cryptic have done a great job of creating an MMO that’s a little bit different from all the me-too WoW clones out there. Ground combat is a little more fast-paced than most MMOs, while space combat is just magnificent, particularly when you’re working with other players.

Then I went for a run. For those of you who were asking about the site I mentioned a few days ago, this is it. I’ve done two of the first week’s workouts this week, and need to fit my other one in tomorrow to keep on schedule. Should be eminently doable though. My current “pace” is to run for 60 seconds, walk for 90 seconds, then run again, then walk again, and so on. It works, and I felt like I could have kept going for a little longer than the just-under-30-minutes I did today. It’s definitely better to do it like that rather than attempt to keep running, running, running and become completely demoralised when you realise you can’t do it, gasping for breath after a few hundred yards. And when I say “you” I, of course, mean “I”. Want to see my route? Here. Gotta love the iPhone.

So this evening will be more of the same, I imagine. Planning on hitting up Star Trek Online for a bit more space-based entertainment in a little while, though I have a rough idea for an article on BitMob to fiddle around with first.

Have a fine and pleasant evening, y’all.