Mobile thinking

Mentally wandering along Tottenham Court Road, I've been wondering about how to go about photography without a working Macbook. Certainly I can use my Android tablet to work on photos but the lack of RAW processing and the lack of a way of uploading RAW (or even JPEG for that matter) to my tablet is a hinderance. Another problem is the lack of a way of transferring the photos to bulk storage. Certainly somewhere (unless I have since thrown it out) I have a bulk storage unit from which I removed the hard drive. That thing was expensive and not all that great. It was pretty much before its time - it needed a flash hard drive rather than a moving hard drive.

As m'lady is set to abandon her satellite internet, I'm back in the position I was in last year when I abandoned Windstream. She`s doing it for very much the same reason - cost. She's paying $80 a month for 10GB of data. I was paying $55 for unlimited data. The problem is that neither of us uses more than about 2GB. My phone comes with 5GB which should cover me for all I need. She'll probably use my MiFi pad and use $40 of data every 2 months (a $40, 4GB package only expires after 2 months).

Thinking about the motorhome I've been building over the last year or so, that will require mobile internet. This was factored into my thinking hence the MiFi pad. Another reason why I particularly like the MiFi pad is that I'm not advertised as being in a particular location. Windstream had a nasty habit of publishing my name, address and Windstream phone number in the Windstream phone book. That was particularly worrysome because at the time I was being stalked quite intensively. Since I never actually put a phone on the line, using it purely for DSL, I never got any harrassing phonecalls. Having said that, I did try plugging a phone in and from dawn til dusk I'd be getting advertising calls. That phone lasted 3 days before being unplugged and dumped in the eBay box.

One of the irksome things about my old-school digital cameras is the total lack of connectivity. Bluetooth, NFC and WiFi are the only ways to communicate with tablets and these days with many laptops. Loath as I am to sell something for half a peanut, I might be forced to do just that, purely in order to keep taking photos. I can't really see my buying another Macbook when they cost almost 4 times what a Windows laptop does. Mind, if I did buy a laptop, Windows would not last much further than the "Do you agree to the terms and conditions" because the answer would be an emphatic no. Instead, I would install Linux. Linux has improved in terms of user interface, dramatically since it was first released and now ranks on a par with Mac. Windows is left behind in the dust.

Going forward, the future definitely looks mobile and lightweight. One of the main concerns is something that can be charged off a non mains voltage supply. Tablets, phones and mifi pads can all be charged via USB. Cameras have a problem as the chargers are all bricks that hang off a wall socket and gobble 110v. Perhaps I should say that's the problem with my camera. My decade old superzoon compact that no longer takes good photos takes AA batteries which are easily chargeable while mobile. Modern cameras don't take AA batteries which is in my opinion a gigantic leap backward. Instead they use non standard lithium batteries that cannot be used in any other device and each battery needs its own funky little charger.