Looking at the software available for iPad, there's a glaring gap... There just is no suitable app for blogging. Certainly I have tried a blogging app. As can be seen by yesterday's efforts, the big problem is that the app ignored all my nice paragraphing. There was no solution other than to uninstall the app.
How am I blogging now? Simple. I am using the email approach to blogging. Blogger allows me to email updates of up to 10 MB in size. And of course one of the nice things about the iPad is that I can just dictate my blog entries which is a lot faster. Unlike Android it actually makes sense of what I'm saying. Android never could quite understand English as it is spoken.
On the whole I am very impressed by my Apple iPad. In times of mistakes, it doesn't make a lot when I'm dictating. I probably have to correct about one sentence in every three. Android couldn't understand anything half the time. This is not an Android bashing session; this is merely comparison between my experience of the android on the iOS devices.
Yesterday , I ordered a gizmo to read my camera memory using Wi-Fi. That should make a huge difference. Now, one of the questions I had was whether I should continue blogging using Google blogger or whether I should change to Wordpress. For the moment, it makes sense to continue with the Google blog. This of course is a downside to not using my own domain name for the blog. Had I used my own domain name then I would be able to switch blog hosts at the drop of a hat. As my blogs still do not make very much money even though they carry Adsense, there seems little purpose in spending money on a domain name. My typical AdSense income seems to be less than a dollar a month. A domain name, even a cheap one would cost about $10 a year. That is not going to finance itself. As I have said many times before in this blog I am totally done with financing the Internet. I don't pay for web hosting. I don't pay for domain names. I don't pay for anything that does not return more money than I am spending on it. This is particularly so regarding the Internet.
If you haven't considered an iPad, maybe you too need to come out of your shell! The entry price can be as low as $250 for a full sized iPad Air. That's about what you'll blow on cheap Android tablets every year.
The only thing I don't like about email blogging is that I can't add search descriptions and tags. I can include photos however and get them correctly formatted. Even the dictation seems to work.
Ouch! I've gone and done it now!
Yes, dissatisfied with the lousy run of tablets, I have bought another but not just any other tablet. This time I bought an iPad. Call me nuts but I believe a product I buy should last long enough to be able to use it. My history of tablets has not been exactly rosy
In 2013 I bought a Nook Color tablet cheaply just as it was about to be discontinued. That thing cost me $90 and never performed as desired. In the slightest humidity the screen would go bananas imagining phantom touches. A photo album would mysteriously flip through all the images or the screen would be utterly response less. Inside a place with powerful air conditioning, it would behave. In my car, outside or in my home it would not behave. Worse than that, I was displaying photos at a function and it let me down embarrassingly. By the time I decided to get rid of it, they were selling on eBay for $75. I copied the text of an advert that sold for $75 and added the same generic photo. I should have got more than $26 for it but that's my experience of eBay. Anyway, it was a case of probably being lucky to get $26 so I sold the damned thing.
Roll on a year and i bought a $5 Android tablet that cost me $75 in Walmart. It worked but was very slow. It had such limited memory that only one or two apps could be installed. I struggled on with that tablet for about 6 months before upgrading. Eventually, rather than repeat the miserable experience of eBay, I simply gave the thing away.
My next tablet was a refurbished Nexus 7. That was pretty good. The screen was pretty good. In fact, I'd say the screen on the old Nook and the Nexus were both pretty good for displaying photos. The Nexus worked pretty well. In fact, very well. As time went on though, it became ever more sluggish. Eventually, after about a year the USB port worked loose and then the tablet began to behave erratically as though something had gone amiss. That situation became so bad that a factory reset was the only solution. Sadly, the factory reset turned the tablet into a non functional device that merely looked like a tablet. I gather Android tablets have a tendency to do this. Hunting around, it transpired that it was possible to reflash the tablet. Nobody was prepared to do this however and despite my having a pretty intensive computer background, the instructions provided online were opaque enough for reflashing to be well nigh impossible. In the end I found people who said they could do it but they were the usual geek type places. You've all probably encountered them - grubby, pimply, not entirely honest and who will claim to be able to do anything but when faced with reality find they can't back up their claims and quietly shuffle away or put up the shutters when they see you returning. Anyway, one was so keen on doing business they never got back to me and never answered their phone. The other wanted $50 to reflash a $100 tablet. There was a 3rd but honestly, by then I had tired of visiting shady Mike Hammer type places that looked fly-by-night.
Thus my next purchase was a $50 tablet from Walmart. That actually was pretty good. It even had a clamshell case with a little keyboard. The keyboard-screen angle was a little strange and the low quality LCD screen was viewable only from certain angles. That meant using it was a matter of physical contortions but it worked pretty well. That was an RCA tablet but more capable than the one I gave away. Three months after purchase, the usb socket broke rendering the tablet useless as it could not be charged. I knew the answer before I started... Nobody would want to fix it. Even though it was under warranty RCA wasn't particularly interested. Postage ($10) would have to be paid by myself despite the fact it was their lousy workmanship that failed. That rankled me. Then there was the thing that they would not replace my nice purple tablet with a nice new purple tablet but rather with a reconditioned black tablet - not even close to a satisfactory resolution!
Thus, being in the market for a tablet, I considered my options. I could have bought another cheap tablet and regarded tablets as being a $150-$300 a year habit. Just like a narcotics addict, I'd be hunting for my new tablet fix every few months after the last temporary fix wore out. Equally I could have just kicked my tablet habit. That would require me to resurrect my old MacBook which definitely needs a new battery. While resurrection is a plan for the future, I have my doubts about its value. I could spend $160 on a new battery and I'm sure after 9 years it would be best to replace the hard drive - probably best to do that with a flash hard drive at $300. That then puts me at $460 or $300 shy of a new champagne colored brand new MacBook. Somehow the new MacBook seems better value especially considering I cannot upgrade the operating system on mine past Snow Leopard. The only other option was to leap into iPads.
Years ago, I had a similar situation with phones. I bought cheap phone after cheap phone and never had my money's worth out of them. Then I went for a Blackberry and that was pretty good but died after just a year. Next, I moved to android phones and had a series of underwhelming phones that were ultimately unsatisfactory until I spent way more than I wanted to on my Nexus 4. That was actually a good phone until the USB socket died. Fortunately it had a cordless charging option which I've been using for the last year or so. I almost went for an iPhone at the time. My next phone probably will be an iPhone.
So, having decided that after blowing a nett total of $289 on android tablets that ended up in landfill, I'd try an iPad. I'd already paid the equivalent price of an iPad in failed Android devices. Looking around, prices were outrageous but there were cheaper options. The iPad Air was $249 at Walmart. That was a full sized tablet. The iPad mini 2 was $269 again at Walmart. As it makes no sense at all to have a big tablet when I can simply use a laptop, I went for the smaller tablet. It's just the right size to be portable and the right size to use at night. Needless to say, I got it cheaper than Walmart wanted - that's no great challenge!
Using the iPad I notice several things. Firstly, the blogger app is not available. Secondly, there are less apps to weed through. Thirdly, the Apple environment is different from Google's. As I'm a blogger user, this is a challenge. In use, the tablet runs very nicely. Battery life is excellent. Thus far I'm on 86% battery having had several breaks from writing and having done other things as well as writing over the past 3 hours. The screen is excellent. There's a security code I have to enter rather too frequently that was missing on android. On the whole though, it's more pluses than minuses.
Next, I have to get my iPad to talk to my camera, mass storage, my MacBook and to camera memory cards. That could be challenging but I'm always up for a challenge. I was right in dumping Windows and going Mac. I'm probably right in dumping android and going iOS.
A few days ago I ordered a secondhand Olympus E-PM1. That arrived pretty swiftly and of course that's when all the fun started. It arrived with no lens cap, no filter, no neck strap and no lens hood. Not even a filter to protect the front element.
It's a nifty little thing with a high ISO of 12,800 - way higher than I was expecting. I have been able to download images onto a Windows computer but as there is no raw processing software, I'm a little limited right now.
The good - it works really well. I have yet to take a night sky image that I really like but that's just a matter of perseverance. It's light and small. So small in fact that it's not going to look obvious.
The bad - it really eats up the battery. I suspect I might have to get a couple of extra batteries. Olympus Viewer 3 is not compatible with my Mac as my Mac is 9 years old. I had been thinking of getting a new battery for my Mac since it has been misbehaving and I believe that misbehaviour is due to the 9 year old battery being several thousand cycles past its prime.
My tablet is not going to be sent for warranty repair. I just don't feel it's worth sending my tablet off. Sure - for $10 I could get a replacement tablet but to be honest, it's not up to photography or anything remotely worthwhile. I suspect I'll probably end up using my RCA tablet for target practice in rather the manner of the now famous Death of a Virgin video I did some years ago with a less than satisfactory cellphone.
The question is now whether I should get a way better tablet or a battery for my Macbook. I'm definitely at a point where almost all the technology I have is 10 years old and beginning to show signs of age. Don't get me wrong - my Macbook works perfectly well when it's plugged in now that it has got past the silly stage with the screen going black every time I took a breath.
My aim with the new camera is to take pictures like the following sky picture but sharper in the corners. This lack of sharpness was caused by a less than stellar lens - the Tamron 17-35 f2.8. The corners were described by one critic as "softer than last night's mashed potatoes".
I had a little go with my Olympus and got a reasonable night sky photo. I need to work more on this. I'm finding when I overexpose, I get purple blotches but that's not particularly important. That's just a response of the sensor to chronic overexposure. The photo is nice and sharp though.
Interestingly, the tree leaves aren't that sharp. That could have been due to a breeze though. What I'm more interested by is the sky though. The stars are really showing well. I need to do more practice with this camera. I certainly need to be able to work with the RAW files.
This is a straight out of camera JPEG with the 14-42 lens set at 14mm. It's not too bad. I'll have to do more testing and work out how to get the best out of it. So far I have discovered at least one camera software bug. When I get the connecting cable - it uses a small USB connector that I do not possess so I had to order one from China - I'll be able to use the one Olympus app that did download - the one that allows me to update the camera and lens firmware automatically.
Things are definitely progressing. I might well have to upgrade my computer though. I certainly do not want to go over to Windows. I really detest the glitchy nature of the Windows operating system. Each version seems to be a giant step backward from the previous. I looked into a Chromebook but there's so little difference between Chromebooks and tablets there seems singularly little purpose in having one.
Regarding tablets, I found that just about every existing tablet has a micro USB charging port. That's what failed on my latest RCA tablet. I did have an RCA tablet before but that just didn't have enough memory to be remotely useful. My Nexus 7 was pretty good but the USB socket worked loose and though I could cope with it, the software onboard corrupted itself rendering the tablet non-functional. My Nexus 4 phone (purchased in April of 2013) developed a loose USB charging port too. I had to switch over to using a cordless charger. It charges as long as I hold the USB cord in place so I went cordless instead. My Nexus 7 didn't have that luxury.
I'm slowly trying to dig myself out of a technological black hole. I was dead right that a Mac would last far longer than a Windows laptop. I'd have been through between 3 and 5 Windows laptops in the time I have owned my Macbook and it still works. The alternative (which looks attractive) is a Windows laptop running Linux.
More interestingly, my night sky photo taken with the Tamron lens was taken at 1600ISO and f2.8 for 30 seconds on a Canon XT. My (overexposed) photo with my Olympus at 128000ISO and f5.6 and 40 seconds. That's -2 stops on aperture, +3 stops on ISO and +0.25 stops on exposure. So, it's just over a stop overexposed. I'll play with it a bit more.
Reading around, it seems that some photographers have used F4 with 800ISO to get great night sky images. I've read others that swear by 3200ISO and F2.8 with 30 seconds as being the only way to get a great photo. Given such a wide variance I have to assume other factors are at play than exposure. It might be that there's a wider variation of ISO sensitivity between cameras than there really should be. It could be the ISO standard isn't being adhered to all that strongly. It could be a problem with location - maybe my area of night sky isn't clear enough. I know a few miles away, the best I could achieve was this.
As I've said, there's plenty room for experimentation and practice. Since the daily portion of my current job ends for the summer in a few weeks, perhaps I can head off for a few days to a dark sky area to do some real experimentation.
In December I bought an RCA tablet. It was the 7 inch Voyager 2 Pro and was purchased in December from Walmart. No fault of Walmart what subsequently transpired.
The tablet came with a keyboard case. The keyboard was a delight to use. The problems with the tablet were minimal. It was fast, had sufficient storage and worked well. The keyboard was at a very strange angle. With the keyboard level, reading the screen was somewhat hard due to its narrow viewing angle. A few apps wouldn't work on it. The screen was low resolution and didn't have a great color gamut.
Then on the 20th of March, the USB charger port worked loose. It had been getting gradually sloppier and sloppier. It stopped charging the tablet totally. As it was under manufacturer warranty, I contacted RCA. They responded - eventually - with a series of very confusing emails. It transpired they wanted me to spend $10 to ship their incompetently constructed hardware back to them. They promised to ship me back - not a new purple tablet but a reconditioned black tablet. Basically they would be shipping me a tablet somebody else had rejected or had failed to keep their payments up on.
So, because RCA is incompetent in their construction, they want me to pay $10 to ship their junk back to them. No - no way. I am not throwing $10 of good money away after $50 wasted on trash.
That set me thinking. I spent $90 on a Nook Color. That let me down, embarrasingly, in public. At a time when they were going on eBay for $75 I listed it and got the princely sum of $26 for it. Way under the going rate. I took it just to get shot of the bloody thing.
Then I bought a $50 RCA 7 inch tablet with 8GB storage. That was so worthless I threw it in the closet and spent $100 on a reconditioned Nexus 7. That worked reasonably well but stopped working about 12 months later. I did the factory reset which was when I discovered the factory image was missing. It had bricked itself!
Looking around I found lots of people that allegedly fixed tablets. None would reflash my Nexus 7. I don't have a good enough internet connection out in the sticks to download the gigabytes of data needed to fix it. It went in the closet.
So, next was the latest RCA disaster area. By now I have spent $290 on tablets and regained $26. Basically I have spent the $269 of an iPad mini and had nothing but frustration.
It is looking increasingly as though Android tablets of whatever price are just throwaway devices. As soon as they go wrong, throw them away. It's not as simple as that though. All data stored on them can be restored after deletion. With villains so easily undeleting data, the only way to ensure data security is to destroy the device.
So, I could spend $10 more on my RCA junk AND run the risk of somebody stealing my data. I don't think I'll bite on that one!
Whre to go from here? Well, there are 3 options:
1. Fix my laptop (it probably needs a new battery) and say "stuff tablets".
2. Buy a new junk tablet and hope it will last longer.
3. Stretch my finances, say "stuff it" and buy an iPad mini.
From my experience, it seems the weak point on the Android junk is the USB charger. All of my tablets and my phone have USB charging ports. All the USB ports have failed. My phone is now charged solely via a cordless charging pad. My Nexus 7 USB was getting very loose. The latest RCA tablet has probably got broken solder connections. This is why Apple uses their Lightning connector.
The reason why we have crappy USB connectors is because the EU wanted a standard power connector to reduce electronic waste. It actually causes more electronic waste because when the flimsy USB connector fails, the device is thrown away. It's just too expensive to repair them.
This leaves me blogging with just my phone and a bluetooth keyboard. It's not a happy state of affairs. I am not happy! Given that my Nexus 4 Android phone is complaining of memory issues, I suspect it is not long for the road either.
Clearly I'm going to have to go forward from here. The solution might be an iPad mini and simply replace my phone when it dies - probably with a flip phone. Each time I buy a smartphone, I swear I will go back to a flip phone. Give that nobod ever calls me, that might well be the way forward. As far as the tablet, I'm not sure that I wouldn't be better just fixing my laptop and not bothering with a tabet. Perhaps just get a cheap Chromebook.
For a bit of fun, my local camera club announced a competition last month. The closing date for entries is tomorrow. That being said - I left it late to do my entries so late that I've not been able to give them the attention due.
For the first two weeks I just procrastinated. Well, what with an exhausting job and countless ailments caught off the urchins at work, I've not had a sweet and rosy time. Indeed, I have barely been able to attend to my main project of building my home.
Anyway, the competition was a combinations competition. The first photo was of a book, an envelope and a pen. I spiced it up a little! The second was a sign, a lamp and a phone - that was by far the easiest. The last was a box, a kitchen sink and a pair of shoes. There were of course many more items on the list including a squirrel. I could have shot a squirrel and put the corpse in a photo easily but I'd rather not kill for frivolous things.
Well, hope you enjoyed the photos. I've been rather preoccupied with various things of late. Of course, despite having had a tax refund, I've been a good little boy and have not actually spent any of it. I'd kinda like to get a secondhand mirrorless camera in order to take better night sky photos. I'd like to get my Macbook working again and I'd like to get a replacement for my two defunct tablets. That's all going to cost money however and money is in short supply and about to become incredibly short supply due to work ending in a little over a month.
