Mobile

I noticed that when I park above ground in a zone with good mobile coverage the car sends its data to the Leapmotor app when parked. If I park in a basement where there is no cell service and when I park on the surface where there is no cell service then the car thinks that I am still driving until I park where it has network coverage.

It can be extraordinarily frustrating when you live in an apartment and park the car underground to charge. Not only does the app say that the car is “driving” rather than parked and locked, but it doesn’t log charging events. The result is that unless you go out of your way to charge where there is cell service car apps are just decorative, with no value or use.

Yet again I see an article about children being banned from using mobile phones before they are thirteen years of age and once again I find myself asking, “but what if parents had the required digital literacy to help children and teens?” and “What if teachers had that digital literacy too?” Ireland has yet, again said that it would ban children younger from 13 from using smart phones. In my eyes this is a mistake because it fails to address the technological illiteracy of their parents, and children, handicapping them for life in the 21st century.

Photosync is a photo uploading app that allows you to upload to various devices and cloud solutions with ease. Photo Uploader for Photoprism is a specialist app for Photoprism. The reason for which I bring up both of these apps is that they allow you to sync to photoprism.

When I was testing uploads with Photosync I noticed that I can upload to the Photoprism library directly but that it creates a “current_phone” folder, and adds photos within this folder. Since my originals folder is meant to be clean and chronological this breaks the flow I want.

It is when you roam with your phone across Europe that you realise how much data an iPhone gets through. In the space of a week I burned through almost 3 gigabytes and 7 more gigabytes before controlling which apps could use data. At the same time I reset the data counters and looked at the option of using dual esims at once.

With the iPhone it is possible to have one sim active for your normal phone use, and a second sim that can be used for data while roaming. In so doing you save money as we will explore shorty.

Within the last two weeks children have headed back to schools. As a consequence of this schools, towns, villages, and ‘states’ are banning mobile phones for children and teenagers. In theory this is a fantastic, and simple solution. In practice this is failing society.

Plenty of adults, from my generation, and younger, are media illiterate. They use computers for work, and used them for uni and for school, but they didn’t use them for pleasure. The result is that instead of learning, by trial and error, as technology progresses they remain ignorant, until a niche has become mature.

This morning the transition from Swisscom to Galaxus was completed. I moved from Swisscom to Galaxus because it’s up to 50 CHF cheaper. Whereas I was paying about 70 CHF with Swisscom I now pay 19 CHF per month when I am within Switzerland, and I can pay 39 CHF per month when roaming in Europe. The one issue with this is that if I switch to roaming then it lasts for two months, not one before I can switch back.

There is a chance that I have had the same Swisscom contract since 2003 or 2007 non-stop. In that time I have been very happy with network coverage. What I am less happy with is the price. At seventy or more francs for unlimited data it becomes very expensive on a yearly basis. Recently I noticed that I could get “unlimited data” for nineteen francs per month within Switzerland so I took a subscription in parallel to run some tests.

Recently I switched from an Iphone SE from 2020 for a Fairphone 4 and the migration has been easy, except for two apps. Whatsapp and Signal. With Android it’s easy. You backup to Google Drive and you can slide between Android devices with ease. With iOS the backup is in iCloud so sliding between devices should, in theory, be easy to, but I don’t remember finding it that much fun. If it wasn’t for this apps we could slide from Android to iOS and back without a second thought.

During the World XR Forum I had to carry six or more Oculus Quest devices from a car to the conference centre and then help with setting up at least one of these devices. At first I thought it was like most VR headsets where the phone is the display.

In reality, the Oculus Quest is a self-contained VR headset driven via an app from the mobile phone. Once the Oculus quest and the mobile phone are paired you can play with content and use it. This is great because it no longer requires a high spec computer, it has no cables and best of all it’s affordable. At 400-500 CHF it’s affordable within most geek budgets.

You remember the old saying. The best camera is the one that you have with you. Today the same can be said about “edit suites” that you carry in your trousers or jacket pocket. I’m speaking of edit suites that work with your iphone or ipad. Lumafusion is one such example. 

It differs from other mobile editing solutions in a number of key ways. The first is that it allows you to edit on a timeline with three video sources at once This means that you have more control. It allows you to split audio which allows you to overlap sound from one clip to another and provide a better finish.