An ordinary life in an extra-ordinary place
Archive for August, 2010
If you are a reader of the comments on this organ, you will have noticed regular remarks by “genuinej”. It is interesting that, contrary to the standard laws of the universe, he has chosen a name that does not start with a capital letter; because his special interests are drinking, spelling, grammar and more drinking, and he is quick to point out what he believes to be errors; especially after six pints.
He obviously relishes his visits to Pattaya Days, maybe because there is so much to snipe at; and after a recent lapse in my posting frequency, he churlishly suggested that the site be renamed “Pattaya Somedays”.
Just another genuinej gibe and I forgot all about it. After all, the man is a model of physical perfection with a razor intellect, ready wit and a disarming smile. And he brings me chocolate eggs.
But Billy, another regular commenter, decided to embark upon some investigative journalism; and came up with this:
Billy also maintains a blog (in fact his blog is responsible for this one; but that is another story and I have already told it). Like me he knows how hard it can be to write something every day. Like me, he also used to call himself an accountant in his previous life. Unlike me, he also has the skills to knock out a graph (I never got my brain around Excel, beyond the ability to sum a column).
So thank you Billy. Proof, if any were needed, and it wasn’t, that Pattaya Days is, on average, a daily offering. In fact, with some simple maths (which is all I am capable of), You can take the total number of posts to date (1006) and compare them to the number of days that this site has been running (865), and decide that this site should be called Pattaya 1.1607 Days. But then tomorrow I would have to call it something else, so maybe I will stick with the current version.
Fact is, there are many days when there is bugger all to write about. If I had to summarise my life in one word, it would be “mundane”. Not that I am complaining, I like mundane. But it can be hard to write enthusiastically about such an existence.
Today has been fairly typical. Woke late to discover she who must be obeyed had already risen and was busily engaged in farming and other nonsenses on Facebook. Reached out for my iPad and spent half an hour in bed reading mails, twitter and news. Visited on occasion by the cats who like to come and say good morning by jumping on my head. Eventually rise and make for the toilet to perform the usual, whilst trying to crack level 5-3 of Angry Birds. Fail to crack level 5-3, but achieve primary purpose of toilet visit and proceed to shower. Shave, dress (T-shirt and underpants, everything else is superfluous), prepare breakfast and make coffee. Mess around on the computer until mid-day. Think about what I will do for the rest of the day. Probably Xbox. Decide to write this. The end.
A five day road trip in Thailand may not be considered as a sufficiently robust test of the iPad as a photographer’s assistant; but it’s the best I can do unless someone is prepared to sponsor a six week tour of Iceland.
What you need:
1. A camera
2. An iPad
3. An iPad camera connection kit
The latter is a somewhat contentious add-on for the iPad. Some feel that a slot to read cards should be built into the device. I can see that this would require additional internal space, weaken the overall structure, and provide a second hole to fill up with dust. If I didn’t intend to use it, I would rather my iPad didn’t have it. So I am quite happy with the camera connection kit, I just think it should come free with the iPad.
What you get in the camera connection kit are two devices that plug into the iPad. One accepts the SD memory card found in most smaller cameras. The other one contains a USB port, into which you an plug a card reader for non-SD cards; such as the CF card I use in my Canon 1D. This device will also accept some other USB devices, including keyboards.
As I was only taking my GF1 on the trip, I only needed the SD card reader, and of course the gentleman’s travelling companion.
The iPad as a back-up device
So, off we went and on the first day I snapped a couple of hundred photos. Take the card out of the camera, stick it into the device and plug it into the iPad. The photo application automatically opens with a new tab marked “camera”, and thumbnails of your photos are displayed. You can’t review the photos at more than thumbnail size at this point. Touch “Import all” and all the photos on the card will be imported to your iPad.
If you don’t do anything else photographically with the iPad, backing up your photos is a significant benefit. Here you are, on your six week tour of Iceland, paid for by the grateful readers of Pattayadays, and you are capturing staggeringly beautiful images on your tiny SD card. What if you lose the card? What if it fails (they do, occasionally)? A photographer only feels comfortable when his or her photos are backed up somewhere. So, stick them on the iPad and now you have a copy. Just don’t lose the iPad and the SD card.
Unfortunately, I had pretty much filled my 16GB iPad with entertainment options in case I was stuck alone while she who must be obeyed dealt with family business (something that never happened); so I did not have enough space to back-up everything. Instead I selected the photos I wanted to use with my blog and imported those.
You will notice that each of my photos has “RAW+JPG” noted on it. This is recognising that I have set my camera to produce both RAW and JPG images from a single shot (if you have no idea what I am on about, may I recommend page 40 onwards of the dubious Pattaya Days Starter Guide to Photography?). The good news is that the iPad is quite happy to interpret and display RAW images from most cameras. The bad news is that, if you import an image that has been captured in both RAW and JPG, you can only view and work with the JPG image. So if you chose to shoot the JPG in black and white, that is what you are stuck with in the iPad, no way to get to the colour image in RAW.
So now you have your imported images on the iPad; and it’s great to be able to browse through your photos at the end of a day of shooting; photos do look very good on the device. They reside in albums called “Last import” and “All imported”, and now would be a good time to break them out into albums called “The belching volcano” and “The rutting Icelandic ponies”; but you can’t. The Photos application is extremely limited in this regard. It will kick off a fine slideshow, but there is very little you can do to select what it includes in the show. Naturally, “there’s an app for that” (Photo-sort), but Photos needs beefing up to do more. Maybe they will give us iPhoto for the iPad at some point.
Home again after an excellent tour of Iceland, and time to put all those photos onto your computer. You could work through the fifteen memory cards you filled; but a quicker solution would be to just plug in your iPad and load from there. Lightroom treats the iPad the same as a memory card, and transfers are quick.
Great! Your 3,000 photos were safely backed-up on your iPad during your trip, and have now been transferred to your computer for further processing. Time to clear them off your iPad. So all you need to do is….oh dear.
The Photos application provides no means to mass delete your imported photos. You can view an individual photo and delete it; but you won’t want to do that 3,000 times. A very slightly quicker method is to select the sharing button on the top right of an album.
And then touch each photo you want to delete. Still a load of work.
If you use iPhoto, this is not a problem because you can choose to delete the photos from the iPad after the import. This is not an option for Lightroom. Fortunately, for Mac users, there is an alternative. Open the Image Capture application on your Mac, highlight the photos in your iPad, and click Delete. (For Windows users, I have no idea. Buy a Windows tablet instead perhaps. That was a joke).
Still, not good enough Mr. Jobs; we need an option to mass delete imported photos on the iPad please.
So, with some workarounds, the iPad does the job as a back-up storage device. I would like to be able to look at my RAW and JPG files separately, would like to be able to organise my photos so I can show them off with slideshows while on the road, and it should be a whole lot easier to mass delete on the iPad. Apart from that, I think I have an excellent justification to purchase a 64GB iPad when the next version comes around.
The iPad as a photo-related blogging tool
I wanted to post to Pattaya Days while I was away, and I wanted to see how easy it was on the iPad. Let’s deal with the photo aspect first.
First thing was to prepare a photo for including in the blog. In some cases, the original photo was OK, but in other cases I wanted to do a bit of cropping or exposure tweaking. Once again the Photos application falls short by offering zero processing tools. But once again “there’s an app for that”, in fact there are many offerings in the app store to help with processing your photos. Photogene, Filterstorm and PhotoPal all offer some surprisingly sophisticated tools. I tended to use PhotoPal, which is a simple app for making simple changes. Photo tweaking complete, time to move it to the web.
As you may be aware, I keep my photos on Flickr. One of the many ways you can get your photos into Flickr is to email them to a unique address that drops them into your photo collection, so that is what I did. Photogene, Filterstorm, PhotoPal and the iPad Photos app, all include an option to mail a photo; so it was an easy process. Mailed photos are automatically reduced in size to make them appropriate for mailing, but the image is still more than large enough to use on Pattaya Days. If you feel the need to mail a full-size photo, then you can always copy the original and paste it into a mail. If you are so inclined, the photo apps can also post your photo to Facebook or Twitter.
Next step was to write the words and, as I wasn’t always online, I used Pages. Once online I went to Flickr to extract the photo URLs and pasted them into Pages. Then I copied the complete post and pasted it into WordPress. Initially I used the WordPress app; but that contains a nasty bug which results in a new post over-writing an old post; such that the rather amusing story of she who must be obeyed searching for a statue on a local island is now lost forever. So I just used WordPress via the browser. Preparing blog posts on the iPad was easy.
My five day test has confirmed to me that the iPad works as a photo backup device, as a medium for reviewing and enjoying the shots you have taken, and for sharing selected photos. More work required on the Photos application, but OS4 for the iPad is coming soon and maybe there will be a nice surprise.
However, I do feel that my test was compromised by being too brief; such that a six week tour of Iceland will be required. Please send money.
Any street in Thailand is a mess of telephone and electricity wires. It’s a mystery to me how they keep it all working (most of the time).
The wires are a necessary evil of life, but they do interfere if you want to parade large candles. The solution is men with long sticks.
The red banner on the front of this candle indicated it had won something in the competition.
Along with the candles, there was music and there were dancing girls.
All photos: Panasonic GF1
My iPhone bores me.
Never thought I would say that. When I first got my hands on one, it was a delight. Neat web browsing, e-mail, and loads of nifty games to amuse me when I needed to be amused. And it served me well, until the iPad arrived. Then everything was possible in a larger scale, and lounging around with a big screen was always preferable to fiddling with a small screen.
The iPhone still serves when I am out and about; but all I use it for nowadays is web, mail and the argument-saving potential of the satnav and Google maps; and I could get all that on a cheaper Android phone. And on an Android phone I could create a wifi hot-spot and connect my iPad to the web in the middle of a field. But Apple doesn’t want me to do that.
The world of Apple mobile devices is a walled garden. You can only install the applications that Apple allows into their App store. The upside of this is that you know that the apps you download will work, and because this approach secures revenue for developers, there is a huge choice. The downside is that Apple may not want to let you do all the things you want to do. On balance, for me, the Apple walled garden was full of enough goodies to make me happy and I had no need to knock down the wall. Until I really wanted to increase the usefulness of my phone and turn it into a wifi hot-spot.
Cracking open an Apple device to make it available for applications outside of the Apple store is known as jailbreaking. I had jailbroken (probably not a word) my first iPhone and it was something of a challenge. You had to get your hands on the latest Apple firmware, download a cracking program, and then run it against the firmware package. This produced a revised firmware file, and all you had to do then was get it into your iPhone. Then came the clever bit; you had to put your phone into DFU mode. DFU is Device Firmware Update, although it should really be Doesn’t Fucking Understand; because it was a real pain to put the iPhone into DFU mode. You had to press combinations of buttons at precise time intervals; and if you got the combination or timing wrong, then you had to start all over again. The whole process took at least an hour and it was invariably stressful. Furthermore. not that it worried me, there were concerns that it was not legal.
In the last week, the jailbreaking world has changed. Firstly, the FCC in America have declared that jailbreaking is legal; so there is now no likelihood of being extradited to Guantanamo Bay for cracking open your phone. Secondly, a very smart group of hackers has produced a wonderfully simple jailbreaking tool. Here are the instructions:
1. Go to www.jailbreakme.com on your iPhone (Touch, Ipad)
2. Slide to jailbreak
3. Wait about 3 minutes while it works.
4. Done!
Of course literally millions of people want to use this, so during the last couple of days it has been difficult to get a response from their servers. But I finally managed it last night; and it worked immediately on she who must be obeyed’s phone this morning.
Then it was off to install MyWi, which is rather costly at $20, but means that my phone can now operate as a wifi hot-spot and I no longer have a need for a 3G iPad and a separate sim card.
Best of all is the opportunity for mischief. Walk into any establishment, change the hot-spot name to something appropriate, and then wait for customers to start asking to use it. I have this ready for the next time I am in Starbucks:
The main candle festival procession was scheduled for Sunday morning; but there was something planned for the Saturday evening so we decided to check it out.
Had to leave early in order to find somewhere to park, then a long walk; but eventually we were jammed against a barrier opposite the VIP stand. It was going to be one hour wait, and then we discovered that it would be a two hour wait. Then it was delayed by a further 30 minutes; by which time my legs and back were aching and I was feeling pretty pissed off and wishing I was somewhere else. Then it started to rain.
Up with the umbrella and we took it in turns to hold it while the other took photos. I might as well not have bothered with the photo bit. The GF1 has an on-board flash, OK for close-up shots but no good for longer distances. She who must be obeyed has an external flash for her Olympus; but the best I could do was strap on the monster flash from my Canon. Plenty of power, but no communication with the camera; so everything had to be set manually and the usual result was disaster. One shot that I really liked, even though it was the result of substantial under-exposure.
Other than that, almost nothing of note.
One hour of dancing in the drizzle with the occasional passing candle, and then it was over. Soggy walk back to the truck and then a fight back through the traffic to our room where a hot shower and a cold beer were required; followed by a mass delete of most of the photos.
Note to self: need flash for GF1.
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