Beacon Rainbow

I was visiting someone in Beacon Hospital and took a walk over to a nearby shopping market. On the way while I was sheltering from a shower a rainbow in between the apartment blocks so it was a good opportunity to play with hipstamatic on the iPhone4. It's becoming a firm favorite app for me.

Newfoundland Nets

It has been a busy few weeks since I got back from Newfoundland but I've finally managed to go through the last of the photos from the vacation and especially the ones from Trinity. I love that little town, have to go back there again next year. This photo of some fishing nets left on the dock of an old abandoned shipyard. Trinity proper is almost a little too perfect, all nicely preserved for the tourism market so it was nice to find this shipyard and take some photos there.

iPhone 4

As I mentioned already I picked up an iPhone 4 and I have to say I'm quite impressed. OK so the OS is identical to the one on my 3Gs but the redesigned case is excellent. Not that I didn't like the old 3Gs case but it was plastic and that did tell after a while. The new glass and metal of the iPhone 4 is nice and sturdy. The few buttons on the device have a more solid click to them and remember my 3GS was only a month old so it's not like its buttons had worn. The only structural problem I had with the original case design was a crack on my older 3G where the USB connector plugs in. The plastic developed a hairline crack about a centimeter long, it never grew or got worse but it was there and it did make the case feel cheaper. The new connector is surrounded by metal so hopefully that wont happen again. The home button on the 3G had started to go as well, it didn't always click properly. I suspect some dirt or fluff was wedged under there but I couldnt get it out. I'll have to wait and see if the 4 develops a similar problem in a year or so but with the home button being so important for multi-tasking I hope Apple took special care with the design this time.

The retina display is, well, it's an iPhone display. Sure, it's nicer and smoother, less pixelated when I hold it up to my eye but it is solving a problem I didn't know I had with a solution I cant really notice. It's nice to see Apple moving the technology along but I wouldn't have bought a new phone just for that.

The camera is a big improvement, especially for video. Pictures and video are cleaner and more usable. It might be the best camera phone around but I wont be taking my SLR out of it's bag, or even my point and click. The point and click might get used less but I still like having the extra controls and shutter button. The iPhone camera flash might make a useful torch when I drop my keys but I have yet to use it with a photo so I don't know how well it performs as a camera flash.

All in all I'm happy but my fiancée is happier because she got the 1 month old 3GS to replace her first gen iPhone.

Peoples Photography

Had a great weekend at Peoples Photography 2010. I sold 16 prints, sold them pretty cheap but I covered all my costs for the event and brought home everything I didn't sell. Photos of Dublin landmarks were the clear favourites and sold to the tourist market.

While there I had some quiet moments and was able to play with the camera on my iPhone 3GS (which has just been replaced with an iPhone 4 but thats another post) and I downloaded the Hipstamatic app. It wouldn't be my preferred way to take photographs but for the price it's a cool way to turn dull iPhone pictures into interesting snaps.

NCT results

Darran over at A Langers Blog put up a graph to show the pass and fail rates of cars taking the National Car Test (NCT) in Ireland. The percentages are freely available online but it was only when I saw them in the graph that I realised something smells funny about the NCT.

The goal of the NCT was to remove unsafe cars from the road and as part of this they have introduced more and more things that cars can fail on and pulled more cars into the NCT net, yet the percentages for pass and fail stay the same.

Year	Pass First time	Pass Retest
2010	51.9% (483.466)	90.3% (396,130)
2009	51.5% (444,935)	90.8% (367,404)
2008	51.9% (433,677)	90.8% (349,225)
2007	51.8% (355,708)	90.8% (285,556)

The level of defects in cars seems to stay stunningly consistent? This leads me to wonder, could the NCT be working off a quota system for passes and fails or is the published data just wrong?

This plane is crashing, no its not

Having recently returned from Newfoundland and the numerous work flights over the last year I can well imagine the panic that would have take place when the automated crash warning played on a British Airways flight from London to Hong Kong.

Mistakes do happen so I dont really blame British Airways but I do wonder why planes need an automated "we are about to crash into the sea" warning. Does it happen so often they decided it would be less work to hire a voice actor put them in a recording studio and then copy the warning onto all the planes. If I'm about to die I'd rather have a member of the crew tell me than some recording. Then again if I'm about to die then they are probably about to die as well so the plane is probably on full auto and they are hitting the drinks trolley. I wonder if Ryanair has a recording and does it try to sell you something?

Peoples Photography 2010

I’m almost ready for Peoples Photography 2010. Good thing too considering it’s on this weekend. The last batch of prints arrived back from the printers today and over the weekend I settled on the technique I will use to hang the photos. I decided to go with a hopefully quicker approach, pre-hanging the mounted photos on black “webbing”. Then I can fold up the display the night before and each morning just unfold it, hang it on the railings and secure the bottom tightly. I’ve seen similar work well for other exhibitors on other years so fingers crossed it works for me.

Tonight the mounting process starts and while time consuming is at least achievable with effort. Then I will select the final 20 to display and the backups to keep in the box in case I get bored of what I have on display. Ok, so maybe I’m not as ready as I could have been if I’d started earlier but I’ll get there before Saturday, fingers crossed.

Mrs Fahey and Son Tom

This photo is from Marlfield church and graveyard outside Clonmel. It’s my old family graveyard but has become very overgrown lately with only a few families maintaining their plots while the older parts of the graveyard are reclaimed by nature. Thats a shame since lots of effort went into cleaning up and restoring the place 20 years ago.

This cross jumps out because someone is making small efforts to maintain the area around it, yet there is very little information about the people whose grave this marks. All it lists is Mrs Fahey & Son Tom. There is no date visible, no ages, not even a first name for Mrs Fahey. The fact that the text is still so clear and the wooden cross has not decayed indicates it’s relatively recent compared to the rest of the graveyard.

Flower in the Tracks

As I mentioned in an earlier post I was recently lucky enough to win an iPhone 3GS. Just in time to replace my old 3G which was dying under the demands of the new iOS 4 I had foolishly upgraded to. One of the things I did not like about the 3G was the camera but the 3GS has a much improved 3 megapixels, auto focus and a touch focus screen.

One day last week while walking to the Luas tram home I spotted this flower head dropped in the tram lines and it seemed like the most interesting thing around to try and photograph with the new iPhone. I didn't put the image on my computer. I downloaded some photo apps on the iPhone and just used those to tweak the picture. It's still hard to judge the image on a small screen but I was pretty pleased with the result and how easy it all was. It's not perfect but it's a camera phone. so what else could I expect.

The unfortunate thing is the camera in the 3GS is so much better than the 3G I now really want the iPhone 4 with its 5 megapixel camera :-)

iPhone 3GS

I recently won an iPhone 3GS, pretty lucky because I'd made the mistake of upgrading my iPhone 3G to the new iOS4 and while it worked it was woefully slow and suffered frequent app crashes. I had decided to keep it for a few weeks and then get the iPhone 4 when it's released in Ireland (rumour is 23rd July) . I could have gone through the process to downgrade the phone to the old OS but I liked the features such as folders.

On the other hand the iPhone 3GS with iOS4, after 1 day of use, is a huge leap forward. It was free, which is always a big bonus. It is much faster, I mean MUCH faster than the 3G. Even without iOS4 my 3G didn't run this fast. The extra processor and memory are obviously key. Also apparent now is that apps might be written to run on the iPhone 3G but they are written to run properly on the newest phone. Apps that ran painfully slowly now run smoothly and load quickly. So far no apps have crashed but it's early days. With the iOS4 it's good enough to make me consider waiting a while before using my upgrade to buy an iPhone 4.

The camera is a major improvement. I rarely used the camera on my 3G. It produced poor, low quality out of focus pictures that were just about suitable for twitpic but not much else. The new camera performs much better. I still have to use it in anger but the touch focus and image quality on the screen are greatly improved. I still wont be selling any of the photos from it at Peoples Photography but I can now use it as a camera when I'm out with friends.

However it's not all rosy in the 3GS garden, there are a few issues that would make me pause and glad I didnt have to spend my own money.

First signal strength seems to be reduced. Not by much but in my current office where I can just get Edge it's reduced enough to make the difference between a connection and No Service. In places where I used to get 1 bar most of the time, I now get No Service consistently. Same at home. The 3G used to hold a poor connection on the bedside locker, the 3GS just goes to No Service and stays there until I move it a few feet closer to the door. Maybe that's Apples "reported signal strength" software bug but the 3G running iOS4 seemed to cope better with poor signals so I suspect its a hardware change. It makes be worried that the new iPhone4 with it's more publicised reception issues might not perform at all in my environment.

Second issue is with the build quality. Strange for a device that is using the same body case so it should feel the same but something about it feels more plastic and the edges around the silver surround feel sharper like they almost meet perfectly, but not quite. Maybe I'd broken in my old 3G and smoothed off the edges but I don't remember ever running my finger along the edges of the silver and thinking it was kinda sharp. The edges make it feel more plastic. Perhaps I'm just working on a phone from an end of life batch where Apple were switching focus to the iPhone 4 but somehow this one feels strange. I wont be sending it back or anything daft like that but it's just a surprise from Apple.

Third, not a phone specific problem but an iOS4 problem. I'm not overly keen on the way multitasking works. Apps dont really close, they go into the background and in some case continue to run, in others they just seem to sit there. I got used to closing apps and having them close fully. Now they go into the background and I dont need them there. I realise I'll get used to the new way of closing apps but perhaps all Apple need to do is allow the user to specify which apps are backgrounded and which are just closed. Maybe there is a new setting I'm missing but a switch in the settings page for Apps would do the trick.

But those problems are minor and really I'm just nit picking. The phone with the new iOS4 together are a huge improvement. I'd recommend any 3GS user to upgrade to iOS4 while warning any 3G users not to upgrade without giving it serious consideration. That said I wouldnt advise anyone to buy a 3GS now, certainly not with their own money. The 4 is coming out in Ireland in a few weeks so wait for that. A cheap 3GS may seem like a bargain right now but I can see the same performance issues I had with the 3G hitting the 3GS as developers write new apps to use the improves CPU, memory and camera of the 4. You will still be able to run those applications but you'll definately be a second class citizen in the app world.