All posts by tomwiles

About tomwiles

Over-the-road truck driver and early podcaster. Began podcasting in late 2004.

Sharing Fatigue



socialmediafatigueFor some time, something has been going on with me I’ve been struggling to explain. My motivation to share things via social media has been waning.

When podcasting came along in 2004, and social media was still in its infancy, my motivation to share was strong. For several years, I was creating and posting new content at a furious rate.

However, in the past couple of years, the motivation I once felt has been on a sharp decline. I’ve been wondering, did something happen to cause me to stop caring? Was I running out of energy? What was the deal?

Lately, I’ve been toying with the theory that people have a fixed amount of sharing capacity, and once that is used up, the motivation drops off. To back this idea up, there have been plenty of people that had a large online presence that at some point simply seemed to run out of gas and ended up dropping off. This pattern seems to be common, whether it is with a large percentage of podcasters, or just people posting stuff on platforms such as Twitter or Facebook.

With me, motivation is everything. I find that if I am motivated to learn something and/or do something, I can bore right through to the center of whatever it is and make it happen. However, if I’m not motivated, I might as well forget it. I cannot force myself to do something that I lack natural interest in or motivation for.

So, this is the best answer I’ve come up with so far. I am currently tapped out when it comes to the motivation to create and share content online.

Will this lack of motivation to share continue? Would it return if I found myself in a different personal situation, such as when I retire? These are questions I currently have no answers for.


Bluetooth Versus Wired



Coloud The Snap Active EarbudsFor some months now, persistent rumors have been flying that the next iPhone will do away with the 3.5mm wired headset port. There have been plenty of people arguing both against and for this idea. Some people say that the demise of the wired headset port is inevitable.

As an over-the-road truck driver, I’ve been using Bluetooth devices for years. To be perfectly honest, the majority of Bluetooth headsets suck, regardless of price. They typically suffer from poor audio quality, especially those intended for phone calls.
I have yet to find a Bluetooth microphone that produces anything approaching acceptable quality for anything other than phone calls.

Bluetooth stereo is great for certain uses, such as in the car or for use with certain Bluetooth speakers intended for casual listening.

With this in mind, let’s examine how a smartphone would work without a 3.5mm wired jack for the way people use these devices today.

I see plenty of people using wired headsets, day in and day out. That tells me that, unlike the floppy drive, which was dropped because most software was being shipped on CD-ROM’s, the wired 3.5mm headphone jack is NOT obsolete. The 3.5mm headphone jack is NOT falling into disuse. There are still millions and millions of people using wired headsets with their smartphones on a constant basis. Wired headset use is NOT dropping off.

Modern smartphones are also extremely good high-definition video cameras. While they have built-in microphones, because of the 3.5mm headphone jack it is also possible to plug in a wired microphone. Wired microphones on traditional consumer camcorders have either been absent or an option for costlier prosumer models. Take the 3.5mm wired headphone jack away and the option of plugging in a superior wired microphone goes away with it.

If Apple takes the 3.5mm wired headphone jack away, it doesn’t matter to me, because I don’t have an iPhone and don’t want one. There will be plenty of remaining Android models to choose from that keep their senses.

In fact, there have already been Android smartphones available on the market that leave out the 3.5mm wired headphone jacks. The Chinese company LeEco released three jack-less phones in April of this year. Ever heard of them? Me neither, until I did a search. I don’t get the impression they are burning down the barn with popularity.

I make extensive use of Bluetooth as well as the 3.5mm jack on my phone. I will never buy a phone that doesn’t offer a 3.5mm jack any more than I would buy a phone that doesn’t offer Bluetooth or WiFi.


The New World of Machine Photo Recognition



Red DogBack in 2012 Google announced that its computers learned to recognize pictures of cats.

Technology doesn’t stand still. Today in 2016 Google’s computers can now recognize many other things besides disinterested feline faces. What comes from this machine recognition ability goes far beyond facial recognition.

About a year ago, I uploaded my entire library of photos and many of my videos to Google Photos as a supplemental photo backup system. I am using the free version, allowing Google to compress images as they see fit to save space. Over a period of time my thousands of scanned 35mm negatives finally uploaded. I install Google Photos on all of my mobile devices so any photos or videos I take will automatically be uploaded.

I was looking at Google Photos as just a convenient photo/video backup insurance plan. As it turns out, I’m getting a lot more than I bargained for. The ability to search my personal photo collection is nothing short of remarkable.

Who has the time to enter keywords into photo management systems? Like most other people with large digital photo collections, I’ve never bothered.

Machine learning now renders labor-intensive keyword entry unnecessary.
Though the current level of machine learning isn’t perfect, it is more than good enough to be extremely useful. It is now possible for me to quickly find specific photos or types of photos from my massive lifetime image library.

For example, I take search for “zoo” and photos of animals in cages plus various animals that can be found in zoos pops up. If I type in “rodeo” a massive number of rodeo photos will pop up, not surprising since I spent years photographing my youngest brother, who used to be a rodeo bull rider.

If I search for “dog” all manner of dog photos I’ve taken over the years show up.

If I search for “cup” all kinds of photos will show up, including photos of different types of cups, people holding cups, etc.

If I type in people’s names, chances are I will get photos of them. I’m not surprised by this since when I scanned in a number of old print photos I named the files with the names of the people in them.

Searching on adjectives such as “cold” or “hot” may or may not yield image results. Using search words such as “blue” or “green” can result in images that have blue or green objects in them, or they may have an overall blue or green cast to them, such as images taken without flash under different colors of florescent lights.

Over time the machine learning is bound to improve and the search results will become even better than they already are.


Losing The Signal



Losing The SignalWe often end up thinking we know the stories behind major and/or tumultuous events that happen during our own lifetimes. One of those revolves around the story of Blackberry. The rise of the iPhone is often thought of as the big downfall of Blackberry, the once wildly popular Canadian phone manufacturer from Waterloo, Ontario. Indeed, the iPhone was involved in Blackberry’s problems, but not in the way people commonly think it was.

I recently listened to the unabridged version of the Audible audiobook “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry” written by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff. The book tells the story of the seemingly overnight rise of the popularity of Blackberry devices, and recounts the often fascinating step by step details of its spectacular fall into relative smartphone obscurity.

For example, were you aware that Blackberry had two CEO’s? Not one, but two. This highly unusual two CEO arrangement may have served Blackberry well at certain times in the beginning, each CEO having his own respective strengths, but in the end it is generally agreed that this odd two CEO arrangement caused inevitable confusion and dangerous, very damaging paralysis as their personal relationship with each other dangerously deteriorated.

I take from this book that Blackberry happened to come along with the right thing at the right time – a device that could reliably and securely put email in the smartphone user’s pockets on early networks. Blackberry was driven to success by sheer market demand for their product, in spite of their missteps. Blackberry’s success was due in part to the fact that because of the way its system was constructed, it could reliably and securely handle email on highly bandwidth-starved networks. Its popularity started as a business device, and ended up with major consumer crossover demand.

A better idea came along – Steve Job’s iPhone. The iPhone essentially put an entire shrunken computer in the user’s pocket, and started a revolution that changed the face of the market itself. Even so, the iPhone didn’t inflict the most damage on Blackberry, but rather the iPhone concept.

The iPhone reached about 25% overall market penetration in developed markets when at the same time Blackberry was able to sell its less-expensive units into price-sensitive world markets that could not afford the high price of the iPhone. In essence, Blackberry was able to keep going even after the iPhone’s obvious success by replicating its early developed-market successes elsewhere in the world.

What inflicted the most damage on Blackberry sales was the incredible spreading dominance and popularity of Android, which could sell cheaper Android-based smartphones into Blackberry’s price-sensitive world markets, thus ultimately rendering Blackberry irrelevant.

Along the way, Blackberry made a couple of serious, self-inflicted missteps with Verizon that it never recovered from. Blackberry, which had been known at one time for rock-solid hardware, realizing it was losing market share, foolishly started selling faulty products into the marketplace that clearly weren’t fully developed and were highly unreliable.

If you enjoy these kinds of non-fiction books that tell behind-the-scenes stories of things that happened in your lifetime, I highly recommend you give this book a try.


An Unplanned Upgrade



Note 5A few weeks ago my trusty Samsung Galaxy Note 4 started acting weird, randomly rebooting at inopportune times. To make a long story short, on the second trip to a Sprint store the technicians determined that it was a hardware problem.

Since Sprint has no more Note 4 units available for replacements, their only alternative was to upgrade me to a Note 5. Ever since the Note 5 was announced, I didn’t want it. The Note 5 has no removable battery, and no Micro SD card slot. My plan was to keep the Note 4 and skip to the generation after the Note 5 that should be released sometime towards the fall of this year.

The free upgrade to the Note 5 does not affect the plan I’m on – I can still upgrade to the new Note (6 or 7, depending on what Samsung decides to call it) when it comes out. I was stuck, so I took the free upgrade.

Even though I was somewhat prejudiced against the Note 5, I have to say I’ve been quite impressed with it. The upgrade in overall performance and the snappy feeling of the device is tremendous. The other thing I’ve been amazed with is excellent battery life, which happens in spite of the improved performance over the Note 4.

The overall size of the Note 5 is physically smaller than its predecessor, yet it retains the 5.7” inch screen size. Samsung was able to achieve this by shrinking the bezels even further, particularly on the sides.

For some time now I’ve been using my phones to scan documents for work. I started doing this with a Galaxy S3. The process was faster with the Note 4. It flies with the Note 5.
My bank recently sent me a new chipped debit card, so I had to go through the process of logging in to various services to update my information. To my surprise, I was able to efficiently do all of this updating via the Note 5, mostly due to its speed and responsiveness.

Are there things a mobile device can’t do? Of course. For one thing, a 5.7” inch screen is too small for many tasks. Could I type out an article or record and upload a podcast on the Note 5? Yes, but the mobile form factor just doesn’t work well for these sorts of tasks – they cry out for a real computer in order to be carried out quickly and efficiently.

Smartphones have matured, yet there remains room for improvement. In my opinion, improved performance and improved battery life are the two biggest things that will induce me to consider upgrading to a new phone. Improved camera performance is always a nice thing to have, but camera performance alone won’t induce me to pull the upgrade trigger.

Styling and silly emotional gimmicks have diminishing appeal in a mature market.


Keep The Note 4?



Motorola Bag PhoneSince the mass adoption of the cell phone happened starting in the 1990’s, like everyone else I’ve gone through a long succession of cell phones. My very first cell phone was a Motorola bag phone. Remember those? Analog cell phones could sound surprisingly good. Of course, in fringe reception areas, the sound quality would often become quite crackly and was prone to dropped calls. Those bag phones could output up to three watts of power, so the reception could be decent depending on the area it was operating in.

The next phone I had was an early analog candy bar style phone with a nickel cadmium battery. It had a terrible standby time of only about 30 minutes. Reception was poor in part because output wattage was cut back to about ½ a watt.

After that, the next one was a more modern Nokia candy bar style phone with better battery life and was both digital and analog. Unfortunately, the digital sound in those days was pretty bad, and the analog reception suffered from vastly diminished ½ watt of power.

The next one was an updated version of the Nokia candy bar phone. It offered somewhat better performance, and a few more bells and whistles.

Cell phone number five was a folding LG camera phone that included a color LCD and was my first phone with an integrated 640 x 480 camera. The phone also had a USB port. I was able to figure out how to plug the phone into a computer and go through a very clunky process of transferring the photos from the phone’s built-in memory to the computer’s hard drive, a process that required some hacky third party software I downloaded from the Internet. Even after I replaced this phone I continued to use it for several years as an alarm clock, a function that worked quite well.

Next came my first smart phone. It was a Windows Mobile phone from HTC with a 3.5” pressure sensitive touchscreen with WiFi and 3G EVDO. It included a storable stylus and a slide-out keyboard, features I found of little practical use.

My second smartphone was another HTC phone running Windows Mobile, this time without the slide-out keyboard. It still had a 3.5” pressure-sensitive touchscreen, WiFi and 3G EVDO.

Smartphone number three was my first Android device, a Sprint Evo also manufactured by HTC. The HTC Evo  included a 4.3 inch capacitive touchscreen and the 8 megapixel rear camera was able to record 720p 30fps video, though the video sound quality suffered compared with newer devices. The HTC Evo’s biggest problem was that it had awful battery life.

Smartphone number four was a Samsung Galaxy S3. It had a 4.8 inch touchscreen and was a better performer than the Evo while offering somewhat better battery life.

Smartphone number five was a Samsung Galaxy Note 3. The Note 3 had a 5.7” 1080p touchscreen and offered great battery life. The Note 3 can record 4k video. The Note 3 has great stereo video sound. Many Note 3’s remain in use today.

The next, and my current smartphone is a Samsung Galaxy Note 4. I really like the Note 4. It has great battery life, fantastic performance and a Quad HD 5.7” touchscreen.

With cell phone number eleven, I find myself in a bit of a quandary regarding where do I go from the Note 4? Three of the Note 4 features I find extremely important, besides the 5.7” screen size, are the integrated Micro SD Card slot, the ability to do fast charging, and the user replaceable battery.

The fast charging feature is game-changing. If I have forgotten to plug the phone in or I find the battery is low, I can plug the phone in and quickly goose the battery. The Note 4 will charge from zero up to fifty percent in only thirty minutes which is incredibly handy. Even a quick 10 or 15 minute charge can be extremely useful in pushing the battery percentage back up to a higher level.

I recently experienced a suddenly failing battery in my Note 4. I was able to buy a high-quality replacement battery via Amazon and I’m back in business. If I had a phone such as the Note 5 with a non-user-replaceable battery, I would be forced to make an inconvenient trip to my phone provider.

I am inclined to simply keep the Note 4 that I have indefinitely. After all, it has everything that I demand. There’s nothing to be gained by switching to the Note 5 or later, and the user-replaceable battery to be lost.


Celluon at 2016 CES



CelluonTodd Cochrane talks to Ethan from Celluon about the PicoBit laser pico projector. The PicoBit is a pico projector shaped like a smartphone that uses a built-in version of the Android operating system. It has 8 gigabytes of built-in memory and a Micro SD card slot for extra media file storage.

Since the unit runs on a laser light engine, there is no need to focus, and therefore no focus ring control. Depending on the darkness of the room, the unit is capable of projecting up to a 150″ inch image. It has a standard tripod mount on the bottom of the unit.

They are planning an April release date with pricing at $379.

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