Let's Talk Tech
There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all “nice microphone“. There are different types of mics for different types of recording jobs. If you’re looking at podcasting, spoken word, interviews, or voice over recording, here’s a quick primer on some of the microphones you might want to consider!
Continue reading ““USB” is NOT a Type of Microphone: A Guide for Podcasting and Home Recording”
Channeling my inner Bob Ross, to answer some recent questions I’ve gotten on how I edit photos before sharing them on Instagram. Our cameras can deliver some terrific shots, so here’ how I tweak them before uploading to a service which cuts all our shots into squares, and HEAVILY compresses the image quality!
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Samsung abandoned memory cards on the Galaxy S6, so while it has a fantastic camera, you can fill up that storage pretty quick with UHD video. Thankfully with USB host capabilities we have a couple options available to handle file management. Here are the two solutions I’m currently using on my GS6!
Leef MicroSD Card Reader Review.
Shop the Leef on Amazon.
Shop for USB OTG Host cables on Amazon.
I’m not a fan of how Chrome handles browser tabs by mixing them into the main list of apps when multitasking. I think it’s very poor design for a smartphone, cluttered and a waste of space. Thankfully there’s a way to fix this!
Amazon has been notoriously slow in bringing their Prime Video service to Android. Cross platform compatibility was a key factor in making the Kindle service the most widely used way to consume e-books, but Amazon seemed happy to let Netflix, Hulu, and Google Play run away with the Android streaming video market.
Recently they caved on allowing Android phones to stream video, and now, the most recent update for the Prime Video app includes support for Android tablets.
It’s not all roses however. Getting the service up and running still requires a multi-app strategy. The fastest way we got it running?
Install the old Amazon App Store APK manually.Congratulations, you’ve set up Prime Instant Video on your Android tablet! From here on out, you should be able to continue using the service by using your browser to search for videos to watch.
I don’t see Amazon Prime Video unseating Netflix, Google Play, and Hulu on Android devices any time soon…
There have been several ways you can run Android apps on Macs and PC’s, but now using the ARC Welder Chrome app, you can load an APK and run it through your Chrome browser just like on a Chromebook. Here’s everything you need to know!
ARC Welder in The Chrome App Store: http://goo.gl/9ykdOI
APK Mirror: http://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/
Got a great viewer question on my Instagram feed from follower kill.the.spiders who asks:
“Do you edit your photos or are they the way they are? The focus is amazing and the blur effect is impressive, also is it possible to make similar shots with phones, like the G3 for example?”
Let’s take a quick look at cameras, sensor size, and depth of field! This video should be watched full screen for the best experience, and don’t forget to increase the quality to 4K!
Filed on Tuesday, a class action lawsuit claims that Apple is misrepresenting and falsely advertising how much storage is available in the iPhone and the iPad. Far be it from me to to defend on Apple on a situation like this, but the media covering this story has blown a fairly common practice wildly out of proportion. The filing itself reads like it was written by someone who lacks basic knowledge of math and technology.
This is a problem we’ve been dealing with since the advent of home computing. How do we accurately report how much space is on our device?
The main issue comes down to the discrepancy between advertising and how computers are actually programmed. To grossly over simplify, you are allowed to advertise a megabyte as being equal to 1 million bytes, and a gigabyte as being equal to 1 billion bytes. Makes sense right? All those metric-y words? This is known as “decimal notation”.
But that’s NOT how your computer utilizes storage. Your computer stores info via binary powers of 2. Your computer treats 1,048,576 as a megabyte and 1,073,741,824 as a gigabyte.
So if we do a little math, the outside of the box claims the iPhone has 16GB, in that it has sixteen billion bytes on board. But iOS will use that in binary compatible chunks. Those same 16 billion bytes will be reported to the operating system as 14.90 GB out of the box before you slap an OS on the device. Have a “32GB” phone? The OS will report that as 29.80GB when it’s totally empty.
The larger the pool of storage, the larger the chunk of data you lose via this advertising hijinkery. Have you cracked open a hard drive recently? Sure you can buy a box which claims to 4TB packed inside, but your computer will report that as 3.64TB. You didn’t “LOSE” this data, you did receive 4 trillion bytes, but your computer doesn’t use a storage device like that. It has to cluster them, so it looks like you’ve lost some 360GB, when you haven’t.
This practice is so common that pretty much every hard drive and flash memory manufacturer has some link in their respective FAQ’s that explains this very phenomenon. Here’s Seagate’s for example.
The chart being used in this class action suit is conflating the difference between decimal notation (1MB = 1,000,000 bytes) and binary notation (1MB = 1,048,576 bytes) to make it look like Apple is trying to do something nefarious, and to make it look like iOS has eaten up significantly more space than it actually has.
If we want to talk about bloat, I think Samsung customers have more reason to complain as the first batch of “16GB” Galaxy S5’s were delivered with less than 10 binary gigabytes available to the user depending on carrier. Samsung took more than 30% of the available storage for the OS, pre-installed apps, and partition.
What I hate most about this situation is that it forces me to defend Apple here. We do have an issue with how products are advertised, and it’s a problem we’ve had since the first storage devices were built into PC’s. What’s not going to help us explain this situation to consumers is screwing up the math being used to demonstrate the problem.
The problem here isn’t with Apple being “stingy”. It’s with an entire industry and how it advertises its products.