Sorta-OT Apple iPhone rant- don't design hardware that software can damage

Huh, sorry. I think ~1/2 the time my phone is totally discharged in the top pocket of my pac. Though I have been trying to be better about keeping it charged. How about going back to the previous phone?

People are way to addicted to phones, as a liberal I feel obligated to suggest we either regulate 'em or tax 'em or both. :^)

George H.

Have had a Samsung J7 for about a month now, very happy with it. A charge last about a week, Some use during the day and off at night. Plus Droid 48 works well.

Cheers

You must be very near a tower. I also have a J7, but the signal is marginal here. When new, the battery lasted 36-40 hours, now only 18. Same when traveling in Europe; you need a bit of extra battery life when you don't always have access to a charger. I took a single-cell USB power pack for emergencies, and did get to use it once or twice.

I can't understand the narcissism that makes people want to spend >$1000 on a phone. Makes them feel special, I guess.

Clifford Heath.

Apple.. [i]pads, Androids, my Android is stored with the battery removed. useless, too big for a phone, too small for any serious computer work.

Some month ago I bought this:

Now that really blew my mind, I have worked with cameras all my life...

This is is worth gold.

I wear it if I go biking, use it to record situations... as evidence. It is mjpeg, so individual frames are clear, no mpeg I frames crap.

Found it after a long search for - and reading reviews of a reasonable small camera..

Just clip it on your glasses and record what you do, or stick it somewhere with double sided tape and record the environment.

Somebody to me: "reading light is it?" LOL

You can always back them up locally if you don't trust the cloud. It is a very high failure rate that you are seeing. My wife has an iPhone (as does my BiL) and all they ever seem to suffer is a gradual slow down as the battery ages. One qualified for the at cost battery upgrade.

Which apps do you reckon take it down? I have had a Moto G3 brick itself for no apparent reason - probably a true hardware fault.

I guess you need to binary chop on the applications to figure out which one or ones make it unstable.

Perhaps it is having so much memory installed that is making it unstable? I'll bet the vast majority have 64G or 128G. Your warning that the iPhone X may be unstable in some configurations is noted.

They are geniuses compared to the general public not compared to EEs.

How long will it record for? How do you download the videos out of it? mark

snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote :

Not tried the maximum yet, but about 2 hours works. It makes small AVI videos of say 15 minutes each, a pre, as that makes sure most AVIs are correctly closed even if the battery goes empty (has not happened yet). Time and date is correctly set in the filesystem, still correct after several month.

Best is to take the micro sdcard out and put it in the PC and use a media player. Works with all players I have. Then you can copy and edit it too.

You can also play or download via the USB cable, but that does not give me full speed on an USB2 port. The documentation says you can also use it as webcam, have not tried that. Charging via USB takes some time (couple of hours). It is a clever design, audio is very good too, I can hear back conversations from people on the sidewalk when I biked past them. The thing has a vibrator build in, push button for > 4 seconds and it will vibrate once to say standby for video recording. Push it short again then it will vibrate 3 times to indicate recording running. Push it one short time it will vibrate one short time to indicate recording stopped. Push it for > 4 seconds again it it will vibrate a long time to say it is off. So you can use it without having to look at screens or whatever, You an also take single pictures that way with the other button. I have got a Samsung 32 GB micro sdcard in it, fastest one I could get.

Compared briefly with the other guy. We have WhatsApp and Dropbox in common among the less popular apps with the general public. He's an Indian guy an d has quite different habits- I have things like OpenRice and Lyft that are relatively rare. The day it failed he tried to go into the store and notic ed a bunch (not a huge crowd) of other similar people.

Other guy has the smaller memory, so I don't think so.

;-)

--Spehro Pefhany

My old iPhone 5 still works acceptably well (tiny screen for reading datasheets though), but it was only a 16G so it can't be loaded from a backup of the new one. But stick the SIM card in and it functions.

--Spehro Pefhany

$22, amazing, if it works at all. ;-)

--Spehro Pefhany

Looks like a nice thing.

Can it record while charging? So you use an external USB power pack to prolong the record time?

Clifford Heath.

if you already use dropbox why on earth don't you back up photos there as well?

For me, I have 82GB of photos, but only have 10GB available in my free DropBox account, and don't want to pay an annual fee to store more. I also don't want to worry about managing the storage or bandwidth for replicas on all my devices, because our national network is pretty slow and not that cheap.

So I Dropbox important things tat I'm likely to need when away from home (e.g. my .dotfiles are all in a Git repository that pushes to a Dropbox upstream, so are my presentations) and manage my own backups of media and e-books.

Git works well for managing things that you don't mind replicating, and pushing changes to a bar Git repo on Dropbox is neat too.

Clifford Heath.

~$100 per year gives you 1000GB

on android there's a setting for uploading photos immediately or next time you are on your wifi so you don't use your cell phone data for it

and afaik as soon as you have more than 10gb dropbox selective sync asks you to choose which folder to sync to your device

so for little more than the price of a harddrive you get 1000GB offsite backup with history, available from anywhere

For the cost of a little electricity, I already have 10x that storage in my NAS, also available from anywhere, and 100x as fast when I'm at home. Explain again why should I spend the $100/yr?

Clifford Heath.

so that if you house burns down or you NAS takes a lightning strike your data is somewhere backed up somewhere else

It is already. I take a TB drive interstate occasionally, bring the old one back. The big stuff changes slowly, and has lower value anyhow.

The point is I'm in control, no sovereign risk (loss and security), and one less recurring expense.

Clifford Heath.

hard drives don't last forever

That's why I have copies. There are still risks, but they're *my* risks.

Companies don't last forever either. Clouds evaporate. Remember geocities?