The joy and problems with iCloud Photo library

Posted on 30. December, 2016by bonka

The first digital picture I have in posession was taken on January 1st 2001 with a FujiFilm FinePix6800 ZOOM. It had a resolution of 3 megapixels and weighed 360 kilobytes.

Behold! — Yes, my first digital image was of a wooden copy of the TinTin moon rocket.

Since then, I have shot my way through 15 years of life with a small array of cameras, totally adding up to around 160.000 images of different size and quality. Many of them tagged, named and managed with the now defunct (alas!) Aperture.

Consistency hell

Up until recently, I had an unhealthy, unhinged Lightroom library (I never managed to get that program into my fingertips or workflow), an offline Photos library converted from Aperture, and an online Photos library consisting mainly of iPhone pics.

But then I bought a Sony RX-100III as a travel camera, and started transferring pictures to my iPhone via WiFi while on the go. When back at my computer, I imported the remaining pics from because it was easier to manage everything from one location. I also decided to copy some of my more memorable albums from Aperture, as trips and places often pop up in conversations, and that it’s cool to be able to say “Check this out”

So over just a couple of months, inconsistency and redundancy issues arose. Having librarian tendencies, and having tried (and hated) the Adobe / Lightroom cloud, I decided I would — once again — make the leap of faith with Apple. This time more so because of the completely nonsensical Adobe Cloud¹ than Apples solution being best. So I started moving all of the photos into the iCloud Photo library.

Enter Magic

My Aperture library alone held over 120.000 images and ticked in at about 800Gb. It was harder than I imagined to get them all into the same library². Also – with only a 15MB/s uplink it literally took weeks to upload all the data. But little by little, all of my pixelated history — from the wooden rocket image from 2001 until yesterdays street shoot started popping up on all my devices.

And this actually felt just like the kind of “magic” Apple sometimes overuse in their presentations. While this is really easy to understand as a concept, it is hard to explain how incredibly transparent and nice it is when it “just works”. Not only did I now have I access to every photo and video I ever took at an instant (tags and albums help a lot while searching DSLR/P&S pics without GPS), but I was also still be able to shoot images and hours of HD video without ever running out of space.

Seriously — using Dropbox or Google Photos to “empty” your phone for photos from time to time doesn’t even come close, at least not on an iPhone. With iCloud Photo Library, it’s all there and not there at the same time. I could now browse, watch, edit and upload the RAW photo from the Canon 5D 50mm@1.4f image I took in 2012 with nearly as much ease as the one that was taken seconds ago.

In addition to instant access to over a terabyte of images and videos, I always have ±16Gb free space on my iPhone. This really feels magical. Although the transition had a lot was lost moving from Aperture and Photos is lacking several important features — moving my images to iCloud is one of the best “digital decisions” I have made. If that is a thing.

But as the library grew bigger, weird stuff started happening. Or rather — stuff stopped from happening at all.

Exit Magic

I first met the problem with my present go-to photo editor Polarr, that just wouldn’t load at all. I tried reinstalling, but while I could get into the tutorials fine, it wouldn’t let me load any images without crashing. And yet — although the app itself crashed on launch every time, its extension for Photos.app worked just fine.

But why?

Technology

Mavic Pro

Posted on 10. October, 2016by bonka

I have never ever wanted to own a drone. Or even control one. I have found them them way too toy-ish, bulky and nerdy. Just look at the Phantom 4. No matter what you try to do to it to make it look cool, it still looks like a toy. And this comes even if I love both photography and helicopters, and have many vivid memories of the times I have been able to merge the two using the old school, and much heavier machines from the olden days!

Enter the Mavic Pro

But this thing is different.

This thing is the first drone I have ever looked upon and thought. “WOW!” Just the industrial design of this… It looks like something coming straight out of an extremely well designed video game with strong ties to Japanese military mecha/anime. It’s really beautiful! So I thought really, really about for at least two days, and then I just bought it! (yeah!).

Delivery isn’t due before a month from now, so now — I believe for the first time since I was waiting for my iPhone in 2007 (and that is saying a lot!) — I am having this kid-before-christmas day both anxiety and anticipation. Its delivery date is pending, but it ought to be here sometime early next month.

I still don’t know what this means, will my life require me to film everything from above now? Will I have to pick up an extreme sport just to make it happy? Will I from now on be that annoying guy with the drone? Have I really really just bought myself the ultimatest selfie-stick? Still don’t know, and it’s a nice feeling.

And by the way, I couldn’t find the specs in a handy format anywhere, so I compiled this Mavic Pro specs PDF for all your speccy needs. And I have to give it to Casey. I think this was the moment that had me (pre-forwarded for ya.)

Technology

Apple’s new Lightning spec allows for smarter, better-sounding…

Posted on 9. June, 2014by bonka

Sources for 9to5 Mac understand that Apple has published a new specification that lets headphone makers use an iOS device’s Lightning port for audio instead of the normal 3.5mm jack. On a basic level, this allows headsets to launch apps and carry more than just the usual playback controls. However, there’s reportedly an advanced spec that permits a lot more — headphones could include digital-to-analog converters and other processing that overrides what’s in the device. If you’re not happy with the fidelity of the built-in hardware, a new pair of cans could provide an upgrade.

…and – one might think – really awesome audio peripherals.

Technology

Open letter to Apple Mail

Posted on 9. June, 2013by bonka

Seriously, Apple / iCloud / .Me / .Mac / Proofpoint / whoever is in charge; your spam filters suck so bad.

The algorithm has been drinking

I get these mails with THE SAME SUBJECT AND THE SAME CONTENT all the time from strange foreign domains that I have NEVER EVER recieved a mail from. The emails are transmitted from INSAAAANE subomains like this one hbkdgkjhkbcjzac.googlemoogl.tk. I mean REALLY? Doesn’t strings like googlemooglbooblbrobl ring any bells for ya? A five year old idiot would understand that this with 99% probability is spam. (No offense, five year old idiot.) Yet your spam algorithms are all drunk and can’t seem to cope with it.

I even send you almost every single spam mail to your spam account. Can’t you make your servers at least pay attention. This is the third mail with the same content I recieve within two hours. Sometimes there are 10 mails with the same format, content, text and subject, usually all with the same funky attachment with the same filename sent from multiple CRAZY subdomains on the same domain.

The girl from Tokelau

I mean – .tk??! The island of Tokelau? Shouldn’t it be some kind of amobean logic installed on mailservers today? Like when I – for the first time in my life – recieve five mails from five different persons that all live on the same remote island in the middle of the pacific ocean, that all have registered their mail on a subdomain so complex that Steven Hawking would have a hard time remembering its URL?

Technology

Domain Name Scam

Posted on 3. May, 2013by bonka

I just got contacted today by a ‘chinese gentleman’

…that wanted to confirm with me that a company called Qol asia Investment Ltd had applied for the chinese top domain norwegian domain name. The mail claims they thought this was strange, as there already is a norwegian domain with this name, and that they wanted to give me 7 days to claim this domain name for myself.

While this is awfully considerate of the chinese registrar, it is – of course – a scam. And a pretty legal one too. While it might have been interesting to get a chinese top level domain name if I was planning on doing business in China, I would no doubt have considered this myself a long time ago. This scare tactic should alert no one.

Here are some more articles about the same scam tactics.

And here is the mail in full:

(Letter to the President or Brand Owner, thanks)

Dear President,

We are the department of Asian Domain Registration Service in China. I have something to confirm with you. We formally received an application on May 2,2013 that a company which self-styled”Qol asia Investment Ltd”were applying to register”bareform”as their Brand Name and some domain names through our firm.

Now we are handling this registration, and after our initial checking, we found the name were similar to your company’s, so we need to check with you whether your company has authorized that company to register these names. If you authorized this, we will finish the registration at once. If you did not authorize, please let us know within 7 workdays, so that we will handle this issue better. Out of the time limit we will unconditionally finish the registration for”Qol asia Investment Ltd”.Looking forward to your prompt reply.

Best Regards,

David Zhao
Tel:+86.551/63434624||Fax:+86.551/63434924
Address:No.650 HuiZhou Ave,Hefei,Anhui,China

Technology

iPhone 5 camera error – pink stripes

Posted on 30. December, 2012by bonka

This story has been updates as of Nov 2013. Skip to: Replacement iPhone

After having taken around 1000 pictures and over 30 minutes of flawless HD video with my iPhone 5 (64Gb), it suddenly started giving me weird results.

The first Pink Stripes

The first irregularity appeared as stripes in the top of a video, giving resemblance to a severely broken VHS tape. I first thought the irregular pink stripes was only on-screen, but reviewing the recording proved the noise was burnt in.

ARVE Error: id and provider shortcodes attributes are mandatory for old shortcodes. It is recommended to switch to new shortcodes that need only url

Five hours passed until I tested the camera again. This time the noise was much more apparent, sometimes filling almost the entire screen. The camera was active the whole time, so I took a few snaps and screenshots.

Not only video

Screen capture from iPhone 5, showing a band of digital noise

At this stage, the signal/noise ratio was approximately 3:1, making it difficult, but not impossible to take a noiseless picture. I managed to get a comparison by taking pictures in a fast rate. These two images are approx. ½ second apart.

Still image from an iPhone 5, showing a band of digital noise

The problem was also apparent in 3d party apps like ProHDR.

After 30 minutes of active testing, the S/N had scaled to such a degree that the camera was practically useless. The stripes appeared 80-90% of the time the camera was active, and would now freeze the camera app completely after 10-15 seconds.

The first stripes were taken 16:45, the last 23:54. Although I wasn’t taking film and pictures the whole time, the noise was “active” for a good 7 hours, going from just a little to a whole lotta love in this period of time.

Troubleshooting

First of all, I was on our cabin in the mountains when this occurred. There is no 3G there (or at least very little), and the signal bars on the iPhone vary from 1-5 bars of Edge. The atmospheric conditions on this particular night was medium snowfall, dense skies, temperature around 0°C (Thats 32°F for you non-metric people).

I’m no electro engineer, but taking hints from my days of stage-PA and the EMR effect any cellphone radio can have on other electronic equipment – my best guess would be that this has something to do with proximity between the antenna and the camera circutry. I base this on the purely subjective fact that – when holdning the iPhone in the vicinity a loudspeaker, the audio noise from the speaker seemed to cohere with the visual noise.

My guess is that the Edge network, operating at the lower 850 MHz band, interfered with the camera module, and because of the atmospheric conditions, the network handshaking needed extra output power. Or the other way around, that the phone found a weak 3G signal, and tried real bad to connect to it by upping the antenna gain. If this assumption is right, my guess would be that this video is from an area with similarly low coverage / Edge.

ARVE Error: id and provider shortcodes attributes are mandatory for old shortcodes. It is recommended to switch to new shortcodes that need only url

A Working (Quick)Fix

As pointed out by Pete in the comments, there is a working fix: Just Turn Airplane Mode on, and shoot noise–, error- and stripe-less pictures and video to your heart’s content. Although this is no optimal or permanent solution, it will give you access to the camera in a pinch. You can also try the old, ‘temporary fix’.

Temporary fix (old version)

As noted in the comments, this fix has proven to be too flimsy for real world use. Since you might have use for it, I’m not going to delete it. Click here (or scroll down) for a working fix.

I concluded that rebooting didn’t work, but a hard reset seems to have fixed the problem for the time being. The stripes reappeared the first minutes, but diminished and then disappeared completely after some time. This might be purely coincidental. Perhaps the skies cleared out, perhaps the phone was out of pink juice for the time being.

Refund / replacement

I was hoping this problem might be fixed via a software update, or that it would reduce in intensity / not be that much of a problem, but no software updates has helped, and photographing in rural areas is just pure pain. I am now asking for a refund/replacement phone from Apple. Will post how the progress. (August 2013)

Refund pt. 2: Updated November 2013

After coming home from vacation, I immediately got on the line with Apple and asked for a replacement. Since the problem is very sporadic, and that the problem is somewhat undocumented on the net (also – my girlfriend has the exact same model iPhone as me, bought only a few months later. She has never seen the pink static.) I was worried that normal diagnostics wouldn’t suffice, and that I would get the old phone back. I made it very clear that the static only became apparent in rural areas with low coverage / on EDGE or 3G with bad signal / high antenna gain. While the Apple support members I spoke with didn’t seem to have first hand experience with this problem before, the process went smooth.

I asked for a replacement phone while they diagnostisiced it. As everything Apple support, the process went fast and smooth. I had a new phone in my hand by the end of day 2 or 3, and two weeks later my original phone was (seemingly) recalled.

So – what about my new iPhone? Is the problem gone?

As a matter of fact – NO, it isn’t. But at least – this version has far less of it. So far, I have only had pink static two times, in the same rural areas. But as far as support goes, it should be no problem for you experiencing this problem to get a replacement unit. That being said – Norway (where I reside) – has three years of complimentary guarantee for all mobile devices, put forth by the government. Your mileage may vary in other countries, and AppleCare might be necessary if you’re out of the 1 year complimentary guarantee of Apple.

Gallery of iPhone 5 camera static/stripes/noise

Update february 2013: I have taken over 15 minutes of video and around 300 pictures since the first pink party. Some in dense 3G areas, some in Edge county. None has any of the artifacts described in this post.

Update march 2013: New pink stripes. This time taken in the subway in the middle of Oslo. Camera was fine when exiting the subway.

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Update, march 2013: Back on our cabin, and thick lines of noise appear instantly.

Update, June 2013: Northern part of Norway = bad reception and lots of pink striping. Some of these images are HDR’s, so you’ll see some examples with trasparent noise. The completely white/pink image, could be a digital correction mask for camera vignetting.

Everything Technology

ALL YOUR AVID ARE BELONG TO US

Posted on 19. December, 2011by bonka

Prøver å reversere lyd i AVID, et program jeg forlot for en dekade siden. Jeg trodde noe hadde skjedd på disse ti årene, men tok feil. All your base is not belong to you; det er AVIDs way eller ingenting. Skal vedde på at det er raskere å reversere lyden i Word. Blæh. (Men si gjerne ifra hva jeg tydeligvis gjør feil.)