Thursday, 28 November 2019

Joined the herd - bought an iPhone

For years I've been a Samsung Galaxy user, but I've finally cracked and got myself an iPhone.

A refurbished one admittedly, but a pretty recent one.

Not that I've never been an iPhone user - work used to give us iPhones as the corporate phone, but I always had my own phone as well, and that was also a Samsung - good battery life, decent screen, reasonable camera, reliable, and since I retired four years ago now my Galaxy's been my one and only phone - and it's been a really good productivity aid.

But after four and half years, it's beginning to show its age. It's still stuck on Android 6, and it needs a new battery - only twenty five bucks for a third party one admittedly -but I took that as a sign that it was time to change.

Now, where we live, we have to have Telstra.

Non negotiable.

Optus's coverage is ok over most of the town, but we live in a blackspot. Vodafone's not great either, but Telstra works, a bit on the edge but we get a usable signal.

This means that you can either buy a phone from Telstra, either straight up or on a plan, or else you buy an unlocked phone from someone else.

Now you can buy a reasonable midrange phone from Telstra for not a bad price, and if you wanted the convenience of a phone on a plan it's probably not too bad a deal, but you can probably do better buying from one of the online retailers.

And that's why I ended up with a 12 month old refurbished iPhone.

Most corporates have standardised on iPhones as a company phone creating a healthy market in good second hand and refurbished phones, but it's not the case with Samsung phones meaning you probably are going to end up buying new.

So on the day I did this I could get a 12 moth old refurbished iPhone 8 for $600 and a new Galaxy S10 for a $1000. As always your mileage will vary, and it could be that next week someone drops a whole lot of decent Galaxy's on the market.

Being a cheapskate, I went for the iPhone and Apple's well known build quality.

I'm not a heavy phone user, and I'll probably keep the phone for a few years. So build quality and long term reliability is important to me, other things less so.

As I'm no longer working, I hardly call anyone these days, and if I do, I use my Skype account half the time, and  I'm not a great user of mobile data.

In fact the principal things I use my phone for is

  1. receiving verification codes via SMS
  2. calling J to let her know where I've parked when picking her up
  3. a little bit of twitter and email checking
  4. checking the weather
  5. looking at maps if I'm not sure where I am in Melbourne/Sydney/Brisbane

in fact just about any phone would do, but the iphone has a useful ecology round it of extra apps, bump covers, hands free holders for use in the car etc etc I thought I'd go for the iphone and Apple's build quality ...

[update 29 November 2019]

and I get Telstra's wifi calling service in the box - which given the sometimes spotty local cell coverage is a definite plus ...

Friday, 15 November 2019

Documenting artefacts - using a camera instead of a phone

The methodology I wrote up a couple of years ago has proven pretty robust - even coping with with me spilling coffee on my laptop - but the time has come to introduce a change.

Previously I've been using my Samsung Galaxy 5 to take images of artefacts. That phone is now about four and a half years old, and definitely due for replacement. What I havn't decided what I'm going to replace it with, some experiments with my iPad and general frustration at easily getting images out of Apple's walled garden has led me to suspect that if my next phone was an iPhone it wouldn't fit quite so well into the methodology.

However I have a Nikon CoolPix AW100 that was bought second hand on eBay for another project entirely that is as good as the Samsung's camera. Reasonable lens, reasonable zoom, and the added advantage of being designed for use in challenging environments it can be used comfortably while wearing nitrile gloves.

Getting images out of it is as easy as taking the SD card out and plugging the card into an external SD Card reader - external because my work laptop doesn't have an SD card slot, but does have a spare USB port - actually I use a little portable Belkin hub - and copying the files across and reviewing them.

The procedure works fine - the only downside is that the Nikon, like most cameras, uses a sequential naming system for images of the format DSCNnnnn rather than the Samsung's yyyymmddhhmmss format which has the advantage of making the date and order the image was taken immediately obvious.

The Nikon does record the date and time in the EXIF data (as well as the GPS information), but not using the date in the filename does mean recording the image name really has to be done at the time, or more accurately, during the review process, before the individual artefacts are entered into the documentation spreadsheet.

Otherwise, procedurally, the process is exactly the same and works well ...