Shooting Better Sit-down Interviews with a Mobile

2018-04-19T04:38:11+00:00September 15th, 2015|Tags: , , , |

Shooting interviews with any camera is a challenge. Doing it well with a mobile can often make it even more difficult. But mobile also has some advantages. The cameras are pretty simple, upload immediately and share content significantly faster.

In August I had to shoot some interviews with a mobile during a residency I did at Ideo, a global design firm with a human-centered, design-based approach. I was lucky enough to spend two weeks with them this past August. I want to share some of what I learned about shooting interviews with a mobile.

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How your smartphone’s battery life can be used to invade your privacy

2018-04-19T05:02:44+00:00August 5th, 2015|Tags: , , , , , |

How your smartphone’s battery life can be used to invade your privacy

if a user visits a website in Chrome’s private browsing mode using a VPN, the website should not be able to link them to a subsequent visit with private browsing and the VPN off. But the researchers warn that that may no longer work: “Users who try to revisit a website with a new identity may use browsers’ private mode or clear cookies and other client side identifiers. When consecutive visits are made within a short interval, the website can link users’ new and old identities by exploiting battery level and charge/discharge times. The website can then reinstantiate users’ cookies and other client side identifiers, a method known as respawning.”

Worse still, on some platforms, the researchers found that it is possible to determine the maximum battery capacity »

2018-03-27T08:06:05+00:00August 5th, 2015|Tags: , |


There are more phones than ever, and the devices come from all over. OpenSignal now counts over 24,000 distinct Android devices, up from closer to 12,000 back in 2013.

Stare into android long enough, it stares back into you.

2018-03-27T08:15:35+00:00February 17th, 2015|Tags: |


…the migration rate of the handset market, in new phones sold hit 67% for the year 2014. We are now seeing the last years that dumbphones are still sold. I project year 2019 is the last year when any meaningful numbers of dumbphones are sold (more than 1%) and year 2020 is the first year when all phones sold are smartphones.

I won’t remember you being stupid dumbphones, I’ll remember you for your good qualities. Good battery life, snake.

2018-03-27T08:17:38+00:00January 23rd, 2015|Tags: , |


The users who we observed touching their phone’s screens or buttons held their phones in three basic ways:

one handed—49%
cradled—36%
two handed—15%
Voice Calls – 22%
Passive Activities – 18.9% 

How people hold phones; or how Flappy Bird stopped caring and loved the tap.

2018-03-27T08:57:56+00:00January 10th, 2014|Tags: , |

We were pressured to weaken the mobile security in the 80’s

They wanted a key length of 48 bit. We were very surprised. The West Germans protested because they wanted a stronger encryption to prevent spying from East Germany. The compromise was a key length of 64 bit – where the ten last bits were set to zero. The result was an effective key length of 54 bit.

…

One other thing that was put in the GSM specification, after demands from some countries, was that the encryption could be turned off, without the cell phone user knowing.

When the encryption is turned off, it is also quite easy for private citizens with the right equipment to eavesdrop on cell phone calls.

2018-03-27T08:59:26+00:00January 5th, 2014|Tags: , |

nerdology:

This year Wired is sending their reporters to cover CES only using phones.

What a crazy, insane, minigame inside the biggest news week for tech.

Instead of the usual mix of old hands and greenhorns, WIRED’s crew is comprised entirely of CES veterans. Which means that covering it would be, like, easy for our team. Easy, that is, if we didn’t intentionally make things harder. So we’re not letting them use computers.

This year at CES, our core crew of reporters can use only their phones to cover the show—this includes any text, images, video or audio content they create. No DSLRS, no laptops; no fancy compact-system cameras or iPads. Just phones. (Our photo department reserves the right to swap out terrible images; you’re welcome.) We’ll call it our CES Mobile ChallengeSmartphone Superchallenge Smartphone Thunderdome. And to make it more interesting, »

2018-03-27T09:02:47+00:00November 4th, 2013|Tags: , |

“Those animations are based on spring physics. So it’s like you stretched a spring from you to the folder and then let go… Animations pre-iOS 7 were based on sine wave curves. iOS 7 animations have a more gradual decay.’

There’s a sweet gif, but it’s too big for tumblr. 🙁

2013-05-08T18:23:33+00:00May 8th, 2013|Tags: , |

In November 2012 Samsung released the Galaxy Camera, a first attempt to incorporate the Android OS and a cellular antenna into a compact camera. Then Canon introduced the EOS 6D, a full-frame DSLR with Wi-Fi and sharing tools built in. “This connectivity will become the new normal,” says Richard Koci Hernandez, an Emmy-winning multimedia journalist, assistant professor of journalism at UC Berkeley, and mobile-photography maven. “I never bet against technology.”

(source)

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Carriers

2013-02-25T20:09:41+00:00February 25th, 2013|Tags: , , , , |

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Carriers

The goal of the BATMAN project is to create a much lower overhead and more dynamic method of collecting routing information at run time. Beyond the BATMAN routing protocol, there have been discussions about applying machine learning to add predictive routing with information from Android’s accelerometers, gravity sensors, gyroscopes, and rotational vector sensors to predict where it can find the next node in the network.

Initial testing is promising. Each smartphone in the network can operate up to about 100 feet away from its nearest neighbor. VoIP works over up to 5 hops. Initial tests with 30 nodes did not reach the limit of the number of channels supported by 802.11, but developers expect to find one when a larger number of nodes are employed, and hope to solve it with a new routing »

2018-03-27T09:19:23+00:00January 31st, 2013|Tags: , |

Rode has put out a mic for the iPhone. With this device, (which is not cheap at 200 bucks) and the app from Rode you can now record in 96k with the iPhone. They seem to have built this the way it should be done.

2018-03-27T09:32:50+00:00June 15th, 2012|Tags: , , , , , |

This is in the running for favorite photos I’ve ever taken. As we were quietly hanging out at the top of Borobudur, we heard a wave of giggles and fake camera sounds approaching. This crew came around the bend, and proceeded to take a ton of photos of us. Stopped and posed for a few for us as well and then continued on their merry way.

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