there’s a test for that

What Makes a Good Photo? – Analyzing Photo Popularity on Flickr

Fri, 01 Jul 2016 16:06:55 -0400

In 2016, I took a Digital Humanities course during my last semester at Princeton. The project I undertook in the second half of that semester was rudimentary analysis of the relationships between the popularity of photographs on photo-sharing website Flickr and ways in which they were created. Below are some of the results from that analysis, along with this disclaimer: these visualizations are not correlations, nor should the explanations accompanying them be considered claims of causality. I present simple visualizations to tease out simple relationships between the ways a photo was taken and how well it performed on the site.

Introduction

In photography communities, a debate regarding the nature of the art rages. In one philosophy, the quality of a photograph (or a photographer) lies solely in their creativity, their artistic vision, and the subject matter that they capture. For those in this camp, photographic equipment (cameras, lenses, tripods, etc.) are simply a transparent tool by which photographers capture what they see. Those opposed to this philosophy pay more attention to the physical and technological limitations of the equipment when pursuing their craft. These limitations can in many ways shape and in some cases dictate the types of photos that can be taken, and for some photographers, the capabilities gained and lost through the use of different “gear” limit their creative freedom significantly enough that they prioritize the equipment to a much larger extent than the first camp would.

A landscape photograph taken with a DSLR camera at a relatively small aperture of f/8. Because of the narrow aperture and large distance between camera and subjects, everything in this photo is in focus.

Let us explore an example. In optical lenses, the aperture of the lens is an opening near its rear that controls how much light passes through the lens. The aperture can close down to a size as small as a pinhole (this is denoted in photographic metadata by a large “f-stop” number like f/16 or f/22). The aperture can also open up to allow a larger amount of light in (this is denoted with a small f-stop like f/2.8 or f/1.4). As the f-stop decreases, the size of the aperture and the amount of light passing through the lens both increase. Aperture has another effect besides controlling the amount of light entering the lens, and it is one of the most creative tools a photographer has to change the way his/her photos appear in the camera. Because of the geometry of light passing through a lens, a wide open aperture will result in everything closer or farther than the focal point of the lens (controlled by focusing) being out-of-focus. This is referred to as shallow depth-of-field, as the normal plane of space at some focusing distance away from the lens within which objects are sharply in focus is very thin. Moving just a small amount away from the focal plane either forwards or backwards will cause blurring. The effect of blurring the background behind a close object can be quite visually pleasing, and the appearance of blurred backgrounds is called “bokeh.” For this reason, portraits are typically shot with wide open apertures (an example is shown below). On the contrary, closing down the aperture to a small hole causes the focal plane to expand to be quite thick, resulting in objects at varying distances being in focus, whether they were focused on or not. Landscape photography is typically done using stopped-down apertures to maximize the portion of the frame that is in focus.

A portrait of me taken with a DSLR camera at a relatively wide aperture of f/1.8. Note the in-focus subject and heavily blurred background.

Because professional photographers tend to take photos of people using a wide aperture and consequently shallow depth-of-field, that particular look is often associated with professional quality, especially by people who are not professional photographers. The logic is simple: because only professional cameras can create that particular look, the look is associated with professionalism. This psychological connection between a technical aspect of a photograph and its perceived quality is the main focus of this project. Over the course of the project, we have done the following:

Developed an application to gather technical and other metadata for thousands of photographs published in an online community.
Cleaned the dataset and wrote another program to parse the existing data and supplement it with additional information based on the gathered data.
Generated visualizations showing the relationship between key technical and authorial aspects of the photographs and how well they performed in the online community where they were published.

Data Gathering

Source

First, the source of photographic data was selected. Flickr was chosen for a number of reasons. It has a large body of photographic work going back decades, its user base is active, it hosts work from a wide range of photographers, from amateurs to professionals, it collects and displays large amounts of metadata (including EXIF data) for each photograph, and it provides relatively simple means to access each photo’s metadata.

After selecting the source, we registered an application in Flickr’s developer portal in order to get access to the Flickr API. Then, we developed a Python application to gather the data desired for analysis from the public sections of Flickr’s API. The application was built to achieve a few main objectives:

Authenticate with the Flickr API using the private key provided by Flickr’s developer portal.
Generate a list of dates from which to gather lists of photos.
Send a request to Flickr’s “interestingness” endpoint to get a list of photos that were heavily engaged with during each day in the list, going back approximately one month.
Concatenate every photo acquired in the previous step into one large (~12,000 photos) list. Then, use an array of different API endpoints to gather the appropriate metadata for each photo, including EXIF data, titles and descriptions, tags, views, and favorites. During this step, some photos may be private, so handle any errors thrown by Flickr’s API regarding denied access.
Parse the responses from the previous step to select only the fields relevant to the project and transform them into a readable and/or useful format.
Connect to a local instance of the MongoDB database and store the full record of metadata for each photo into a database collection for future access.

The final list of photos included over 8,000 of the most engaged-with photos on Flickr posted in the first 20 or so days of May 2016. Photos that were marked private by their owners or were posted without EXIF data were ignored. For some photos, some fields may be blank, and those fields are generally just ignored in our analysis. The full data-gathering process took around 8 hours.

Data Cleaning & Supplementation

After the data had been inserted into the database, work began to clean it. First, the data was exported from the database into a usable CSV format using the mongoexport tool provided with MongoDB. Then, it was imported into an OpenRefine project. The full OpenRefine edit history is provided in Appendix B, but the major steps are outlined below:

Major revisions were made to the “Flash” column, which indicates whether or not the photograph was taken with a flash or not. Cameras tend to fill out this EXIF field in a number of different ways, depending on the type of flash used and brand of camera. Clustering and faceting was used to reduce every possible value to either “Fired” or “Did not fire,“ indicating simply whether or not a flash was used for the photograph.
The exposure mode field is similarly varied across camera models and brands. Every possible value for this field, which represents the shooting mode the camera was in when the photo was taken, was condensed into two options: “Auto” or “Manual,” to indicate whether or not the photographer manually exposed the photograph by controlling all 3 of the major settings (Aperture, Shutter Speed, and ISO) or if the camera was in an automatic mode, which includes both full-time auto modes for beginners or the semi-automatic program, aperture-priority, and shutter-priority modes. The semi-automatic modes are used often even by professional photographers, so this field should not be taken to represent the skill of the photographer, but rather whether the photographer manually exposed the photograph or not.
In many other fields, especially the numerical ones, simple cleaning was done to elimitate nonsensical values.
Duplicate photos were checked for, but Flickr’s API apparently does not provide duplicate values across days.

Once the data was sufficiently cleaned, it was exported from OpenRefine in Excel format before being imported into MATLAB for the next step.

In the supplementary phase, a MATLAB script was written to parse the imported data into formats usable for analysis in MATLAB. For example, a photo’s shutter speed could be represented either in decimal or fractional format, but MATLAB’s built-in number parser does not handle strings that represent numbers as fractions. Some code was written to detect these cases and manually parse and calculate the decimal value for these photos.

Also, many of the fields were analyzed for content not originally present in the dataset, and additional fields were created to supplement the dataset with information of particular usefulness to the visualizations yet to be created. These extra fields are outlined below:

Metadata: A column called “metadata” was created to represent the sum total of accompanying metadata that was provided by the photographer with the photograph on Flickr. This included the title of the photo, its paragraph-format description, and any tags added to the photo to aid in its discovery by other users. The field itself was calculated by adding together the length of the photo’s title (in words), the length of the photo’s description, and its number of tags.
Popularity: The popularity of a Flickr photo is quantified in two ways. First, each time any person browses to the photo on Flickr.com, that visit is counted as a “view.” Second, logged-in Flickr users can also elect to “favorite” a photo, indicating their appreciation of the photo to its owner or simply saving the photo for later viewing. Because the dataset had two separate metrics to estimate a photo’s popularity on the social network, a formula was created to combine the two values in a representative way for each photo. Using MATLAB, the mean number of favorites and views for the entire pool of photos was calculated, and it was found that on average, the photos received approximately 36 times more views than they do favorites. In light of this, the final normalized “popularity” value was calculated by multiplying the number of favorites a photo received by 36 and adding that to the number of views it received. This single “popularity” value made analyzing a photo’s success in the community much easier.

Results

Again, please see the disclaimer at the top of this post. These visualizations are for curiosity’s sake, not rigorous statistical analysis.

Hypotheses

We hope to see a number of patterns in the data once visualized.

We would expect to see a bimodal pattern emerge when relating aperture to popularity, as both very low and very high apertures are used for photographs that are quite popular (the bokeh-laden portrait look at wide apertures and striking landscapes using narrow apertures). Aperture values near the middle of the range (between f/4 and f/7) can be useful in some circumstances, but more often than not, they are the values used by cheap lenses afforded by very amateur photographers, and as such we would not expect very good quality in general from this audience.

Shutter speed depends highly on the circumstance of the photo, and no clear pattern is evident regarding which shutter speeds might attract more more popularity, so we would expect this distribution to be quite flat across the range.

We expect to see that photos taken at lower ISO values will be more popular, as the camera’s base ISO produces images with the least noise and the highest dynamic range. Both of these are desirable aspects of photos, so we expect to see a roughly inverse linear relationship between ISO and popularity.

We also would predict that photographs with more overall written metadata would perform better than those with sparse information, simply because having more metadata makes a photo easier to find on the Flickr website.

Visualizations

The inferences presented in this section are mostly speculative as to the causality driving our observations. While they may adequately explain many of the witnessed phenomena, the relationships are not necessarily causal.

Aperture

Aperture was visualized first, and a number of attempts were made to adequately represent any trends in the data. Initially, scatter plots were attempted, as shown below, but to quite limited utility. Despite plotting the full population, it is difficult to perceive any relationship between the aperture value and popularity, due to the relatively wide variance among photos taken at any given aperture value. However, the plot is useful in revealing that f-stops are not a continuum of values, but rather a discrete set of values dictated by the incremental opening and closing of a lens’s iris. We can also see some interesting details regarding the aperture values most present in the dataset. As we might expect, Values between f/2 and f/10 are most prevalent, as they are the most useful for everyday shooting conditions. We can ignore the values at 0, as they are not actual data points but incorrectly-parsed values. (These values are ignored for all following visualizations.) Today’s widest commercially available lenses only offer apertures as low as f/0.95, though the vast majority are f/1.8 or higher.

[Larger] Popularity vs. Aperture as a scatter plot

Moving to the figure below, we do see some interesting patterns. The methodology behind this plot is shared among the remainder of the bar plots in this post. In general, we collected the photos into a discrete set of bins covering a certain range of aperture values. Those bins are not evenly spaced, but rather arranged to include very common aperture values and to be able to express the differences among those values by separating them into different bins. For each bin, the median popularity of photos with aperture values falling into its range is calculated, and that value is plotted in the bar graph. While the variance in any bin can be high, this seems to be the only way to visualize how changes in aperture (or shutter speed, or metadata quantity) affect the likelihood of a photo to be popular.

[Larger] Median Popularity vs. Aperture Range

We can see some interesting patterns as we move down the aperture scale. Photos taken with exceptionally wide apertures (f/0.7 to f/1.5) typically perform quite well on Flickr. This is somewhat expected — lenses that offer apertures this wide are very expensive and generally only affordable by professional photographers. Photos taken this way also provide a dreamy bokeh look that many people find appealing. The next step up is the range that includes f/1.8, the minimum aperture of many inexpensive prime lenses purchased by pro-sumer photographers. While these photos don’t perform as well as the widest apertures, they still do respectably. The next bin contains the aperture value used by the world’s most popular camera, the iPhone, at f/2.2. Despite the relatively low f-stop, the iPhone’s sensor is very small, and so the depth-of-field of its photos is generally quite large, without the bokeh that generally characterizes this range of apertures on APS-C or full-frame cameras. Despite the relatively rich iPhone photography ecosystem, photos in this range (which should contain overwhelming numbers of iPhone photos, given Flickr’s own statistics on camera popularity) performed the worst of any other group. The next bin contains f/2.8, the maximum aperture value for most professional zoom lenses. Many professionals shoot with a 24-70mm f/2.8 lens, and so we see a relatively unsurprising increase in popularity for photos in this range. Normally, when aperture is used creatively, it is done to create deep or shallow depth-of-field. Values in the middle (such as the next three bins, from f/3.4 to f/6.8) are not necessarily notable for the depth-of-field they create, so most photos taken in this range might not emphasize aperture as a creative element of the photo, instead controlling the value simply to affect the exposure of the photograph. It is interesting to note, though, that photos in this range performed about as well as the f/1.8 range. The last interesting pattern is the popularity of photos taken with very narrow apertures. In most cases, photos taken in this way are taken outdoors in daylight (narrow apertures demand a large amount of light for proper exposure), and the most common photos taken in this way are landscape photographs. This genre of photography is undeniably popular, but it is extremely interesting to see that these photos tended to perform better than extremely wide-aperture photos.

Shutter Speed

[Larger] Median Popularity vs. Shutter Speed Range

Next, we consider the figure above, which treats shutter speed in the same way as the last plot treated aperture. Most photos are taken in the range between 1/4000 and 1/10 of a second, and in our data, photos in this range generally performed about the same across the range. Shutter speeds in this range are generally suitable for handheld shooting (fast enough to avoid motion blur caused by shaky hands), or, on the faster end, they are aimed at freezing moving subjects (or simply limiting how much light can hit the camera’s sensor by shortening the exposure time). The most striking feature of the chart, though, is how incredibly popular long-exposure photographs are. Long exposure photography is a creative way to allow a camera to capture scenes that the human eye cannot, whether that entails exposing for long periods of time to give flowing water a silky appearance or light-painting (a technique wherein a person moves a light source during the exposure to paint out some shape). It’s understandable why these photos might perform well, though somewhat surprising that the difference in popularity was so noticeable.

Author-written Metadata

[Larger] Median Popularity vs. Quantity of Authorial Metadata

Another revealing visualization is this one. In this figure, we see perhaps the strongest relationship between one of our variables and photo popularity. As we predicted, the amount of written metadata attached to a photograph on Flickr is nearly directly proportional to its popularity in terms of views and favorites. We would expect this trend in terms of views, since having more detailed titles, descriptions, and tags would obviously make a photo easier to find on Flickr, but since we weight favorites so highly in the popularity score, this trend must have also carried over to the number of favorites each photo received as well.

ISO

[Larger] ISO Ratings Sized by Popularity

As for ISO, the data in above seem to confirm our initial suspicions. This visualization, generated with RAW, shows unequivocally that photos taken at or near a camera’s base (lowest) ISO value perform much better than photos where the ISO value needed to be raised. In general, except in the most expensive cameras, raising the ISO reduces image quality by limiting the dynamic range of the photograph and introducing unpleasant-looking noise. The utter dominance of ISO values below 1000 (which in most cameras are relatively noise-free) in the visualization offers only one piece of advice: if you want a photo to take off, keep the ISO down.

Exposure Mode & Flash

In the remaining technical metadata we gathered about the photos, the two that are qualitative are exposure mode (whether the camera controlled some or all of the settings to ensure the photo was properly exposed) and flash (whether or not one was used). The alluvial diagram below is sized by popularity, and it shows a couple of interesting features of the dataset. First of all, it is clear that photos taken in automatic exposure modes perform better on average than those with manually-controlled exposure. This is somewhat surprising, as many professional photographers swear by shooting only in manual mode, believing that the extra control it affords them can produce superior photographs. Second, it seems that photos taken using natural light perform much better than those that employ flash. This is also surprising, as most professional photoshoots make use of at least some form of flash. However, it is possible that those photographs are generally used for commercial purposes and not posted to Flickr, so there may simply be fewer professional examples of flash among many more amateur examples in the dataset.

[Larger] Alluvial diagram showing the photo dataset in terms of exposure mode and use of flash, sized by popularity

Limitations

Changing the Photo Set

In the work completed so far, the list of photos comprising our dataset were taken from Flickr’s daily lists of the 500 most “interesting” photos. “Interestingness” is defined by Flickr in a proprietary way, but one can assume it represents some combination of popularity and engagement from the community. However, since the analysis done attempts to make generalized statements about the photography in general, using only photos from this set may limit the external validity of any findings. In this project, this group of photos was used simply because it is the easiest way to obtain a large, somewhat random group of photos via Flickr’s API.

Rigorous Analysis

While the visualizations presented offer some interesting insights into the nature of how people perceive photography, it would do the project a great justice to perform more rigorous statistical analysis on the underlying data (regressions, correlations, etc.). These were omitted from this prospectus due to limits on time and statistical competency.

Expanded Visualizations

More visualizations incorporating more aspects of the photos could certainly be made. Specifically, it would be useful to see visualizations making use of more of the data points we gathered in our dataset, including focal length, the maximum aperture of the lens used, or the camera type.

Other Data

It also may be useful to gather additional data points for each photo, including, for example, the number of comments the photo received, which could be incorporated into our popularty metric, the editing software used to post-process it, or whether the photo was shot in RAW or JPEG in the camera. These data points were omitted due to the time required to re-fetch all of the data.

Content Analysis

A more robust analysis might also include analyses of the photos themselves, rather than just the metadata. Certain aspects of the photos, including their overall brightness, saturation, and contrast, would be interesting to analyze with regard to photo popularity.

A Note on Windows 10 UWP Apps & Mobile Graphics

Mon, 27 Jun 2016 10:00:18 -0400

I’m a big fan of UWP apps on Windows 10 (formerly known as “Metro,” then “Modern” apps). These are the new type of Windows application that can run wherever Windows 10 can run. They’re installed and updated via the Windows Store. I like them for a few reasons, even though the selection is still fairly poor and many are sorry replacements for their desktop — or even web — counterparts:

The Windows Store: Confining UWP apps to the Store is limiting in some ways (something, something, walled garden), but it’s a major improvement to the way applications are managed on Windows in others. First, it’s as close to a real package manager as Windows has ever gotten, even counting efforts like Chocolatey and OneGet. There’s now a central location for applications, and updates are automatic and all in one place. I’ve been waiting for an organized software manager in Windows ever since I switched back from Ubuntu.
Design: When done correctly (and the entire Windows 8 era was an example of when they are not), UWP apps employ attractive design. Making good-looking Win32 applications is hard work, but UWP application templates start off with at least the basics of good layout. Whitespace is more generously used across the top UWP apps than it traditionally is in Win32 apps, which I consider an improvement. And, on HiDPI screens, text rendering is oddly better. I say “oddly” because as far as I know, it reverts back to grayscale non-subpixel antialiasing. With as many pixels as we have on HiDPI displays, the text in these apps is a pleasure to read.
“Universal:” Not that Windows 10 Mobile is in any way relevant (although I guess the Xbox is), but the idea of universal, responsive applications is cool, if not incredibly necessary at the moment.

Part of Microsoft’s all-in UWP push is games. PC gaming is a huge advantage of the Windows platform, and Microsoft wants those games to be developed on their UWP framework. They’re continually making improvements to enable that transition, like adding support for SLI and the ability to turn off VSync. For these reasons, Microsoft is starting to attract AAA titles like Rise of the Tomb Raider and Quantum Break.

Recently, I had a frustrating experience with one of these games as it pertains to mobile graphics in the PC gaming world. My primary (read: only) PC is a laptop. Because I like to play the occasional game, that laptop (a Dell XPS 15) has both integrated Intel and discrete Nvidia graphics. Through Nvidia’s Optimus technology, the dedicated GeForce graphics card only turns on when an game or other 3D application starts. By doing this, the laptop can run on very little power when not being used for gaming but tap into that powerful Nvidia card when it needs to. UWP games aren’t recognized by Nvidia’s drivers as games just yet, so when I went to open up Microsoft’s flagship UWP game, Minecraft Windows 10 Edition, it was running on the integrated graphics. So, I opened up Nvidia’s control panel and told it to use dedicated graphics for Minecraft.

The next day, I saw that the card was being used, despite not having any games open.

The culprit? Minecraft. Soon, I remembered something about UWP apps: they like to run in the background.

This was tough — I didn’t want my GPU turned on all the time, but Minecraft seemingly ran in the background without my control at random.

Eventually, I remembered a group of settings buried in the Windows 10 Settings app, the “Background apps” tab under the “Privacy” section. In hindsight, the menu for “Background apps” might logically control an app running in the background that I didn’t want. But since UWP apps are new, it’s not second nature to head to a section of the global settings app to control when a program runs. That’s a phone app paradigm adapted for desktop PCs, so I expect many people, no matter their technical literacy, to have trouble making this connection.

But here’s the thing: it doesn’t actually work.

While I’m sure turning off an app’s background privileges has some effect, even after a restart, Minecraft is still running in the background as shown above. Again, this wouldn’t normally matter, but because it causes my dedicated graphics card to turn on, it would have a massive impact on battery life if I hadn’t noticed.

Microsoft (or Nvidia) should find a way to handle this gracefully. Windows needs an elegant way to allow UWP games to run certain tasks in the background without activating dedicated graphics cards. In a normal Win32 application, a helper process would accomplish this, even if most users wouldn’t want MinecraftHelper.exe to run on startup. But I haven’t seen any UWP apps that use multiple processes that could be separately treated by graphics drivers.

I hope that an elegant solution to this issue emerges in the next few updates to Windows 10. For now, every mobile UWP gamer is stuck manually changing the graphics settings of each UWP application back and forth, every time they launch and quit.

The last required course for electrical engineering majors at...

Sun, 14 Jun 2015 23:13:06 -0400

The last required course for electrical engineering majors at Princeton is ELE 302: Building Real Systems, affectionately known as Car Lab. Students partner up, take a stripped-down electric hobby car, and build the circuitry to drive it.

The first stage involves tearing out the RC controller for the motor and steering and replacing it with a microcontroller-driven power MOSFET, driving the motor at a constant speed using PID control. The goal is the make the car travel at 3 ft/s on any terrain. It needs to be within 2% of that speed over flat ground and 10% of that speed on an upward or downward incline.

The next stage involves mounting a VGA camera to the front of the car, looking at the ground, programming the car to follow a black line on the floor at a fixed speed. The challenge here is parsing the video signal into a meaningful indicator of the car’s angle relative to the track. The version of the car with the camera mount is shown below.

The last half of the semester is dedicated to a self-guided project. We decided to add obstacle avoidance capabilities to the car. We used two sonar rangefinders and a continuous-rotation servo to image the car’s immediate surroundings. The gear system we mounted the sonars to was a custom design that we laser-cut in acrylic. By having two sonars facing opposite directions, we could completely map the surroundings every half a rotation of the servo, or 100 times per minute. We used that information, tracking up to two obstacles at a time, to steer the car out of the way of obstacles. We also transmitted the car’s local surroundings map via a wireless serial link to a laptop, where we plotted it in Matlab (below).

The result was a car that navigated the environment in a fairly unintelligent way, considering the minimal data it had to work with, but always managed to avoid obstacles as it drove. There’s video of it in action below.

Building PollPrinceton

Sun, 14 Jun 2015 21:26:07 -0400

This past semester, I took a class taught by Brian Kernighan where everyone in the class built a large-scale programming project as part of a small team. The team that I led built a small, single-purpose social network designed to be used by Princeton students to ask questions to the university community. We built PollPrinceton.

The idea behind PollPrinceton was to build an app like Yik Yak which students could use to ask quick questions quickly and easily. The site is authenticated using Princeton’s Central Authentication Service, so only current students and staff members can use the site. When they log in, they see a feed of polls asked by anyone with a Princeton ID.

If they want, they can anonymously ask a poll themselves.

Or, they can participate in existing polls.

Oh yeah, and it’s totally responsive and mobile-optimized too.

For polls that already have a few votes, you can view demographic breakdowns of the way people have already voted by degree program, class year, and residential college. We cross-reference data from the Princeton student facebook with the responses each poll receives to generate visualizations of the data.

Stack

I did a lot of the work planning and designing the architecture of the app, which we visualized below.

The frontend was an AngularJS app, drawing from my experience building an app for Comcast last summer. Bootstrap and jQuery helped build some of the interactive components. The backend was written using ExpressJS on top of Node.js, which we taught ourselves for this project. We stored everything in a MongoDB, using Mongoose.js to interface with it from the Node server.

There’s a much more in-depth write-up on the technology we used here.

Developing with this JavaScript/JSON-only stack was actually a joy. Spinning up the application was very simple, once I finished writing my own JavaScript integration for Princeton’s CAS service.

I expanded a bit on the frontend design process in a post over on Behance.

We open-sourced the entire project on GitHub from the start, which you can see here. We hosted it on an Ubuntu server provided by DigitalOcean.

If you want to see our spiffy splash page, or use the site if you’re a Princeton student, you can check it out at PollPrinceton.com.

The iPhone 6

Thu, 29 Jan 2015 18:04:00 -0500

Back in November, I upgraded to the iPhone 6 from my trusty old iPhone 4S. Because the most necessary thing I could do is provide yet another review of Apple’s new phone for the Internet’s collection, I decided to write down my thoughts on it. I’ve done so for much less significant device purchases before, and this phone has become the most important device in my life over the last few months.

Comparisons

I upgraded my 4S to iOS 8 when it was released. The 4S is the oldest phone supported by iOS 8, which generally means it’s a poor idea to update. I knew I was due for an upgrade, though, so I did it anyway. After about a month using my 3 year old device with a brand new iOS, upgrading to the iPhone 6 was like wearing glasses for the first time. It wasn’t just about speed, although the performance difference between the 6 and 4S is so hilariously large that using the 6 for just about anything felt great. The new features the appeared in those 3 years are an amazing upgrade as well:

Touch ID sensor
Health, the motion coprocessor, and barometer
Apple Pay
drastic upgrades to the cameras
LTE
64-bit architecture
drastically larger screen

Those are the ones that actually affect my day-to-day with the phone.

Here are some of the features I love from the iPhone:

Touch ID

For reasons more dutifully explained by experts, I don’t like using fingerprints as a password (you should never use something as a password or encryption key that you can’t change), but with the iPhone, it’s actually a smart way to do authentication. Your fingerprint unlocks the phone and decrypts the data stored on it, but you can always choose to use a password or PIN instead of the fingerprint if someone were to obtain a copy of your fingerprint, and Apple has taken some good precautions against that, by storing the fingerprint on a discrete “Secure Element” in the phone, where the data isn’t accessible by an attacker or from software running on the phone at all. The only concern left is the apparent legal discrepancy between forcing someone to tell you their password and forcing someone to put their finger on a Touch ID sensor (based on recent cases, the password is more protected, and thus a safer means of authentication). Touch ID also helps secure other apps that you might want to protect from people who are using your phone, like banking apps.

Health

The iPhone records motion activity continuously, keeping things like steps taken, floors climbed (via the new barometer), and distance traveled. Combining this with data from other apps, provides a really nice way to keep track of personal metrics. I won’t get into too much detail here, because that would inevitably lead me to griping about how Fitbit refuses to integrate with the Health app, forcing me to use the great but not ideal Sync Solver app to liberate my Fitbit data. I’m planning a post on how I use various health metrics apps with Health, so keep an eye out for that if you’re interested in how I do it.

Apple Pay

I actually really love the way Apple has tackled payments with Apple Pay. NFC-based payments are only new in the iOS world, but the iPhone 6/6 Plus combination of NFC, TouchID, and one-time codes produce a really fantastic, secure experience. Requiring a fingerprint for payments is as good as you’re going to get for quick and easy authorization, and Apple’s use of pseudo-card numbers and security codes is a fantastic way to protect your payment information from merchants. Combining that with the fact that Apple keeps no records of the transactions, Apple Pay is actually an excellent way to pay on an iPhone, either using NFC or for in-app purchases.

The Cameras

Photos

The iPhone 6 has the best camera on a smartphone aside from the 6 Plus. It’s really that simple. It consistently produces well-composed shots in all conditions, and it can easily stand up to any smartphone or point-and-shoot. I’m really happy with it. The 4S had virtually the same camera, although the 6 has larger, 1.5μm pixels, and benefits from improvements to the optics over the generations. Photos are still great quality, although the JPEG applied to them is sometimes noticeable, especially at full size. I wish Apple had selected a better quality setting.

Here are some shots from the iPhone 6 edited in VSCOcam:

Full size [1] [2] [3]

Video

The iPhone 6 can record 1080p video at 60fps with cinematic stabilization and auto-HDR, which increases the dynamic range of videos in difficult scenes. The video looks fantastic and the stabilization is superb. The audio bitrate is pretty low, around 63kbps AAC, which is decent for speech but not much else. All in all, though, this is the best quality video I’ve seen on a smartphone, and it has pushed me to film more often. I like that.

Slow-Motion

The slow-motion options on the iPhone 6 are spectacular. You can record 720p video at 240 or 120fps, slowing things down by a factor of 8 or 4. You can also take the 60fps video mentioned above and slow it down to half speed, but that requires a computer. The video you get out is pretty good quality, though obviously not as cinematic as the standard video, but the 240fps slow-mo produces some amazing shots that you’d never see otherwise. The ability to carry a tool like this in your pocket is really amazing.

A video posted by Ryan O'Shea (@ryanoshea) on Dec 29, 2014 at 6:00pm PST

Timelapse

Prop your iPhone against a window, lock the exposure, and press record. Wait as long as you want, and you’ll get back a timelapse video between 15 and 30 seconds in length, where the playback speed has been dynamically adjusted based on how long you’ve been recording. It’s a really great effect, and a nice feature to have

Odds and ends

Since the 4S, the iPhone has added a dual-LED flash that makes lighting warmer and more natural, especially on people. Burst mode is also nice to have, to make sure you get the best shot, and the iPhone 6 does a good job of selecting the best shots from a burst to get the most smiles and least blur. Last, the front-facing camera was upgraded from VGA to 1.2 megapixels, and combining that with the better tone mapping from the iPhone 6’s auto HDR feature, the front-facing camera can take decent photos.

iOS 8

iOS 8 deserves a full review, but I’ll just mention a couple of the things that I like about it. In addition to the features I’ve already mentioned, like Apple Pay and Health, iOS 8 adds share extensions, which were desperately needed, a more universal spotlight search, Notification center widgets, third party keyboards, and a whole slew of other features. I really like it, despite its initial bugginess.

It Just Works

Wrapping this up, the only conclusion I can honestly come to about the iPhone 6 is that it’s a spectacular phone. it has limitations and quirks, but I still think it’s the best smartphone on the market. It does everything well that it’s capable of, is tied to the best app ecosystem around, and it feels incredibly sleek, efficient, and fashionable while you’re using it. I can take it out and snap a quick photo in half a second and end up with a better quality photo than most smartphones can muster on their best day. I can go to the App Store confident that whatever app I’m looking for will be available. I can play a game and be blown away by graphics better than anything I’ve seen on mobile. I know I’ll be supported with iOS updates for years to come, until I’m ready to upgrade. Everything just works, and when it doesn’t, it’s either a bug that gets fixed in a month or a design limitation that I accepted when I chose iOS over Android. It’s a pleasure to use and it inspires me to do more and create more. I’m very happy with it.

"It’s easy to agree with [William Deresiewicz] that “the first thing that college is for is to teach..."

Mon, 22 Dec 2014 01:45:26 -0500

“It’s easy to agree with [William Deresiewicz] that “the first thing that college is for is to teach you to think,” but much harder to figure out what that means. Deresiewicz knows what it does not mean—“the analytical and rhetorical skills that are necessary for success in business and the professions”—but this belletristic disdain for the real world is unhelpful. The skills necessary for success in the professions include organizing one’s thoughts so that they may be communicated clearly to others, breaking a complex problem into its components, applying general principles to specific cases, discerning cause and effect, and negotiating tradeoffs between competing values. In what rarefied ivory chateau do these skills not count as “thinking”? In its place Deresiewicz says only that learning to think consists of “contemplating things from a distance,” with no hint as to what that contemplation should consist of or where it should lead.”

- “The Trouble With Harvard” — Steven Pinker’s excellent response to “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League,” for The New Republic

In the 2000s, the Microsoft Zune was one of the most frequently...

Mon, 27 Oct 2014 00:44:59 -0400

In the 2000s, the Microsoft Zune was one of the most frequently ridiculed products in the world. I’ve always found that funny, because the design (if not the market strength) was impeccable almost from the start. I can’t think of a single product line that so singly drove the design language of any major tech company as did Zune. Every major platform Microsoft produces now, including Windows, Xbox, and Windows Phone, has clear, deep roots in the Zune ecosystem’s design.

Not bad for a “failure.”

Photos from my family’s trip to Ireland Taken on an iPhone...

Mon, 01 Sep 2014 22:24:00 -0400

Shopping scene near Grafton Street, Dublin

Kylemore Abbey, Connemara

The Cliffs of Moher

Glendalough Monastery

The Lakes of Killarney

Dublin

Caha Pass

Slea Head, Dingle

Connemara

Photos from my family’s trip to Ireland

Taken on an iPhone 4S

My first week with Fitbit Flex

Thu, 07 Aug 2014 23:29:00 -0400

Last week, I decided to make a move on a decision I’d been debating for a while. I decided to get myself a fitness tracker.

I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for health metrics. I’m completely aware that gamifying parts of my life causes me to be a tad obsessive about them, but I feel that health is the one area where I could afford to be compulsively concentrating on improvement. I was a somewhat early adopter of Nike + iPod and continued using Nike+ to track my runs for six years. I’ve always felt that having my performance tracked gave me extra motivation to do better. In the last year, I’ve been using Sleep Cycle to keep track of my sleeping patterns.

So I decided to buy a Fitbit Flex.

Why I chose Fitbit Flex

Neither of these services were particularly intrusive or required much work on my part. Sleep tracking was a bit more intense than run tracking, because Sleep Cycle requires keeping my phone on my bed during sleep, but since both running and sleeping are activities with a definitive start and end, it wasn’t difficult to incorporate tracking into my routine.

I knew that a wearable fitness tracker would be different. Keeping tabs on all of my daily activity would mean not only wearing a tracker constantly but also potentially using the device and its software on a regular basis. For that reason, I knew that minimally intrusive hardware and high-quality software would be a priority. Each of the major players in the wearable fitness tracker world right now has their own suite of software, but for me, the iOS app is the most important, because that’s the point of contact I’d be using almost all day. I’d had some experience with Fitbit’s app before, and I liked the design and how it worked. More importantly, the metrics it focused on — calories in vs. out, steps taken, and active minutes — were right along the lines of what I was interested in tracking. The calorie metrics, accomplished through math associated with tracked activity compared with logged food consumption, are especially important for me, since they’re probably the most relevant statistics for weight loss goals. The fact that Fitbit includes GPS-enabled run/walk/hike tracking, much like Nike+, meant that I could easily incorporate the activities that I’m already concerned with tracking into their software.

The other trackers I was considering were the Jawbone Up24, Withings Pulse, and Misfit Shine. I’d spent time with the Withings and Jawbone software, but I didn’t end up likine either of them as much as I enjoyed using Fitbit’s app. Some were for tangible reasons, like a difference in what is tracked and prioritized by each app, while others were more subjective. I prefer Fitbit’s clean, iOS 7 design over Jawbone’s more customized look. I didn’t do an exhaustive comparison of the software and features, but in a quick survey, the Fitbit’s offering was everything I needed.

Hardware was a big factor in my decision. I like very much that the Fitbit Flex’s band is a $15 replaceable piece, while the device itself is half the size of a USB flash drive. That means that after years of wearing it, even if the device wears or gets damaged, I can have a virtually new Fitbit just by replacing the band. The Misfit Shine and Withings Pulse also offer this convenience, but the device with the most similar form factor to the Flex, the Jawbone Up24, is one solid piece of hardware. Granted, the Jawbone looks fantastic, but it has a reputation for failing hardware and disappearing caps for its headphone jack connector. I really prefered the slim styles of the Flex and Up24, since I ideally wanted this device to be as out of the way as possible. The Pulse is much more like a smartwatch than the other options, with a full band, but the orientation of the display — laterally across the wrist — inspired doubts about how natural using the device would feel. The Shine, on the other hand, is more understated, with a smaller band, but when worn on the wrist, it looks exactly like a watch. If I’m going to wear a device that looks like a watch, I’d like it to at least tell me the time. That’s not the case with the Shine. After these thoughts, it became obvious that the bracelet form factor offered by the Flex and Up24 was what I wanted. For the reasons I already stated, the Flex seemed to be the best choice for me. While the Jawbone seemed to be a fashion item unto itself, the Flex was a more understated, utilitarian accessory designed to stay out of the way.

Another factor was price. The Flex and Shine retail for $99, while the Up24 and Pulse both sell for $129.

I didn’t spend too much time assessing and comparing each in detail. I had my reasons, mainly that I wanted this thing to be as out of the way as possible, and the Flex seemed to fit that description well enough.

Features

The Flex’s primary activity is tracking steps. In fact, that’s all it does, with the exception of sleep tracking at night. The software does everything else. It syncs with your phone using Bluetooth Low Energy either all day in the background or each time you open the app, if you’d like to save battery. The software takes that data and uses it, combined with information about your body and tracked workouts, to calculate your steps taken, calories burned, distance traveled and active minutes. Alongside that, the app allows you to log your food eaten, and weight. If you’re good about it, you can get a really good idea of what kind of calorie deficit you’re sustaining on average and how it’s affecting your health. Combine that with a weight goal, and Fitbit can suggest how many calories you should be eating on a given day and what kind of results you can expect to see.

The Fitbit does step tracking well. Just like any pedometer, you can fool it, but the Flex’s algorithms do a fairly good job of only counting real steps. It uses those to give a fairly good sense of when you’re active throughout the day.

Logging food is dead simple. You search Fitbit’s database for the food you ate, tell it how much you had in real-life terms (number of chips rather than counting ounces), and optionally when you ate it. Then it uses that information to tailor its suggestions for your diet.

Workout tracking uses your phone’s GPS to track location, while your Flex tracks your steps. In the end you get a nice breakdown of how the workout impacted your daily fitness metrics, which you can see below. You also get the usual statistics like distance, time, and pace, alongside a map of your route.

The Flex also does a decent job of tracking sleep, but compared with specialty apps like Sleep Cycle, it can seem a little lacking. It gives you an indication of when you were asleep, restless, and awake throughout the night, but it doesn’t translate that information well into an indication of how well you slept (the website does this, but it doesn’t use as much data to calculate as Sleep Cycle), or give you a chance to add notes to each night so you can get a sense of what factors might affect your sleep. Still, placing the Flex in sleep mode is a matter of a few taps on your wrist, and it helps shape your calorie statistics, so it’s no problem to track sleep with the Flex as well as Sleep Cycle.

Overall, the software is very nice. I knew that with a fitness tracker, the biggest obstacle would be whether I’d be willing to keep using it after a few months. Software that gets in the way or demands too much for daily use would be the last thing I wanted in the Flex. And I’m happy to say that the Fitbit app does a good job of staying out of the way. You can log things you want, like workouts, food, and water, but all of those are optional and the step tracking and its associated statistics are all automatic. Even sleep tracking requires just tapping your Flex before bed and when you wake up. The software is good enough, though, that a week and a half later, I’m still manually entering things like food because of the value those metrics provide.

Hardware

The Flex is nice. It’s lighter than a normal watch, and thinner than a watchband. It comes in any color you want, but I chose black. The band uses a separate metal clasp to join the ends and you can fit it to your wrist fairly precisely. There are also two sizes of bands for different wrist sizes.

The tracker itself is tiny. It’s about half the size of a flash drive, but even that seems a bit large. It’s about an inch long by a centimeter wide. The display consists of just 5 LEDs. There are only two things you can do with the device: double tap to check your progress towards your daily step goal or continuously tap for a few seconds to toggle sleep mode. That’s it! It’s dead simple.

The battery in the Flex is really great. Fitbit claims it lasts 5 days of normal usage on a charge. Mine lasted a full week, and I cut that streak off right when it notified me of low battery. Apparently, it can last up to a day after that warning shows up. So, in other words, the battery is great.

Finally

I’m really, really pleased with the Flex. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy a fitness tracker this much, but I’ve found getting in the habit of measuring my fitness and diet easier than expected. Now that I’m tracking things like my net calorie intake, I’m finding it quite easy to identify and correct the places in my routine where I was letting unhealthy habits go unnoticed. Obviously, any attempt at getting fit and losing weight is dependent solely on willpower, but the goal-oriented nature of Fitbit does a good job of enticing you to keep track of what you’ve done. Since the step tracking always continues as long as you’re wearing the Flex, it’s hard to just give up and stop tracking your intake.

For now, at least, I can see myself continuing to use the Flex as a key tool to improve my health. And overall, I’m extremely happy with it. If you want a wrist-based fitness tracker, go for the Fitbit Flex.

PostScript: The first Flex I received from Fitbit was plagued with some hardware bugs, including battery drain and sync problems. I contacted Fitbit customer support by phone, and without any questions other than asking whether I’d tried resetting it, they shipped me a free replacement. The level of customer service I experienced, combined with stories I’ve heard from users on r/fitbit, lead me to believe that Fitbit takes customer service seriously. That alone is a great reason to lean towards Fitbit, if you’re still not convinced.

Google’s new Material Design initiative is certainly...

Sun, 20 Jul 2014 20:11:50 -0400

Google’s new Material Design initiative is certainly promising. A coherent design across third party apps is something that Android has needed for a while. But Android has serious competition from the iOS ecosystem. iOS 7 has been out for less than a year, and already, almost all popular apps have adapted to the new design language and created their own designs that work well with the language of the new design. It will be interesting to see if Android’s ecosystem can step up to create an equally great end-to-end experience.

Here are some of the best-designed iOS 7 apps on my phone.

"74% of millennials, according to Reason, want the government to guarantee food and housing to all..."

Thu, 17 Jul 2014 08:56:00 -0400

“74% of millennials, according to Reason, want the government to guarantee food and housing to all Americans.”

- Ana Marie Cox

Conservatives might have most of this country convinced that staying alive in the US is something you have to earn, but apparently, they haven’t convinced Millenials. I’m happy to see this particular statistic.

"It’s not that the government should never act in secret. Quite obviously that’s neither advisable..."

Thu, 10 Jul 2014 14:48:00 -0400

“It’s not that the government should never act in secret. Quite obviously that’s neither advisable nor practical. But when it comes spying on citizens by the government — which has the power to take away one’s life, liberty, and property — it would be irresponsible of us to assume that because our view is obscured, there is nothing to see.”

- Michael Luciano on why yesterday’s fantastic Intercept piece on the NSA targeting prominent American Muslims is good journalism

"The five Americans whose email accounts were placed on the list come from different backgrounds, and..."

Wed, 09 Jul 2014 14:22:04 -0400

“The five Americans whose email accounts were placed on the list come from different backgrounds, and hold different religious and political views. None was designated on the list as connected to a foreign power. Some have come under sharp public scrutiny for their activities on behalf of Muslim-Americans, and several have been investigated by the government. But despite being subjected to what appears to be long periods of government surveillance, none has been charged with a crime, let alone convincingly linked to terrorism or espionage on behalf of a foreign power. Taken together, their personal stories raise disturbing questions about who the government chooses to monitor, and why.”

- Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain for The Intercept, reporting on 5 prominent Muslim American citizens whom the FBI targeted for NSA surveillance

So far, we know how the NSA spies on American citizens. We know the tools they use and who cooperates with them to enable it. We know how powerful US law is in forcing companies to comply with surveillance. We know that these tools and legal frameworks come together to create a powerful surveillance dragnet that collects the private communications of millions of people every day. We know that the NSA uses this dragnet on American citizens, whether it’s in a general manner during wholesale collection of metadata or in a semi-targeted fashion by monitoring Americans who have contact with suspected foreign threats. We know that the NSA has broken its own policies for protecting Americans from unwarranted surveillance thousands of times. We know that all of these things together form possibly the most dangerous threat to American civil liberties, individual freedoms, and protection from oppressive government in the world today. And now we know that this system consciously has been used to spy on prominent figures in the Muslim community, a massive cultural group that the government unofficially sees as dangerous, even if those figures have no demonstrated ties to terrorism, espionage, or any other activity normally warranting surveillance.

The cry of privacy advocates who find the NSA’s actions to be dangerous has always been to warn that the systems designed to protect us from dangerous foreign elements could be abused and turned against innocent American citizens. And with The Intercept’s reporting today, it has become clear that this is possible.

We don’t know why these individuals were targeted. But we do know that FBI and NSA have documented histories of viewing Muslim-Americans as potential threats simply because of their heritage. And the fact that the NSA’s massive surveillance apparatus can and has been used against people with no ties to the types of activities it was built to prevent against is evidence of how dangerous it could be for the average citizen.

Relevant:

My last essay on the topic of NSA surveillance in the wake of the Snowden leaks

All of my posts related to the NSA

Go Watch Marble Hornets Last week, a web series called Marble...

Wed, 02 Jul 2014 15:58:00 -0400

Go Watch Marble Hornets

Last week, a web series called Marble Hornets ended. It took 5 years, 87 entries, 2 YouTube channels, and 555 tweets to finish. You should go watch it.

Over the course of those five years, 3 amateur filmmakers created 3 seasons of a real-time fictional web video series consisting of YouTube videos uploaded one by one. Marble Hornets was promoted as a horror series, but really, it was more than that. The first season was one of the most terrifying pieces of entertainment I’ve ever watched. The creators managed to instill bone-gripping fear in their viewers for nearly every moment of every entry, all while telling a story so intriguing that no one wanted to stop watching. The next two seasons morphed into a mystery series with all of the excitement of the first season. The story was simultaneously too supernatural to believe and just real enough to keep you wondering in the back of your head, “is this really happening?” The five year timeline arose not simply because of production, but because the events in the series were supposedly happening in the present day, with each entry often serving as a handheld camera account of what had happened to the channel’s owner in the past few days. The actors aged and changed in real time over the life of the series, and the entries coincided with tweets from the the narrators, giving Marble Hornets a sense of realism that television shows can’t come close to achieving.

Marble Hornets combined the style and mythological themes of Blair Witch Project with the creativity of the most viral internet phenomenon and the utter dread of the closing scene of The Silence of the Lambs. When I first was shown it, I wrote it off as another dumb YouTube series. Five years later, I’m writing about it. So, if you have a chance, give it a shot. You might enjoy it. And if you’re lucky, you might not be able to sleep very well tonight.

Marble Hornets YouTube Channel: The entries
Marble Hornets Twitter
Marble Hornets Wiki: This might help you get into the series.
Shameless plug: A poster for the series I made a few years ago

Why Can’t I Buy A Movie?

Sun, 29 Jun 2014 23:18:00 -0400

When the music industry moved into the digital world, consumer pressure eventually forced them to sell an accessible, high-quality product at a reasonable price. Everyone in technology predicted that the same would happen to Hollywood.

It hasn’t.

How music became friendly

The early 2000s were a nightmare for digital music. The RIAA and the studios it represented were clinging desperately to the album model of music sales while early MP3 players and the iPod forced them to reconsider their options. Some rallied against ripping CDs to restriction-free digital files, as the rising popularity of file sharing over the Internet provided an easy avenue for pirates to distribute songs without having to buy the CDs. They even went so far as to plant malicious rootkits on CDs that would implant themselves on customers’ computers and prevent them from getting music off of CDs. When digital downloads finally got label support, the files you could download were terribly low quality and were tied down by strict DRM that limited where the files could be played, how they could be copied, and who could play them. It was a nightmare for listeners. The easiest way to maintain a digital music collection that could be played on any device was, unfortunately, to pirate it.

Consumer and business pressure gradually changed this landscape. Today, it’s perfectly legal to rip music at any quality from a CD and put it on any device. Music purchased online from any store is completely DRM-free and uses standardized formats like MP3, AAC, and even lossless formats FLAC and ALAC. Artists can distribute music in digital formats on their own, through a label, on any of the mainstream online stores, and through physical media. For the cost of listening to periodic ads, users can steam virtually any song for free on various streaming services. For $10 per month, they have access to the same massive catalog on any device on demand without ads. Getting music today is relatively easy and fair, as it should be, and the incentive to pirate is greatly decreased.

iTunes songs, encoded without DRM in the standard AAC codec play perfectly in 3rd party media players like VLC.

I can’t download a movie the way I want

The movie industry has always been a few years behind music. Some of this is technological — transferring a movie over the Internet is orders of magnitude harder than doing the same for a song. It wasn’t until this decade that the average user’s computer was even capable of playing an HD movie. As buying music became increasingly consumer-friendly, everyone in the tech press operated under the assumption that the movie industry would be quick to follow music labels in opening up to consumer wishes.

Instead, while access to music is affordable and open, buying movies is a terrible experience. I stumbled across this while trying to buy The Wolf of Wall Street earlier this year. Here are the options for buying a major studio movie right now:

Blu-Ray: This is the gold standard for video quality. A copy of a movie in on a Blu-Ray is generally the highest quality available to consumers. These contain 1080p video at a very high bitrate, normally around 40-50 mbps. The video files are encrypted, and unlike with music, ripping them from the disk is illegal. To play a Blu-Ray, you need a licensed, often quite expensive player, hooked up to an HDTV with the licensed ability to decode the encrypted video sent over HDMI. It’s a content creator’s dream, and a nightmare for anyone who thinks owning a movie should allow someone to watch it wherever and however they want.
Retailer Digital Copy: Buying a movie is easy these days through a content store like iTunes, Google Play, or Amazon. Each of these services allow users to watch what they buy on virtually any form factor, with limitations. For example, iTunes movies can be watched on a TV and smartphone, but only through Apple TV and iOS devices. Amazon Instant Video can be watched on TVs, but only through players that integrate with their VOD service. The problem here is obvious: building a movie collections requires buying into one of these providers’ walled garden ecosystems. In doing so, competition is eliminated. Users who buy their movies on iTunes and watch on Apple TV don’t really have the choice to buy cheaper movies on Google Play because they would need to buy compatible hardware to watch them the way they like to. Beyond that, the video quality on these services, which optimize the files for streaming, is far below that of Blu-Ray. In fact, the files are often on the order of 10× lower bitrate. And of course, they are entirely locked down with DRM and can only be played with custom software.

Media Player Classic, a popular media player, shows an error while trying to open a DRM-laden iTunes movie.

UltraViolet Digital Copy: In an effort to compete with streaming services like Netflix, the major studios have collaborated to support a service called UltraViolet, which serves as a digital locker for a movie library, making user’s movies viewable (on approved devices with custom software) anywhere they want. The movies themselves can be purchased any any of a number of participating online stores, including Target Ticket and Flixster. Despite the good design surrounding this platform, the actual viewing experience suffers greatly due to clunky technology and DRM. The UltraViolet digital copies that come alongside Blu-Ray movies, for example, are almost always SD, rather than HD, which to me is just unacceptable. Flixster at least allows watching on a TV via Chromecast, but that seems to be almost a fluke of opportunity rather than a designed feature. You can watch on your computer through a custom piece of software that decodes the DRM, or on your phone through a similar app, but again, it’s impossible to mix your UltraViolet collection with an existing digital video collection due to the DRM.

The store on Flixster shows prices at various UltraViolet and non-UltraViolet stores.

Cable Provider On Demand: Cable providers offer On Demand movies to their subscribers, but these platforms are even more locked down than the ones listed above, even if they offer access on TVs, phones, and computers. Not only do users need to purchase an extremely expensive cable subscription to qualify to purchase On Demand movies, but the libraries are only accessible for as long as the customer remains a cable subscriber. This is clearly not a safe or affordable way to build a movie library.
Netflix: This one doesn’t need much explanation. A limited collection of films, determined by the studios, available to stream on any device for $8 per month. This is by far the most attractive option for many people. The limited selection and lack of offline ownership is made up for by the convenience of access to Netflix’s collection. It’s a great service, but it isn’t a solution for just-released movies and offers no permanent ownership.

These are effectively the only ways to buy movies currently. Every single option is tied down in some way or another. Blu-Rays are absolutely useless outside of a living room and can’t be played on anything but a TV with an expensive player. Movies purchased through iTunes or one of the other online companies are tied down to hardware and software offered by that particular company. UltraViolet copies have similarly limited use, and like retailers, they offer lower quality experiences to end-users.

None of the current offerings come remotely close to offering the quality of experience and flexibility that currently accompanies buying music online. Every single service offers video encumbered by DRM, locking users into hardware and software options dictated by the provider.

What struck me as most surprising was that it is actually impossible to purchase a DRM-free, HD copy of a major motion picture in a standard video format, playable on all of your devices. There is no such store. Music and movies are fundamentally no different in terms of digital purchases, but the options for consumers couldn’t be any different.

Hollywood is fine with what consumers want

The surprising thing is that movie studios have shown that they will happily afford customers all of the freedoms that we ideally want from buying movies. Blu-Rays let customers view very high quality copies of films on their TVs. Digital copies on iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play allow them to watch movies on their computers and mobile devices. UltraViolet lets users keep collections of movies in the cloud, watch them on generic hardware, download offline copies to keep hard libraries, and provide a way for stores to competitively sell the same formats to consumers.

The studios are selling users products that let them do all of things I’ve asked for in this article, though none of them allow users to do all of them with a single purchase, like they can with music they purchase.

No one cares?

I’m honestly surprised that so few in the tech or even mainstream press are talking about this. Obviously, it isn’t the biggest problem in the world, but there isn’t anywhere near the kind of outrage we saw when the music industry was crippling products to fight piracy. I’m somewhat disappointed, hence this article. The difference between buying a song and buying a movie is striking, and it shouldn’t be. In a world where consumers are empowered to fight against restrictive systems, it’s increasingly odd that the movie industry still has such a tight grip on their startlingly poor offerings when nearly every other consumer technology product offers a much higher level of service to customers.

Moving forward

The most commonly offered argument against selling DRM-free movies is piracy. The idea is that unrestricted formats would allow users to share their movies easily online. The same argument was made for music before digital downloads became DRM-free. The fact of the matter remains that pirated, HD, high-quality copies are easily available on hundreds of sites on the day movies go on sale at stores. There is no way that the situation could get worse for the studios. So now, the only option for them is to do what the music industry did, what they should have been doing all along. Instead of restricting the content further, making it harder and harder for customers to enjoy the movies they purchase, the industry needs to embrace open access and standard, DRM-free formats. The increase in convenience will deter piracy more than any technological restriction ever could. It’s been shown multiple times that the way to combat piracy is to offer customers a higher quality product. In this case, that means allowing them to use their movies in any way they want, on any device they want, instead of forcing them into the utter mess of walled gardens and complex restrictions that is available to them now.

Hopefully consumers can effect this change through their wallets by avoiding the lackluster buying options currently available to them. The popularity of Netflix will hopefully play a role in showing the industry what it needs to do. For now, that isn’t much of a solution, but we can hope the situation will improve over time.

"Held: The police generally may not, without a warrant, search digital information on a cell phone..."

Wed, 25 Jun 2014 11:18:56 -0400

“Held: The police generally may not, without a warrant, search digital information on a cell phone seized from an individual who has been arrested.”

- Riley v. California, Supreme Court of the United States

The Supreme Court ruled today that police need a warrant to search a suspect’s cell phone, which might be the first substantial improvement in the privacy of digital information in years.

It’s still unclear whether those protections apply to information accessed via a cell phone but stored on a private company’s servers. That doesn’t seem to be the case, which leaves the door open to the NSA’s surveillance practices.

Office 365 University is the best deal in software

Tue, 24 Jun 2014 14:15:00 -0400

I’m absolutely blown away by Microsoft’s University pricing option for Office. Here’s what it is.

You need a .edu email address to qualify. It costs a single $79.99 fee, and for that you get the following for four years:

You get full versions of most of the Microsoft Office suite — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, Access. With the first four, you’ve already met the office productivity needs of virtually everyone working outside of an enterprise setting. On top of that, you get the latest updates to those programs for the full four years. If Microsoft releases Office 2015 next year, you’ll get those updates for free. You can also download on-demand versions of Office programs on any computer with an internet connection that let you use the full functionality of Office on computers that you don’t own. The Office Web Apps also provide a decent subset of this functionality.

Let’s stop here for a second and consider the value. Office is one of the most essential pieces of software for anyone. There are alternatives, of course. LibreOffice/OpenOffice are decent substitutes for people who don’t mind the lackluster interfaces. Google Drive provides alternatives for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that are pretty good, but editing with them is harder than using Office and their feature set is limited. I’ve tried to replace Office for years and have always failed in the end. I, and most people in the world, would be willing to pay hundreds for Office alone.

But we’re just getting started.

For the last few years, Office has been tied pretty tightly to OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive), Microsoft’s Dropbox alternative that supports file backup and mirroring across devices, cloud access, and collaborative online editing. The collaborative part isn’t nearly as seamless as Google Drive, but it does work well. And you can always pop over to Google Drive for your collaborative documents.

Up until this month, Office 365 University customers were allowed 20GB extra storage space on OneDrive, up from the 7GB given to free users. That was already a lot of space, but now that total has been increased to a 1TB. Most Office 365 plans will now come with 1TB of OneDrive space for the duration of the subscription. Just think about that. What was once $80 for four years of Microsoft Office now gets you 1TB of cloud storage for whatever you’d like for that time as well. There isn’t a cloud storage company on earth that currently comes close to that price with the access speeds and feature set that OneDrive has.

Some other odds and ends: you get 60 Skype world minutes per month to 60+ countries; tech support is free; and Office programs can be installed on 2 computers (and used on others via Office On Demand and Office Web Apps).

I bought Office 365 University back in December, and I’ve always thought it was a great value. I hate paying for software, so I always try to use alternatives, but Office was one that I always kept coming back to. I hate software subscriptions even more. But $80 for 4 years of use and free updates is absolutely a great deal for one of the most popular pieces of software in the world. In the software world, it’s way out of the norm. Adobe Creative Suite used to cost on the order of $5000, and now Creative Cloud costs $50 per month. Sublime Text costs $70 for a single license, if you want to get it out of shareware mode. The idea of getting a software suite this large for about 60¢ per month is fantastic. The idea of getting that and what amounts to a terabyte Dropbox folder is absolutely astonishing.

And that’s why Office 365 University is the best deal in software.

"The Swat team that burst into the Phonesavanh’s room looking for a drug dealer had deployed a tactic..."

Tue, 24 Jun 2014 09:05:00 -0400

“

The Swat team that burst into the Phonesavanh’s room looking for a drug dealer had deployed a tactic commonly used by the US military in warzones, and increasingly by domestic police forces across the US. They threw an explosive device called a flashbang that is designed to distract and temporarily blind suspects to allow officers to overpower and detain them. The device had landed in Bou Bou’s cot and detonated in the baby’s face.

‘My son is clinging to life. He’s hurting and there’s nothing I can do to help him,’ Phonesavanh said. ‘It breaks you, it breaks your spirit.’

”

- US police departments are increasingly militarised, finds report – The Guardian

How to install all of your programs on a new Ubuntu machine

Mon, 23 Jun 2014 11:53:00 -0400

A while back I used Ubuntu as my primary operating system, and I found myself needing to re-install Ubuntu quite often, whenever I’d muck something up. This trick saved me quite a lot of troubles back then, and it still works, but it’s fairly difficult to parse a good solution from the various forum posts floating around out there. So, here is what I used to do to completely restore my Ubuntu installation when re-installing.

To get a list of all currently installed packages:

$ dpkg --get-selections > packages.list

To restore all of those packages on a fresh system:

Note: Make sure any custom PPAs you’ve added are added first. APT can’t grab your packages if it can’t find them.

$ dpkg --set-selections < packages.list
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get upgrade

After this, all of those packages will be installed on the new machine. To configure them the same way they were on the old machine, copy your old home folder over to your new system. Any applications you installed outside of a package manager will have to be copied from /opt or wherever they were installed manually.

Today, I received an email update from a bug I’ve been...

Tue, 10 Jun 2014 22:53:00 -0400

Today, I received an email update from a bug I’ve been following on the Chromium Project (the open-source codebase that constitutes Google Chrome) almost since it was filed.

The issue: since it was released, Chrome has been using the Windows XP-era Microsoft ClearType text-rendering engine on Windows computer. This wasn’t a problem for a while, but once modern websites and web typography matured past the use of web-safe fonts, it became a real issue. ClearType was a remarkable advancement when it was released. It replaced the horrible, jagged text on Windows XP machines with a smoother, more pleasant rendering. As fonts became more complex and diverse, ClearType began to show its weaknesses. When Windows 7 came along, it introduced DirectWrite, a new rendering technology leveraging a computer’s GPU to refine the edges of text displayed on screen. The results are wonderful. Fonts on Windows 7 and 8 machines look precise and highly readable.

The problem remained, though, because not every program on a PC had been written to take advantage of the DirectWrite engine. Chrome, in particular, was a notable offender because of its ubiquity and the seemingly vast developer resources behind it. I was one of the many who had complained about it. But for years, nothing substantial was done.

But now, 5 years since the original bug calling for DirectWrite support was filed, the feature has been implemented and is enabled by default on the latest Chrome Canary build, which will be moving into the more widespread releases as Chrome’s development cycle continues.

I’m not sure why I felt so attached to this bug. I didn’t file it or have anything to do with resolving it, but it had bothered me for so long and I’d received so many emails updates from it over the years that I felt like I, if no one else, should commemorate it. I’ve been using the experimental feature for around a month now and can attest that the experience on Windows is greatly improved.