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[twarh]

Mobile Photography: Here’s How I Do It

Shooting and editing photos as well as videos on smartphones is the future. In fact, this is a trend that a lot of leading online marketing giants have predicted to dramatically increase in the future. Simply put capturing, editing, distributing content from mobile devices is faster, _does not _tie you down to a studio desk, is well supported by App developers, and is greatly catered for by hardware manufacturers who are trying to improve mobile camera tech every day.

I make full use of my smartphone’s cameras and app when posting online. Till date, except one photo of the Himalayas, I think all the photos on my Instagram were shot on mobile. Here’s how I do it —

1. SHOOTING

1.1 Oil & Dust

All you need is a smartphone with a Camera. Protip when shooting: always wipe your camera lens with a tissue/handkerchief/your clothing before you take a shot. Trust me it makes a difference. Since smartphones are handheld devices, a lot of oil from your hands and dust from your pockets end up on the camera lens.

1.2 Specialised Shooting Apps

You can use the stock camera app on your phone, or you can download Adobe Lightroom on mobile because it allows more manual controls on exposure, shutter speed, ISO levels, and White balance, etc. Lightroom Mobile also lets you shoot photos and save them in RAW/DNG formats, which retain far more data for each shot and proves useful during post-processing as we will see soon. Lightroom is a subscription app, but you can trial the app for a month to see if you like it. 

There’s another app that I use called Hydra on iPhone. Hydra takes a series of photos varying the exposure programmatically from min to max. Then it stitches all the shots together to create a HDR image. This really helps getting an image with Shadows and Highlights both equally visible.

1.3 Camera Shake

Holding the phone stable is the biggest factor during the shot. Getting a simple mobile tripod can help immensely. 

But you can’t always find a flat surface to put your tripod on. A gimbal / hand-held stabiliser certainly helps but they’re pricey compared to the improvement they bring on. Here’s an inexpensive trick to shooting slightly more stable shots — use the self timer. The movement of your finger to the onscreen shoot button causes enough micro-movements to ruin a low-light shot (with good lighting this shouldn’t matter). Using the self-timer you don’t have to press any buttons on the side, or on screen, you just focus all your energy in holding the camera still.

Note on Dual Cameras & Portrait Mode

Dual Cameras are the latest addition on nearly all flagship smartphones. I think the best in class are Google Pixel 2 XL (despite not having a dual camera, their dual pixel tech results in the same effect), iPhone 8+ and X, and the HTC U11. They all allow ‘Portrait Mode’ which is essentially taking photos with a shallow depth of field so that the background is blurred in that beautiful bokeh effect. If you want that effect, getting a dual camera equipped smartphone will help. However, I’ll point you to some apps in the Editing section that mimic this bokeh effect really well (on iPhones at least) but require you to handle the edge marking (painstakingly slow process when done manually).

1.4 Camera Accessories

You can also use some lens accessories on your mobile phones to get some exceptional shots. Although I do not personally own them, but I have come across enough posts on Reddit to know Moment lens are the best in the business for smartphone lenses. I particularly like their wide-angle, telephoto and fisheye lenses.

Once you take the shot, it’s onto editing. This is the portion that I spend most time on, because - though mobile cameras still may not be capable enough to rival DSLRs and professional camera equipment, a flagship smartphone’s processor and memory are quite capable when it comes to post-processing, so there’s a lot of things that can be done with it alone. App Developers are always releasing new unique post-processing apps for your photos.

2. EDITING

I’ll cover this portion in a subsequent post. My top tools for editing are Adobe Lightroom, Snapseed, Enlight, Tadaa SLR, VSCO and Instagram itself. Get these apps and have a play with them. Lightroom, Snapseed and Enlight, in particular are very powerful and impressive programs.

[twarh]

Google Chrome is the ultimate productivity booster

Often times, I find myself marvelling at Google Chrome. Google’s take on web browsers, that is jam packed full of extensions and apps; not to mention that it’s a fully capable, fast browser too. But this post is more aimed at Google Chrome’s extensions, because they are what make the browser amazing.

As I’m writing this, I glance over at my Google Chrome toolbar and spot 8 Extensions that I’m running. I’ve got my favourite Password Manager, LastPass, the instant push service that lets you send anything instantly to any one of your devices, PushBullet and the best web collector, Pocket.

I’ve also got 2 Evernote extensions - Clearly, which spruces up any web page of clutter to help you focus on the text/content only (extremely helpful!), and Evernote’s Web Clipper, an very helpful tool for collecting interesting links, text, images, and even entire web pages to your Evernote… annotating them, sharing them… it does everything.

The last 3 Extensions are all exceptional in my opinion. The first one is the TunnelBear extension. It connects to the TunnelBear VPN service and turns any network activity in Chrome pass through a VPN, essentially securing my browsing and somewhat anonymizing it.

The second last Extension is called Markdown Here which lets you write in Markdown in many websites that do not allow easy, Rich formatting of text. I use it in combination with Gmail and Evernote Web, and it works flawlessly!

And the very last Extension is called uBlock which is the lightest Ad-Blocking Extension available. I used to used Adblock Plus before. And although it fulfilled it’s functionality, it did it in a pretty slacky way - ABP was slow, and extremely resource heavy. Given Google Chrome is a pretty resource hungry application on its own, ABP was just too much of an overhead to bear. So I switched to uBlock instead, and have not looked back! They support most platforms, and most browsers.

And that’s all of my Chrome Extensions!

There’s tonnes more Apps that I downloaded from the convenient Chrome Webstore. And through this combination of Extensions and Chrome Apps, I’ve turned my Linux Laptop 100x more productive on the web front.

Update: It’s 2017 and I use a new set of extensions altogether now. Maybe I’ll do another write up soon with what I have on my Chrome today :)

[twarh]

Fixing mounting errors with /etc/fstab

Recently came across this faulty SSD Optimization article online that basically asked to add some argumetns for each of the storage devices in the /etc/fstab.

The additional arguments being the noatime,nodiratime,defaults, and mode.

The article erroneously directed to put all the aruguments altogether without any delimeters.

This completely wrecked the boot process. After the HDD encryption was unlocked, it simply would not boot from the storage devices, since the mount flags were faulty.

The fix is to drop into the boot repair command line through advanced boot options and then edit the /etc/fstab file.

It wasn’t that simple though, since the /etc/fstab file was essentially corrupted because of the wrong boot flags argument(s), and so the fstab was loaded as read-only only.

To be able to write changes to the fstab after adding ’,’s between all the arguments, the storages have to be unmounted. To unmount storages -

mount -n -o remount /

But if the fstab is corrupted (which in our case it was) you have to specify the storages -

mount -n -o remount /dev/sda /

(replacing /dev/sda between sda1to however many partitions exist on the system for eg. sda4).

Save changes to fstab and reboot.

[twarh]

The Bluetooth module on my ThinkPad was shown to be hardware-disabled and after a lot of fiddling, I simply could not get it to work. Tried everything, depmod, rfkill.

Untill I came across this excellent post on the AskUbuntu stackexchange that outlined the fix for the E320 directly :D

[twarh]

Fan Control in Linux for ThinkPads

I’m a long time Linux user, and have recently started noticing that my development laptop’s fans never throttle up or down based on the workload. I’m running Linux Mint 17.2 on my old ThinkPad Edge E320, and I’ve noticed the problem to have existed in Ubuntu 14.04 to 15.04 as well.

Tinkering about, and rummaging through the ThinkPad’s various support forums and pages online led me to tpfan-admin, a GUI based fan controller that uses the thinkpad_acpi module in Linux.

I had previously tried using almost all solutions under ThinkWiki to no avail. But tpfan-admin sounded promising from the very start because it mentioned the thinkpad_acpi module, which I knew for a fact controlled a lot of hardware switches on my E320. 

Additionally, getting tpfan-admin is as simple as adding a PPA to the Ubuntu repo list, and updating apt-get. You have to get tpfan-admin and tpfand which is the daemon that actually monitors temp using sensors and controls the fan. tpfan-admin is just the GUI to set the fan throttling profile.

Installation Steps

Open up a Terminal of a Debian based distro and enter the following -

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:vl-sht/tpfanco sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install tpfand tpfan-admin tpfand-profiles

That should install tpfan-admin. Make sure to restart your system at this point to load the changes, otherwise trying to run tpfan-admin will throw error messages.

Running TpFan-Admin

Run as super user through Terminal -

sudo tpfan-admin

This is the GUI. Tick manual control if thats what you’re after and drag and click on the sliders to set boundaries and fan activity (0%-100%, with 100% being maximum fan speed). You can split regions on the slider to fine tune the fan speed for different temperature boundaries.

Now my ThinkPad fans whirr up a and down as the workload increases/decreases appropriately. I can actually hear the fan spin up a storm when I pushed it to 100% using tpfan-admin! Success!

Additional Resources:

I had to manually configure the thermal profile for my Laptop as the default hardware based automatic controlling was horrible. Apparently this is a SandyBridge issue for Intel Processors/Motherboards and a German Forum gives a patch for tpfan to automatically adjust SandyBridge hardware temperature monitoring -

http://thinkwiki.de/ThinkPad_Fan_Control 

http://thinkpad-forum.de/threads/121896-Projektvorstellung-Tpfanco-Wartung-und-Paketierung-von-tp-fan?p=1468596&viewfull=1#post1468596

Use Google Translate to read in English :D

[twarh]

Welcome to the Conduit

Hello and a hearty welcome to my small time blog, fair internet-traveller. I’ll be posting anything and everything that I find interesting on here.

I call it the Conduit because I see it as a tunnel from my thoughts to cyberspace!

:)