I found myself in what is called a “meme battle” on Facebook last night.
Considering it was Facebook, the whole battle thing was some dude and all of his stock piled memes. None had anything to do with the conversation. None of the memes had any consistency, other than name calling and cussing. There was no flow to his posts. Just cussing and posting about how bad he burned me.
I on the other-hand took a slower approach and told a story with the memes.
He never understood it. Probably because he is a Facebook user at the peak of his computer knowledge and meme understanding. In his crowd I am sure he is “Hax0r”. or some mislabeled glorified pointless identification for his blatant a.d.d. stream of turrets memes.
I never got around to posting an old article I wrote about having consistency and or originality to your meme usage. One of those “Woulda Shoulda Coulda” things. Random image guy on facebook
folks, if you intend to post memes on Facebook, be consistent, have a story and relate to the topic. Not just random onslaught of pictures that you think “burn someone”.
Tag: picture
Are cell phone extended lenses worth buying?
Are you wondering if cell phone extended lenses are worth buying?
I was. So I bought one from eBay for just under $15.
8x Zoom is how the lens was labeled. Not so sure how they came up with that number.
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- Lense out of package
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- uncapped
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- Ready to mount
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- Over all size
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- Text on lense
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- Focus setting (sorry for flash but had to)
Took forever for the extended lens (telescope) to arrive but when it did, first thing I did was run out and and take photos of local band in Houston playing at a local club. Since it was the band’s CD release party, I had high hopes of getting good photos for my website (TruXter.Org).
Of course the packaging says “Mobile phone telescope” and has a picture of what looks like a blackberry on the cover.
What came inside the package was an actual telescope about 3 inches long and about 3/4 inch wide. The actual lens is about the size of a dime. A mounting frame that is spring loaded with an adjustable plate that locks by the turn of a screw to make sure the lens mounts directly over the cell phone There was also a small cloth which we can assume is for cleaning the lens of the telescope.
Here’s a sample of the photos in a dark setting (I have saturation issues I need to work out)
That photo was taken from about 20 feet away with zero zoom. The lady is Staci Butler from the Staci Butler Band
The next day, I took a trip to an place near Houston that has this old time feel to it and had hopes of taking some good pictures to share. Here’s a sample of the day time photos I took.
That photo was taken from somewhere between 80-100 feet away, without using zoom.
Any photos taken under 20 feet just come out horrible. This is definitely not an extended camera lens and is clearly a telescope for cell phones. The further the object is, the better the picture turns out.
No matter what your iso setting is, the dark settings for your pictures don’t have as good of a chance as you would have just taking the lens off and getting closer.
The focus feature just blows out my cell phones auto-focus. I tried tapping screen first then manually focus. I tried manually focusing then tapping screen and manually focusing again. Nothing made the pictures any better. I got a whole lot of shaky images that looked like I over zoomed the digital zoom and the blew the image up to pretend it was optical zoom. It definitely is not optical zoom. That setting on the side of the telescope is just for focus.
But bang for the buck, there is plenty good use for the telescope lens. I just currently haven’t much purpose in it. Not saying I won’t because I certainly will be looking for a good reason to use it. but fact is, this will not make you a better photographer.
Full review score of the Extended telescope lens for a cell phone.
Function: 7/10
Durability: 8/10
Look: 10/10
Value: 10/10
Useability: 3/10
Total score: 7/10
How do you disable Facebook tagging?
Since Facebook does nothing to stop the sunglasses spammers from tagging you in pictures,let’s help you prevent getting tagged in things you don’t want to be tagged in. Because really, you can get tagged in other things that are really popular and your phone starts buzzing all day long over something you don’t care about. Neat…. a picture of a cheeto that looks like a belly button….
On right side of your screen click the padlock. a menu will pop up (see next image)
At the bottom of the menu click that spot that looks like a disclaimer but says “See more settings”
On left side of the screen click on “Timeline and tagging”
Next you will see “How can I manage tags people add and tagging suggestions?” look to the right and you will also see these three things:
Review tags people add to your own posts before the tags appear on Facebook?
When you’re tagged in a post, who do you want to add to the audience if they aren’t already in it?
Who sees tag suggestions when photos that look like you are uploaded?
Change those to what you feel comfortable with.
To allow no one to see what you are tagged in turn the first option on. That will prevent people from posting tags to your timeline. The next one if it is set to “only me”. Doesn’t allow it to get any further.
The last one set to “no one”, allows no one to get suggestions to tag you in pictures. This forces the tagger to have to type your name and purposely mean to tag you in a picture. Even though they see that you clearly do not want to be tagged.
Years ago you could tell Facebook to not allow people to tag you in pictures. That was removed when Facebook was working on perfecting their facial recognition software back in 2008 or so.
So don’t count on Facebook allowing you to block tagging.
Does Simple Mobile block Cricket Pictures?
Okay, first encounter of this so i have to know if others are experiencing the same issue.
I have been sending pictures with my cricket phone to a female friend of mine who is using Simple Mobile and she has not been responding to them. So i ask her why she doesn’t respond and she says she never got them. She is sure it is cricket messing up. So I test sending her pictures with my work phone which is on Verizon and the pictures send fine. Next I send pictures from my Cricket phone to my Verizon phone and from Verizon phone to my Cricket phone and all goes well. Yet not one picture received to the Simple Mobile network.
From what i see all sms text messages transfer fine and fast but to send a picture from Cricket to simple mobile, no go.
Now understand that I am on the version of Cricket that uses the AT&T GSM sim card, not the old Cricket with no sim card (except 4g) using CDMA network.
So if you are experiencing or not experiencing this please respond below so I get a grip on what is happening.
**Update**
I contacted Cricket and this is the tip they gave me to check my my APN settings to verify i am connected correctly. Sadly I am connected correctly. but nonetheless
Cricket Help: I will send you the APN settings , but this will work just for Cricket devices
Cricket Helps: Tap Settings > Mobile Networks (or Mobile Data) > Access Point Names > New APN (may have to tap Menu button to see this option).
Enter the following APN info:
Name: Internet
APN: ndo
Proxy: Not Set
Port: Not Set
Username: Not Set
Password: Not Set
Server: Not Set
MMSC: http://mmsc.aiowireless.net MMS
Proxy: proxy.aiowireless.net
MMS Port: 80
MCC: 310
MNC: 150
Authentication type: Not Set
APN type: default,mms,fota,hipri,supl
Note: on the above APN type be sure to enter it exactly as it is listed& don’t include any spaces!
Tap Save for the new APN.
Go back one screen to the APN list and tap the dot to enable this APN.
Reboot the device.
Test data and MMS.
Nope, did not work.
Woman calls her ex 77000 times in a week
There is a photo circling Facebook that has a woman’s arrest mugshot, and she is crying. The photo’s text says she is a woman who called her ex in excess of 77,000 times. and sends him over 41,000 text messages and 647 letters in 7 days. and somehow gets arrested by police.
Image text goes as:
USA: WOMAN ARRESTED FOR CALLING HER EX-BOYFRIEND 77000 TIMES IN A WEEK
(picture of crying woman here)
Albuquerque| A New Mexico woman was finally arrested this morning by officers of the Albuquerque Police Department in what could be the most extreme case of stalking ever recorded in the history of the country. The 28-year old woman allegedly not only called her ex-lover a formidable 77639 times in a week, but also sent him 1937 emails, 41229 text messages, 217 sung messages and 647 letters in the same period.
This is fake. She would be calling every 7.7 seconds with zero time for sleep in a week, then in the same time texting him every 12 seconds. While writing an email every 20 seconds. It is humanly impossible.Who she is. she is the lady in the mcdonalds video that flipped out in the drive through back in 2010. The woman in the picture is named “Ciera Steed” . Feel free to search her name. My best results come when typing “Ciera Steed arrested” .
Let’s do the math. In seven days there are only 10,080 minutes. and there are only 60 seconds per each minute. This woman be hitting redial every seven seconds, and some time sthat isn’t even enough time for the phone on the other end of the line to start ringing. and she would be sending out a text message every 12 seconds. Meanwhile writing 600 letters, we can assume would be 9 letters a day, and somehow finding a break in her calls every seven seconds to leave a voicemail. Even if she was three people using three phones with the exact same phone number, it would still be impossible. Someone has to sleep eventually. and eat. and wipe after using the restroom.
There is currently no sign if this her ex-lover making this fake post, or the people in the McDonalds where she flipped out, or just some random troll on the internet who found a picture and went to town with it making a fake post. but this Facebook image post is false.
and after doing my handful of searches to get the information about this stalker photo I am sharing here, I have got to say… There are a ton of stupid people on the internet running websites.
There are greater than 5 pages full of people who think this image is real. 5 Google results pages (before I gave up) of people who really think that a woman can call her ex 77000 times in seven days.
Please share this link on the page where someone is sharing that image.
Woman calls her ex 77000 times in a week is false
Facebook Picture Tagging Issue
Facebook, the website that allows you to upload pictures, and videos. The website that allows you to connect with friends. This place has additional functions such as marking the location you are and tagging friends that are with you when you post. There is also the ability to tag a photo of someone.
You can tag as many people as you feel like tagging in one location or one picture or in a picture that also has their location stated with a check-in.
The Problem
The issue with pictures being tagged with unsuspecting people in them, is it’s never a picture the victims like. EXAMPLES: Facebook Etiquette
facebook picture tagging is bad and it is a horrible change in our culture where someone else can give up your privacy. Any respecting person would not upload anyone’s picture to the internet without their permission. It does not matter if the person/victim already uploaded that same picture to their own profile. It is no one’s right to take that picture and then upload it to the internet where it will sit until the person who uploaded the picture decides to take the picture down. Some of us if we upload a picture of ourselves, we should have full rights to delete said picture if some day we notice something we do not like about that picture. No one should have that over anyone on the internet.
Far too much bullying can go on with a picture of someone going live on the internet, and everyone seeing that picture until the victim logs in and goes through the rigorous steps to have that photo removed.
Misleading pictures can be uploaded and cause divorces.
Parents disowning.
Showing a stalker where someone is.
Showing a bully where someone is.
Giving a bully a picture to work with while harassing the victim
ETC
Collages of friends, are stupid.. Stop it.what is this, 2006?
The fix
The fix for most of the issues, is if someone tags you in a photo, that photo should not be allowed to go live until you accept it.
Basically, the photo just won’t be seen by anyone but the person who uploaded it, and the people that are tagged in the photo. Many may allow it and accept the tag, but it still will not be seen by the victim’s friends and family, until the victim allows it.
This would stop the tag spam too.
Snapchat Review
Review of snapchat. A picture sharing application that seems to have a mild popularity amongst the newbies of tech.. People who don’t realize instagram, photobucket, imgur, facebook,twitter and the like already let you privately share images with specific people. but the software leaves the impression that you set a timer for your friend to be able to see the image, then poof, the photo is magically gone all of the sudden.
Snapchat is stupid.
No matter what a website says…. they always save the content you put on their servers. and we can download the images or screen shot them anyway.. so just send the damn thing to your friends… or use facebook or twitter.
The market is way to covered for this stupid app.
Parents, if you see a little ghost icon on your kid’s phone… Then you kid is sharing images they don’t want you to know about. and they think they have some catch 22 (remember when we thought every law’s kryptonite was us thinking we had this?) clause that makes them safer with this app. remove that app from their phone and threaten to give them a flip phone.. Or just give them a flip phone.
Snapchat Review score
Usability of the snapchat: 7/10
need for snapchat : 1/10
practiclity of the snapchat : 3/10
End score 3/10
Bill Gates Giving away $5000 to people on Facebook?
Is Bill Gates Giving away $5000 to people on Facebook?
I mean….. You saw a picture of Bill gates holding a sign saying that he will be giving $5000 to everyone who shares his picture on Facebook!!!!!
Sorry to tell you folks but you have been duped.
Do you know how many people have downloaded and re-uploaded that picture? There is no method known to man to find even 1/1000th of the people sharing that picture or even 1/100th of the people who have the picture in their personal albums.
The troll that is sharing that picture is currently at a few 40 thousand shares. The easiest way to tell it’s a troll, is the person sharing the Bill Gates (Facebook version) image personally are hostingthe picture in their photo album, saying “It couldn’t hurt” as if the way they are possessing and sharing the image is the same as just clicking the share button. Once a picture is in your personal photo album, it no longer adds to the count of the original image.
troll
and to top it off, they make it so you can’t comment to warn others that it is fake.
The image originally came from reddit, where Bill just did an “Ask ME Anything” visit to let people ask what they want to, and he tries to answer all or as many questions as he can.
If there is any question as to which Bill Gates image is the original. See the little guys he drew on the Reddit version? Look at the one on the right. That is the icon of Reddit.com
Look behind Bill, there is a plush version of that little Reddit on the dresser.
There is a phallic Device that has been photoshopped into the background and the sign he is holding is clearly typed on top of the image.
See it’s shadow? now look at the image with the phallic (Gigantic plug), why does it have the shadow of the plush toy?
No Bill Gates is not giving you $5000 for sharing a picture.
Please share this post in the comments section on facebook when you see the fake one get passed around. not to call your friends stupid, but to stop this from being a thing.
Why do Videos Load Faster than Gifs?
Why do Videos Load Faster than Gifs?
Codecs. Compression/Decompression is further along for video. a Video is a frame rate of 30 frames per second while a gif is typical 2-4 frames per second for the better gifs. But this leaves for a very large file for your computer to open at a rate of two frames per second. a simple 7 second picture could get up to anywhere around 50 megs or more. While a 50 meg video at a higher image quality can get to 10 minutes (and still be under 50megs). A nice quality single frame gif image is usually up to 2.5 megs. Imagine having 4 frames per second of 2.5 meg images.
At one time, a video on a computer was unimaginable. most computers couldn’t handle it. So, all we had were gifs. Our monitors didn’t display much better than the lowest quality gif, so gifs were just like videos by those standards, only easier to open. but
The Gif was obsoleted when everyone started putting effort into compression/decompression for videos.
but now we have a new generation of computers and computer users. We have mobile device users with screens so small that a gif actually looks decent on them. To the old school crowd, this is horrendous. Simply because they have been down this road.
The whole reason people study “history”.. Is so we don’t repeat it. but oddly enough, it seems every generation wants to pick up the old broken crap and say “I like it, I don’t see why you don’t.. You’re dumb” or. .. standards and i.q. get lower with each generation. Which means my grandpa was pretty dang smart.
Here is a small bit of information
“On June 15, 1987, CompuService, the first major online commercial service in the U.S., introduced the graphics interchange format (GIF). According to a recent Daily Dot article, the first-ever GIF pictured an airplane.”
The word is actually pronounced like “Jif” as apposed to the sound “guh”sound at the beginning.
Codecs for video are better than LZW used for gifs.
Basically, gifs are obsolete files that seem to be a retro trend right now because tiny mobile devices have such small screens you can’t see the flaws in the picture (each frame is a separate picture, for better quality you add more frames) as well as you could if you watched them on your computer.
For a couple seconds of a watchable gif, it takes a whole lot of images that can be barely compressed anymore than they are already at creation before they look like garbage. This makes the file quite large.
Videos can decompress in segments, gifs have to completely download before they are fully watchable. Unless you want the slow-motion version first, while this big hoopty of a file downloads. because you don’t need a media player to run a gif = no pause button, no buffering, no skip.Gifs are either open or closed. They do not buffer the way you understand how videos buffer.
Don’t forget bus rate and processing rate of your video card’s processor and how much temp data your video card can store up per milliseconds in your video card’s memory.
It is my suspicion that the people who make these gifs from perfectly good videos that load and play faster, are the hipsters of reddit.
Example:
I saw it first, I saw it so first, I made a gif of it before you saw it and made you sit through a shitty gif before it got shared on your petty site. If you had faster internet, you would love gifs.
Your rights, internet and Privacy
These days are certainly different days of the past.
This isn’t about phobias or conspiracies or anything you can use to belittle this. This is about self respect.
In the past we took everything to the highest level of precaution to avoid giving away our personal information . We refused to give up our date of birth, our names of any sort, and we kept our images to a minimum. In fear of identity theft.
We learned that there is a simple method of finding someone’s social security number simply by knowing where they were born, their name and the day they were born. Back in those days, a “security question” asking what your mother’s maiden name is, was a red flag. A darn good red flag. There is no reason for that question on any website. Especially banks. If they don’t need that information to give you credit, then they do not need that information for anything else, so they should never ask that question. even as a “security question”.
Today we give up everything and laugh at those who do not. We will post our face on the internet, our first and last name, pin our home address in public maps, we tag our family and share that information to the public as if it validates our love for one an other. We post pictures of people, without their consent and think it totally irrational for them to object. Don’t believe me? Ask someone not to post your picture and watch how they react. Typically they will act as if they agree with you, then they will fidget, and mock you for being weird or paranoid about it. They will then tell you that your are too attractive to not share your image, then they will erupt in anger to you. Then they will plea to you. Then they will disconnect themselves from you.
Try this. Take every photo of yourself offline. Request all of your friends to take down photos that contain you in them. If you think that part is too hard, then you might want to rethink your privacy thus far. Now next time you are a party, Avoid the cameras, because the person taking the pictures isn’t going to understand your wants of privacy. So it’s easier to just walk away from the pictures. When they notice what you are trying to do, it then becomes a sport to post your picture on the internet without your consent.
I have observed this for well on 18 years now. This is a fact. and it is very offensive the way people get with photos. and because I am so offended by it, it leaves me snapping at people who are actual friends or girlfriends when they just ask what they think is a very normal question. ” Why can’t I have a picture of us together online to show my friends and family what you look like”. Quite often they will assume you just don’t want to be seen with them. Which further proves how far we have sunken into just trusting things at the value they were described to you, instead of what we can see is really happening.
All of this, I blame on Facebook. In their methods of getting more information from you to sell to potential customers, they keep changing the way you use the site, and changing the rules to the site, so often you have no desire to read the rules and terms of use.ny allowing you certain features if ou give up other forms of privacy. They are the owners of Instagram and just announced a week ago that Instagram has the rights to sell your photos to advertisers who would like to use them in their advertisements. Offering you no compensation. Then with in hours they 360’d that claim and said they never would do such a thing. Just 4 years ago, Facebook made the same claim on it’s main site, and that option is still readily in their hands at all times. Just read the terms of service and see for yourself. Set private or public, those files are on Facebook’s servers and that server is their on their property. Last thing you want is your photo being misused by the highest bidder.
but none of that matters to you anymore. We have relaxed to a state that we now say ” I don’t care what you do with it”. as if Identity theft would be flattering, because you doubt it could ever happen. EVER!
Family tree websites that have you post information about your family heritage. It’s a group event to find our more about about your lineage and your family’s origin. It’s a way to find family members long lost and family members who didn’t even know they had cousins. but what is it really? It’s a spam farm. and that’s a it is. Those sites are created for the sole purpose of targeting spam. Sure you find a use for it that you believe you benefit greatly from but at what cost to you? to all of the family members you posted against their will or without their knowledge?
I for one, will not live my life that way. I have to much respect for myself, and I truly wish that some of you would also.
Here’s a few articles to enjoy.
Convenience or Security?
Why Convenience Is the Enemy of Security
Convenience or security: Who decides which is more important? (pssst, it’s not the end user)