New phone- Send me all your numbers plz

If I see anybody ask something like this without good cause, the respect I hold for them is immediately docked.

Is keeping numbers really that difficult of a thing to do?

In at least 5 years I've gone through as many phones and I've never had to resort to copying numbers by hand, or indeed asking anybody for theirs more than once!

Although bluetooth is probably passed the point of being a novelty, it was one of the simplest ways of moving contacts from phone to phone. Any phone that had bluetooth should have the option to send all contacts. There, Simple. Done!

Bluetooth is no good when you no longer have the previous phone to take the numbers from. The next best thing would be to use whatever bundled software came with your phone. This should allow you to backup all contacts, and probably more to a computer This can get complicated if you get a completely different phone and have have to import/export, but at the very least you have a copy of your phonebook on computer.

The best place to keep a backup of contacts is of course online. Years ago I found my Sony Ericsson phone would sync contacts to Gmail. Since then I've never lost a contact. This lets me look them up online, and regain the entire phonebook on the numerous replacements that have gone through my hands since.

There's probably a way of doing this with any phone that has access to even the most basic internet, so don't say I didn't warn you!

Before flooding facebook with requests for numbers, it might also be worth a moments thought that there is in fact phonebook on facebook and your friends might well have put their number there (whether they realize it or not). Sorry guys, but asking everyone for their number over again is just getting a little bit last decade.

Screenshot or URL?

Like many other complaints and insults I've voiced in this medium, this is a small thing that has annoyed me much more than it really ought to.

When people share screenshot of something when they really ought to just have linked to a page.

It really is blindingly simple. If you expect anyone clicking your link to read any more than one or two lines, or look at ANY picture, then you're better linking them directly to that page or that image. Sending a screenshot might well ensure that people on the other end see exactly what you see but that's not necessarily what's best.
Sending a link instead gives followers the opportunity to see any images at full resolution, to see the full context of what you're sharing and ensures that the original source gets the hits they deserve for their content. Sometimes it gives me the impression that people are sending a screenshot just so that any interested party has to comment and ask for the link!

Of course there are some good reasons to send a screenshot. If you're outside of a browser that's a dead giveaway, since you don't really have any other option. Within the browser you really ought to be careful. Nearly everything is best shared by simply copying the contents of the address bar and sending that. Times you are right to use a screenshot are when you won't be able to recreate what you're looking at through a link, or if the page you're linking is likely to change an error or be taken down entirely, a screenshot will be the only way.

I guess I'm screenshot loosely- If you're only trying to draw attention to a particular part, you should crop (or use snipping tool) accordingly!

With your support, I aim to draft to send through parliament.
Thank you and goodnight

Fiddling with Dropbox

Just in case you've never heard of it before, Dropbox, I'll start off by saying that it's essentially 2GB free online storage. It works best with it's PC software, which runs in the background and doesn't really have much of an interface. What it does do is create it's own folder which is constantly synchronized with that online storage. It comes into it's own when you install dropbox on a second computer, meaning anything in the dropbox folder is then updated elsewhere too. In addition, anything in your Dropbox is then available on the website and via the mobile apps. 

I've used dropbox for ages without going on about it but I've become more actively interested after a recent update to the Android app. This means my phone now has the ability to immediately upload photos to my online storage as they are taken.

This was possible before but needed a third-party app. This update probably means Dropsnap will soon see it's last days. It's probably just as well, considering the Dropbox app has made it a much more simple process. There are only two settings to look for: 'Camera upload on' & 'upload by wifi & data/wifi only'. Immediately after I activated it, the app uploaded what I already had on the phone, and of course any new photos from then on..

My phone is configured to upload automatically while on wifi, and when at home I can take a picture and see it arrive on my laptop only a minute later.

Back in the real world, it's unlikely that I'd need to have the pictures so promptly. I have been quite pleased to find that any photos I've taken while I'm out are usually waiting for me on the computer, having uploaded themselves in the time between the phone coming in range of wi-fi and when I sit down.

Another way I've used this once or twice is to host images to use on the web. There is plenty of image hosting out there but the beauty of dropbox is that the contents Public folder can be directly linked, so there the image can be embedded wherever I like, or viewed on its own, with none of the intrusive borders you get on sites like yfrog. It can be a little simpler than uploading to these sites too, since there's no website to go to, just moving it to the public folder and right-clicking on any such file brings up the option to copy a public link, like this:

Which gives you something like this: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/19414945/Blog%26Twit/rclickdb.png
(yes, that is the URL of an image that shows how to get the URL of an image)


To be honest, Dropbox probably won't supersede twitpic as my twitter image sharing medium of choice but it does have some useful applications.

The meagre 2GB offered to everyone for free isn't that attractive, so I thought I'd offer a few tips on how to expand this as much as you can. The most effective way to get more space would of course be to pay for it which starts at $10 a month for 50GB.

Anyone in their right mind will of course be looking to get as much as they can for free, and there are a few ways to expand without lifting your wallet. There are a handful of triggers which reward additional space. I made my way up to 5GB without really trying to but it certainly helps that I've had mine for over a year.

The best place to start is of course on the 'get started' page, which lists a few tasks to complete. It might not make it clear that some of these will award you with more space though. For example, making use of the Photo Uploader on any platform, which will bring you an extra 500MB.

The most difficult of these tasks is to refer others to the service. You can be rewarded for 32 referrals and get 250MB for each! I'm yet to make any, so if you suddenly find yourself interested, you'd be doing me a favour by clicking one of the links I've scattered around.

That's about it for above board ways of increasing your space, but I do know of one less legitimate way of gaining space.
This paragraph probably isn't for you if you don't have a rooted android phone, so it might be worth overlooking. The forthcoming HTC One series of phones promises to better connect Dropbox and Android. More importantly, it comes with a 2 year, 23GB increase to the owners dropbox! Despite the fact that they aren't released for another 2 weeks, the software has already been leaked and developers at XDA have ported it to run on other phones! If you've already gone through the process of installing a custom rom, it might be worth switching to one based on Primo just to gain this reward. Switching back immediately afterwards hasn't yet been reported to revoke this reward.

G'bye- and if I have by some miracle convinced you to try out dropbox, you'd be doing me a big favour by giving me a referral.

Equilux

Though it's a seldom used term, I thought I'd write something about it since today happens to be the equilux. No, I hadn't heard of it either, but I was reading wikipedia and was perhaps a little too interested by it.

A similar, more commonly used term would be the equinox, which comes from the latin "aequus nox", meaning equal night. It's a little bit of a misnomer, since the it doesn't necessarily fall on the day which is the same length as the night. The equinox isn't really a day at all- it's simply the moment at which the sun crosses the equator. This Spring, that happens to be at 5:12am on Tuesday (20/3/12). That day where I am in Fife, Scotland happens to last 12 hours and 13 minutes.

The equilux is simply the day which lasts closest to 12 hours, which would make it today, as it lasts 11 hours 59 minutes.

This necessarily true of everywhere, however. It's certainly not true of anywhere in the southern hemisphere. I can only say with certainty that it's true for Scotland, and probably the rest of the UK. Sydney, Australia for example will have an Equilux on the 24th March, with the sunrise at 7:02am and sunset at 7:02pm.

Since the moment of equinox is the when the sun crosses the equator, it is not dependant on the observers location so it will be the same time worldwide. The only possible difference in this will be down to time zones, or the fact that my 2 sources stste different times! Wolfram states 5:12am, but Wikipedia and it's source state 5:14am. Go figure.

The reason that equilux and equinox are different is mainly because the sun is so big and so close. If all that light were to come from something that appeared in our sky as small as any other star, it would rise and set in an instant. It's the time that it takes such an apparently large disc of light to set that adds these extra few minutes onto the day closest to the equinox.

Had I simply read, understood and moved on, I guess that'd be the end of my blog post, but no. I went on thinking about it and for some reason or other I decided to challenge myself to figure out the subsolar point at equinox. That's where exactly on earth would see the sun as directly overhead at the time of equinox.

Possible places are immediately rounded down of course, since I'm giving myself the latitude for free. Since equinox is the moment the sun crosses the equator, the latitude of the subsolar point would have to be 0. 

Since the sun will be overhead this point at midday (by conventional solar time), it shouldn't be too difficult to make this calculation. The time given for equinox is 5:12am, so this place is 6 hours and 48 minutes ahead in time from 0 longitude (Greenwich meridian, therefore GMT). For calculation, put into the decimal 6.8 hours. (48/60 = 0.8)

Another known fact is that it takes 24 hours for the earth to rotate 360 degrees. So I can use this to work out the longitude, which will be the angle the earth will rotate in 6.8 hours.

Rotation (r) / Time taken (t) = constant

r1/t1 = r2/t2

r2 = r1/t1 * t2

( 360 / 24 ) x 6.8 = 102 degrees.

Going with the 

So the subsolar point at equinox is 102 degrees different longitude than Greenwich. This makes some countryside in Pangkalan Kuras, Indonesia the exact point I was looking for. I'm just amazed I hit land!

If you were thinking that the 2 minute difference between sources might have made a difference, I've checked that out too. The 2 minutes equate to 0.5 degrees of rotation, which in turn equates to about 35 miles west of the last link.