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Showing posts from December, 2014

Photos workflow on Android

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I recently switched from iPhone to a Xiaomi that runs Android. Taking photos is one of those things one uses the phone for and that too had to change. This was my iPhone workflow Take photos in Camera+ .  Review, delete or edit photos in Camera+. Save to camera roll (long process that may required manually preventing iPhone from sleeping). Dropbox then pushed the photos to the cloud (again, quite a pain, because iPhone may decide to go to sleep while doing it). Pick up Photos on a laptop, move them to a non-Dropbox folder. After all I do not have an unlimited Dropbox space. Use Total Commander to rename them and assign the time and date of when the photo was taken as the file name. Reason: one never knows when a photo editing software would change the times embedded in the jpeg. Camera+, for example, changes the file modification date but not, luckily the EXIF dates.  Use Picassa for final editing and organizing photos into native Windows folders. Photos are too important

Saving Battery on Android

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Android is quite liberal when it comes the use of battery power and tolerant towards apps that may want to run in the background. There are many apps claiming to save battery. But a few simple tricks using just the standard settings work as well. What is really important, however, is understanding how your phone or table work. While Awake There is not much you can do about conserving the power while you actively use your device. It just has to respond to whatever you are doing - reading books, browsing Facebook, snapping photos, watching videos or playing 3D games. There are a few things you can still do: keep screen brightness lower rather than higher. Just to keep the screen bright can use a half of all the power. If you have an OLED screen, make your backgrounds black. Standard LCD displays use a back-light that indiscriminately lights the whole back of the LCD panel and than the LCD just makes sure what gets through. OLED actively lits every pixel if it needs to be lit.

Data driven innovation:if you build it they will come

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  In the EU we are often accused of having big government and public sector; spending too much; collecting too much information etc. But there may be a silver lining to it. In the globalized competition among the states, of course it is important to improve the level of services, cut costs and reduce the red tape. But it is also important to make the best out of the situation. Which is that the public sector is sitting on a treasure of data which costs taxpayer money to collect and maintain and in many cases citizen effort to provide. Therefore it would be wise to make sure the data is either put to use or stopped being collected. It is highly unlikely that the governments would come with the only and the brightest ideas on what to do with that data. On the contrary, the growth around the internet has shown the tremendous potential of innovation in the private sector and the academia. Zagreb Summit In the beginning of December I took part at a Summit “ Data Driven Innovation in Southea