Otterbox Strada Unintentional Drop Test

I upgraded to a Samsung Galaxy S9+ a few weeks ago. I’ve always used a case on my phones but the screen on my last phone cracked after falling about 40cm onto a tiled floor. For this phone I wanted a bit more protection. I bought a number of cases, most cheap with the most expensive being the Otterbox Strada.

I’m not a fan of folio cases:

  • The front cover has to be opened to use the device.
  • The finger print reader can’t be used if the cover is tucked in the back.
  • If you’re taking a photo the cover has to be held upright out of the shot.
  • The volume up and down buttons in this case are too hard to feel. I bought the Edge Gestures app so I could easily change the volume when my phone is on my desk.

However, all is forgiven. This morning I was putting my phone in my shirt pocket when the pocket didn’t open as expected (ironically, partly due to the size of the case) and my phone fell to the tiled kitchen floor. It probably fell 140cm, hitting the floor at the bottom corner of the device. It bounced and landed on the front closed surface of the case.

I was expecting the worst but there isn’t even a scratch on the phone! I’m sure it’s partly luck that it fell in the right way but this case just saved me a €250 screen replacement so I’m happy!

Here’s a video review of the case by someone on Youtube:



Brexit: living in Spain

I’m in Malaga (great city, you should visit!) with Automattic, and I listen to podcasts.

Podcasts these days have adverts that are tailored towards the listener. A number of BBC podcasts I listen to usually don’t have any adverts when I download them in Ireland, but here in Spain they have warnings about Brexit for British immigrants in the country, linking to the UK Government Living in Spain page.

Hopefully it won’t be needed and Brexit doesn’t go ahead ..

Prodigy in Wonderland XIII

The death yesterday of Keith Flint left many shocked and reaching for their CD collections but I remembered that one of their songs was featured in a Commodore 64 demo.

Censor Design sampled Prodigy’s “Smack my Bitch Up” and used it as the sound track to the final part of their excellent demo Wonderland XIII. Click play on the video above to see it in action. It’s really amazing!

It’s worth watching the whole video but if the embedded version above doesn’t load at 7:33 then load it from here instead or here’s another video of the music played back by two SID chips which IMO sounds even better!

For those at the back who don’t know, the C64 was released in the early 80s but developers made it work magic and do things thought impossible, such as in this case playing sampled sound!

Edit (2019-03-22): Here’s a version of Voodoo People from Bad Boy by Samar Productions. Amazing what the SID can do!


No need for camera straps on the ISS

The astronauts living on the International Space Station are in a microgravity environment, so no chance a camera will fall to floor. Just leave it next to you until you need it again!

‘Course you might need velcro to keep the camera stuck to a surface for the same reason. Gravity won’t keep it down but air currents in the station will blow it around.


From the NASA live stream of the Dragon 2 capsule that has just docked with the ISS.


Selfies are easy too. 🙂

Lightroom: spot heal bug after DNG conversion

I discovered a bug in Lightroom!

If you apply the spot heal tool to an area in a RAW file (in this case, a Sony ARW one) and convert it to lossy DNG the spot heal will become a pink square. It’s easily fixed by applying the spot heal again but of course this shouldn’t happen.

While on the subject of Lightroom bugs, a long time ago I also noticed that the Transform tool acted differently on the compressed DNG version of a photo compared to the RAW (CR2) version. Hopefully that’s been fixed because that was a couple of years ago and I’m sure someone else has noticed by now ..

Oddities of C64 BASIC

1 BORDER=1

Can you tell me why the very short BASIC programme above has a syntax error?

1 BRDER=1

But then the one with a slightly renamed variable name is perfectly ok?

It turns out it’s one of the limitations of Commodore BASIC V2. As explained here:

Variable names were limited to two letters. Or, specifically, any variable name longer than two characters was truncated, so that MARKUP and MAINTOTAL would both point to a single variable named MA.

Can somebody confirm this? IIRC, the C64 could handle longer variable names, but it’s a long time ago so I could be wrong.

Correct, the first two letters of a variable name must be unique. Also, your example variable MAINTOTAL contains the reserved word INT which would produce a ?SYNTAX ERROR. —CarstenKlapp

http://wiki.c2.com/?CommodoreBasic

The word BORDER contains the BASIC command OR that cannot be used in a variable name!

I have no idea if I knew this back in the 90s. I presume I did but it had me scratching my head for 10 minutes last tonight trying to figure out why my BASIC programme wasn’t running.

The (re)discovery that variable names shouldn’t be longer than 2 characters long also explains the terse variable names I used in the BASIC portion of DMSREADER. We’re spoiled these days.

I also discovered that petcat doesn’t like uppercase BASIC commands but I have a nice Makefile now to compile BASIC and ASM portions of Disk Masher and copy them into a D64 for testing so it was a productive night.

From Rio to Waterfalls

Follow along from “I Go To Rio” to “Ritmo De La Noche” to “Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall” by Coldplay. I had no idea Ritmo De La Noche had such a history!

Of course there’s a C64 version! Maduplec of BUDS/NATO/Crest fame created a SID version of Ritmo De La Noche for his 1992 Glober demo. Every time I hear that song I think of that demo. I couldn’t find it on Youtube so you’ll just have to fire up an emulator to watch the spinning globe but here’s the SID tune!

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