Shaine Mata Blog

 I recently wrote about my growing preference for using Google Keep rather than my long time and trusty Evernote. The problem with Evernote is that over time, it has accumulated features and a ton of notes. Evernote works well; but it is slow for me to use it for quick notes. Google Keep, on the other hand, is light weight and fast for quick notes. It is not as full featured as Evernote; but I overlook that for what I need. Well, it turns out that my situation is not an either-or. Rather, it is and-or. Keep has a sharing intent that lets you email a note, or export it to another app..., including Evernote. So, as soon as I am through with a note, I can archive it to Evernote.  Yes, you can archive in Keep too; but it counts against your Drive storage quota. Evernote, on the other hand, is unlimited storage. What I love about Evernote is the unlimited storage and, ironically, the search function, which is better than Google's. The ability to scan text in images has been ve

When I was in college, students would periodically pull out a calculator to begin crunching numbers to figure out their grade for each class. Of course, I also played the calculator game. The mental process goes something like, "if I make a B on this test, what minimum grade do I need to earn on the homework assignments to stay at an A average?" And so go the various scenarios. Outside of college, where your finances are your grade, I find myself playing the calculator game as well. Except that you focus on things like capital invested, rate of return, desired monthly income, and other geeky financial terms.

My two challenges with the medium format Diana F+ camera from Lomography are holding the camera steady, for the slow shutter speed, and selecting the right focus range prior to shooting. It may be more than that. Without thinking, yesterday, I shot a few pics with the cloudy aperture in sunlight. No doubt they will be overexposed. They may be completely blown out, or be ghostly white. Once, I even forgot to remove the lens cap, which isn't so bad given the manual film advance. My current roll has the frame mask for 16 rather than 12 photos. I am curious how they will turn out. Shooting with the toy camera is  simultaneously simple and difficult. The  simplicity is what makes it so difficult.

Over the New Year's vacation, I've been backing up my photos of 2013 to Bitcasa  (link provided to get you more free space, I already have unlimited). Unfortunately, for a good part of the year, I was without Internet at home, which means that my backups have been held back a little. It is a slow process when you are trying to catch up on months of work. No Mirroring For Me The easy way to do this would be to have a computer, Windows or OSX, set up with hard drive mirroring. This way, any file I store would automatically get backed up to Bitcasa. There are two problems with that approach in my current situation. The first problem is that I don't have a Windows or OSX computer. My wife has a laptop which mirrors all her files; but, in my case, I operate off an Android tablet and a Chromebook. The tablet runs the Bitcasa app, which only backs up photos I take from the camera. The Chromebook only has access to the browser version of Bitcasa, which has the limitations