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[Rolan7]

Aww, that's cute!  And maybe you can even sell it as a pun!
Also I'm kicking myself for not saying "some-one" instead of "someone" to drive the point I was making home.

[methylatedspirit]

I now have 3 phones with me. There's my old Samsung A50, a Samsung M31, and a Blackview BV9900 Pro. The Blackview is my current phone, and the M31 is really useful as a portable camera (not the best, obviously, but it's not like my BV9900 can actually do much better), since its battery is gigantic by phone standards.

What can I do with the A50? Its cameras in both quantity and resolution (not that it matters; I maintain that 13 MP for pictures and 1080p for video is good enough for most people) is inferior to the M31, though the image processing unit is identical, owing to both having almost the same chip inside. The battery's smaller, so it's not exactly great for the bullshit experiments I want to do with a camera and a tripod. I guess it's thinner and lighter, but after using the Blackview, every phone's thin and light compared to that brick.

Otherwise, though, it's a respectable phone. It runs Android 10 (and it should be on track to get Android 11), it's fast enough that it's perfectly usable, and it's definitely still modern. The battery's still good; it's just overshadowed by the Big Chungus battery in the M31. How can I put this thing to use? There's the obvious "donate it", but I'm a bit attached to this thing.

[Frumple]

I now have 3 phones with me. There's my old Samsung A50, a Samsung M31, and a Blackview BV9900 Pro. The Blackview is my current phone, and the M31 is really useful as a portable camera (not the best, obviously, but it's not like my BV9900 can actually do much better), since its battery is gigantic by phone standards.

What can I do with the A50?

Skeet target. Give it an emphatic sendoff and then bury the remains (somewhere it won't get into the groundwater, I guess).

Less seriously, yeah, sell or donate. You probably don't need three phones and it's good to develop and keep a habit of not hoarding. If you don't have a need for it anymore and you can't think of something immediately useful to do with it, get rid of it somehow or another. Don't even try to repurpose or reuse or keep "just in case", yeet the thing and don't look back.

[methylatedspirit]

I've gotten into the habit of doing network transfers over LAN over my main phone's hotspot because I'm trying to sync all my photos and videos from the camera phone onto more "permanent" storage. Something I'm noticing is that it's a complete crapshoot as to how fast it transfers. Sometimes it's a "mere" 4MB/s, sometimes it's a blazing-fast (to me) 18MB/s. It usually lands around 7-8MB/s.

Why, though? What's the bottleneck here, and why is it so variable? It's not the SSD I'm copying the files to; even if you slam it with continual sequential writes and exhaust its cache (or in my case, no cache because it's a USB device now), it still maintains ~25MB/s. The laptop's WiFi card... definitely capable of at least 200 Mbps (25MB/s) down last time I connected it to uni WiFi. That leaves the main and camera phones' WiFi chips and their respective antennae.

Also, while I'm here, is there a way to get a "dead" SIM card? Damn camera phone won't let me activate hotspot for WLAN file transfers, so I just want to get a SIM card that identifies as some telco's card if inserted, but is otherwise completely useless. I know of prepaid SIMs, but I want to know if I can go further in being a complete cheapskate.

[wierd]

Consider investing in an OTG dongle (Older phones, Newer phones), and just plugging a USB hard drive into the phone.  That way you can get the between 20mb/sec (USB2) and 100+mb/sec (USB3) transfer rates.


If you live in the US, consider getting a FreedomPop SIM, and then going the full "totally free" route with it.  (When initially activated, it starts on the paid plan, but you can turn off all the paid functions, and then it will work for basic calls and such, up to 200 minutes or some such. Works on ATT's network)



As for the "WHY it so slow? why it SO SLOOWW!?"

Wifi uses autonegotiated speed, and will have a link rate that is based on the quality of the connection, and the technology of the wifi chip.  It can also be hobbled by the bandwidth available in a device's ASIC.

In this case, 4mb/sec is roughly correct for 54mbit, which is top speed for wireless G. (Theoretical max speed is 6.75mb/sec, but there is protocol overhead.)

[methylatedspirit]

As for the "WHY it so slow? why it SO SLOOWW!?"

Wifi uses autonegotiated speed, and will have a link rate that is based on the quality of the connection, and the technology of the wifi chip.  It can also be hobbled by the bandwidth available in a device's ASIC.

In this case, 4mb/sec is roughly correct for 54mbit, which is top speed for wireless G. (Theoretical max speed is 6.75mb/sec, but there is protocol overhead.)

Strange. Everything I'm using is very new (2019 at worst), so I'm wondering why it's negotiating such a lowball speed in the first place. They should all have at least 802.11n. The laptop and both phones are mere centimeters apart, so I can rule out signal strength. It's like one of the devices in the chain is just really bad at actually negotiating, and it just says "802.11g. Take it, or leave it.". At least it isn't 802.11a/b?

I wonder if it's because my laptop is set to automatically connect to my phone's hotspot, so once it sees it in range (even if it's barely any signal at all), it just grabs on to that connection, regardless of how crap that connection would be. Does WiFi negotiate speeds at the start of the connection, and it just never checks (or does it infrequently) again if conditions have improved? That would explain the crap speeds.

[wierd]

Could be that the ASIC in your phone can only do G speeds in AP mode.

[methylatedspirit]

One of the bullshit experiments I'm doing with the camera phone is recording for an obscenely-long time (my last one was 4 hours straight). I swear it's for time lapses, but I think I just like looking at moving clouds.

With obscenely-long recording times comes obscenely-large files. I have to reencode these files with Handbrake to squish their sizes down a bit. My last settings were: H.265 (using the x265 encoder), CRF 20, VFR same as source, Medium preset. This did wonders for file size (compressed down to half the size), but I had to let my laptop sit overnight while it was reencoding my video.

Do I really need to go that slow? Can I just go down to the Fast preset and get roughly the same results? The raw footage is in H.265 anyway, all this is is converting it from fixed-bitrate (20 Mbps) to variable-bitrate by making better decisions about where to put bandwidth.

[methylatedspirit]

Are there any image formats that natively save in raw, uncompressed YCbCr rather than RGB? In general, are there image formats that save in non-RGB color spaces, or do I have to play with FFmpeg (an image is a 1-frame video, after all) to get what I want?

[MaxTheFox]

You know how sometimes mammoth babies are found preserved in ice?


How feasible would it be to find any undamaged DNA in them, clone it, and then resurrect the mammoth species? FOR SCIENCE! And also as an international prestige flex.

[Arx]

A cursory search suggests that the freezing preserves structural integrity better than DNA, which still degrades. Only fragmentary DNA sequences have been extracted, although combination with Asian elephant DNA has been somewhat promising.

So no, can't be done. But ask again later!

[MaxTheFox]

Probably could fill in the missing parts with elephant DNA to make something that looks very much like a mammoth if/when we have the technology to.

[Arx]

That's basically what they've done with the Asian elephant DNA. Didn't look into the details, though.

[Rolan7]

Probably could fill in the missing parts with elephant DNA to make something that looks very much like a mammoth if/when we have the technology to.

Or use frog DNA so you only have to make one

[methylatedspirit]

I'm thinking of publishing the full method that I used recently in the Random Things you drew thread to databend images, since I don't think that anyone's detailed anything close to what I did there. The use of FFmpeg to convert images into other pixel formats is new to the "literature", as it is.

Now, I just want to throw the information out there, but I want it to be searchable. I don't really want an account, but I'll do it if I have to. Where can I do that? Is Tumblr still a viable thing now?