My girlfriend very generously offered to go for a drive with me yesterday evening, though neither of us particularly expected to end up parked at 5:40AM outside a little Diner called Ziggie’s some four hours away from home. I managed to learn a bit about driving apps and briefly flood my Jetta’s intake long enough to stall it after fording some flood water a wee bit too rapidly.

Since I’ve begun working in Kansas City and occasionally commuting from Columbia, I’ve found incentive to revisit the crowdsourced driving directions mobile app Waze, which I recall being very excited about in early 2016. It’s smoother now, yet devoid of that pseudocountercultural sense in a design sense. Functionally, it is still the most reliable method of police detection I’ve ever encountered – in this Second Era of my Waze usage I have yet to see a single Missouri Highway Parol car sat in the center of I-70 that hadn’t been reported on Waze first – even at crazy hours on weekday mornings – which should be all the reassurance one needs regarding the immediate future of their userbase.

I'm using Waze to drive to to Licking, MO, arriving at 2:24. Watch my drive in real-time on the Waze map! David Blue on Twitter

Somehow, I was unaware until this morning that Waze allows you to “share” your route by generating a link to a web app of theirs that will live track your progress. Though I can’t actually imagine too many use cases for this, I still think it’s cool. Anybody who’s interested in stalking my every move should follow me on Twitter – where I’m sure I’ll be sharing more drives from now on – and/or DM me and just ask me to enable 24/7 location-sharing for ya!

On the topic of mobile apps for those folks like me who’s only real hobby is just fucking driving around, I did actually find mention in a listicle from a real motoring enthusiast’s publication. “Seven Apps That Will Help Improve Your Driving Experience” is not exactly the sort of advisory article I remember seeing in Road & Track considering that it actually only contains one single app even vaguely related to True Driving Pleasure called Greatest Drive.

Users contribute their favorite routes and with Yelp integration you can either pick a destination to find the most scenic way to get there or find a good spot to eat along the route you've already chosen.

Of course, it’s nowhere to be found on the App Store, but it sounded relatively foodist anyway.

Other notes:

• Licking, Missouri may have a silly name, but the data says it’s struggling. Look for the median household income.
• Apparently the premier mile-tracking app right now is Microsoft’s MileIQ, which I’m going to continue to try because I can’t resist automatically-generated PDF reports, ever.
• I gave my girlfriend administrator roles for my derelict joke Facebook page Boiler Explosion Memes and she’s somehow managed to get it to almost 100 likes / +25,000% impressions in just a matter of days!!!!

#photography

Seven years ago, the fourth generation of Apple’s iPhone instigated a change in our perception of digital photography. Now – thanks to Google Photos – I’d like to reflect on my favorite shots of mine.

When iPhone 4 handsets began shipping in the Summer of 2010, I’d been carrying my first generation for three solid years – since its now history-stricken release, in fact – and its age started to become a problem. I’d drop it screen-down on a rock in the airport parking lot just before going back to school for my Junior year, splitting a crack in the screen that wouldn’t quite kill it – it was the demands of iOS 4 on its 412 MHz CPU and meager 128 MB of RAM that would ultimately cease its usability.

The single 2 megapixel rear-facing camera would surprise one at times, but was never lauded as anything but what it was – a mobile phone-bound sensor capturing very cellular-looking* images, but Steve Jobs wasn’t three minutes in to his iPhone 4 presentation at the June 2010 Worldwide Developer’s Conference before he pronounced the design’s closest possible “kin” to be “an old Leica camera,” associating his device with photography in its first impression. The equivalent of the first generation’s rear-facing camera could now be found facing you, and the fourth’s primary sensor now shot at 5 megapixels (2592 x 1936) with autofocus and 5x digital zoom, setting a fundamental smartphone sensor configuration standard that’s still adhered to by the industry.

After unleashing Google Photos upon the ~15,000 images on my home machine’s hard drive last year, I have been constantly reminded of my own photographic history – for better or worse – and regularly shown five, six, seven-year old snaps in a manner that wouldn’t have been possible (or have made any sense) before. Recently, I was astounded to find that I took many of the better shots with my iPhone 4, so I thought I’d share a few from my high-school days in loving memory of my trusty little rectangular companion.

All taken with iPhone 4, left unedited. View more on Flickr.

#hardware #photography