Mobile Devices, Tablets, Smart Phones: Why Apple’s iOS Has the Edge — Again

People tend to be glued to their tablets and smart phones all the time. There seems to be so much to do that cannot be done five minutes later or an hour later when we’re back home for many of us these days. Whether or not that’s really true is for everyone themselves to decide, and if people really do not mind — or even enjoy — the feeling of always being on the leash for someone else and being immediately available for the stupidest of questions and accessible to others all the time, so be it for these ones.

The health implications of these new behavioral patterns are far-reaching though.

Apart from attention spans getting shortened constantly and reasonable thinking being replaced by the mere reflex of hitting “Like” or sending off some pretty useless “emoticon” along with an equally useless photo of what someone may or may not be eating at one particular moment — really, who-the-f*** gives a s***?! — there are non-psychologic health effects as well.

Just look at people around you: having evolved to some level of going upright, it appears as though humanity would be set to reverse that development, constantly needing to look at some little screen displaying sparkling colors, entertaining them while they should actually be walking (in a more relaxed way), or giving them directions (as if one couldn’t use one’s eyes to look around and see where you’re going in most every-day situations). It might not be long until most of us go back to crawling on the floor again, if we continue with our addiction to beg for guidance from something we hold in front of ourselves, developing an increasingly spastic-looking habit of fixation toward this ridiculous and visually insufficient, pixelated thing and its images.

On top of that are the EMF implications, exposure to electromagnetic fields. If you bore with me until now, it is possible that this is the point where your eyes will glaze over. EMFs and their effects on health have been spun so they seem to be for conspiracy theorists and crazies out there only. The fake-news industry has done a great job at this, and now the majority of people are brain-washed into believing that there’s nothing real about health warnings or people cautioning their fellow humans when it comes to cellphone, mobile device, cordless home phone, baby monitor, or similar wireless device use.

I would say, just “follow the money” though. Here’s why:

Lawyers have this thing going for a while now that they can make very good money leading class-action lawsuits against big businesses. Might be only an outrage or a nasty habit of some mediocre ambulance-chasers one might say — were there not the numerous verdicts and settlements finding some of the initial allegations sustainable in court and awarding significant amounts of money to the victims or affected of some established wrongdoing on the part of the industries concerned. Businesses were fast to learn from that and have included pages and pages of disclaimers, user instruction, disclosures, and risk warnings in accompanying documentation with many kinds of product sold to consumers. Of course, it’s all contained in the small-print only, but never mind.

So I’d suggest you get yourself a powerful magnifying glass from your drawer and have a look into cellphone manuals, user instructions for tablets and mobile devices. While we’re at it, we may as well put the blinders the industry and the mainstream media gave us back in!

Now browse through that manual and go right to the last few pages of it…

 

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it absolutely would make sense that it’s only ‘better’ when idle, as the router still has to produce sufficient signal strength in order to do its job. One bright side though: I understand this particular unit to include some sort of auto-sensing which means that it will cut off all ‘overpowering’ and only emit the amount of WiFi actually needed for certain connections and at their particular distance — so you would still have a significant reduction benefit, e g when this router is transmitting to a nearby device over a short distance requiring very little transmitter power (hence little radiation; better, but still not ideal from an EMF standpoint). Using adaptors like this one https://amzn.to/2RGvcaw and hard-wiring whenever possible (IMHO, it’s ALWAYS possible, who would really need insecure/slower wireless networking?!) is generally the most prudent solution. Having gone as far as now ‘allowing hard-wired connections in again’, I believe Apple have done a giant leap forward (for all of us) and have, once again, the edge over Android-based devices. (In Android newer than 4.4 you unf now need dedicated apps to make ‘reverse tethering’ or internet ‘tunneling over USB’ possible at all — and even if you go the extra mile, it is not certain that each and every of your Android apps will still run). Compatibility has never been an issue with iOS apps when connected using the above Lightning-to-Ethernet adaptors — and why would it: every iOS app has to be able to travel over the Lightning port for iTunes and AppStore compatibility; it’s pretty certain Apple will make sure they do during their infamous app preview)…

Web User Experience: Browser Issues Solved with Opera

Website interaction has become an ever increasing part of overall computer use for most of us. This means that web browsers have even more importance as one of the most widely used application programs on your box. This is true for PCs, be it as a desktop or laptop variant, tablets, and all sorts of mobile devices used for accessing the Worldwide web.

The Google-dominated Firefox browser, derived from the original “Mosaic Netscape” flavors of the olden days, has been the web browser of choice for the majority of web users for some time now. Frequent updates of this browsers mean frequent improvements, but sometimes they may spell trouble or are less popular. This is one of the reasons many users disable auto-updates and try staying with a tested and proven browser version for as long as possible. (It is never a very good idea to auto-update blindly into everything some developer or other forces down your throat without thorough real-life testing by other users.)

The recent Firefox update which introduced a new browser layout (among many other less visible updates) is a good example of a version update many would rather do without. Not only is the new layout not popular with everyone, but the fact that Firefox is becoming more and more bloated and demanding on system resources alone is sufficient reason to be not happy with this. That this version update has been forced upon users even where auto-update had been disabled does not help the measure’s popularity either.

Reason enough for many users to start looking into better solutions than Firefox again.

This is precisely the time when attention turns to the Opera browser which has been well-known for many years now and is always a good option when it comes to solving problems caused by the “big two”, Firefox and Safari (or Internet Explorer, for those who still believe in or for some other reason are stuck with some flavor of MS-Windows).

The Opera browser has a long-running reputation for gentleness on overall system resources as well as “running on all platforms”, i e versions available for all operating systems (which even included Atari, BeOS and IBM’s old OS/2 systems earlier). It is not only worth a try, but Opera is definitely a good — if not better — solution for everyone concerned about general performance and system speed. Opera also includes a highly functional and slick-looking e-mail client. Dissatisfaction with recent Firefox updates — or general Mozilla products, if their dumbed-down attempt of an e-mail client called Thunderbird is included in our considerations here — may serve as a good reason for finally solving the problem with that browser named after a rock on the Svalbard Islands off northern Norway.

YouTube Monetization: Revealing the Real Profit Source for Online Video

YouTube monetization may be a nice feature — but it’s also a big smokescreen (or at least distracting most everyone from what posting a video online is all about, and where the real money can be made with it)!

People are barred from seeing the real deal as a result. They are fooled into believing that those measly pennies make much sense earning. So everyone and their grandmother are out to lecture us about Casey Neistat and the likes and what they supposedly “make on YouTube”. Then these smart [ones] come up with all these educated-looking calculations about what a View is “worth” and oh-so expertly do the simple math multiplying the stuff, whereas the lion’s share of income is made NOT from measly AdSense-style or ‘monetization’ payments but Affiliate links — a totally different thing! Many of the true experts in the field confirm that the ratio is roughly 9:1 in favour or the latter.

The real YouTube benefit for “real YouTubers” or full-time video shooters on there is the site’s characteristics of also being used for “search” (albeit a bit ridiculous when actual search-quality really matters — not the way to go) and by posing as a “social platform” at the same time. YouTubes objective here is attracting and retaining people spending their time on there which, in turn, plays into the hands of savvy video producers and online marketers. All this combined together into one big package deal — also including those 11% or so in monetization income if you insist — is what makes YouTube successful, and also useful from a business point of view. Visit an Experienced Online Marketing Consultant to let them guide you to business growth and success with internet marketing and online video.

If you want to go it alone and already have a really neatly working YouTube channel plus everything else in place and are sure you’re not overlooking any of the crucial ingredients, the next thing you may want to set up would be a number of affiliate opportunities. These can either be found on affiliate portal sites or, sometimes the better choice, individual websites onboarding affiliates. (It’s usually at the bottom of the page or in ‘about’ sections, not too easy to find but not too hard either.) It’s always an option to go it alone if you already are sufficiently well-versed in this area, but remember that we’re here to show you how to get farther, faster, so any consultation cost may be money well spent.

Camera Popularity Wars in a Vlogger-Dominated World — Annoying

Camera and product “suitability” questions are increasingly often decided by Spartan-style popular outcry instead of reasonable consideration of actual product features and strengths. I find this quite annoying.

The former is now common in a world dominated by vloggers, full-time YouTubers and similar self-proclaimed “experts” who, upon closer scrutiny, are often using and operating their equipment more like Silly Sally than a tech-savvy photography or video specialist.

A recent (infamous) example can be seen on YouTube here: an actually promising review of an even more promising camera (the excellent Nikon D850, already called “camera of the year 2017” by many!) turniong out to be an idiotic time-waster full of user error, useless anecdotes about what the camera does or doesn’t compared to a smartphone and resulting failed conclusions.

On the positive side, here’s also a Steve Perry Nikon D850 camera review to make things up to you. This one’s by someone who’s a real pro and actually knows the stuff he’s talking abou!

While it may be true that Nikon, indeed, still continue to overly focus on the photography segment of the market (where they came from, you might want to note), neglecting large amounts of features needed for DSLR filming on many occasions, that would not be a very smart strategy on the part of a camera manufacturer. I normally love and do prefer Nikon over Canon all the time, but quite clearly their way of thinking needs to be modernised back home at Nikon HQ. It is not a smart approach in the day and age of “video is king” to still stick with slow autofocus technologies, excessive shutter roll, lack of selfie-mode displays etc on a camera as that will give your excellent products a bad name as a result. Nikon should keep in mind that nowadays vloggers are all over the place, and thanks to YouTube and similar platforms they are the most vocal group (as in Spartan popular outcry)…

Maybe I would not go as far as saying, it’s not even meant for video (or designed) because, if so, they should say so on the packaging or other sales materials 🙂 Also, maybe the entire concept of DSLR-video is overrated as “real” as in “good video” is still done on VIDEO cameras, not DSLRs.

Panasonic might possibly come to the rescue here, single-handedly topping even the shrewdest and most “popular among vloggers” Canon features by orders of magnitude in a single product update 🙂 Actually, Panasonic are doing that with a mirrorless camera though (not strictly a DSLR then).

we also recommend the Nikon D3300 as it can shoot HD1080p@60 fps for excellent super-35 compatibility at a very competitive price!

Vimeo Content Updated: Check Out Our Non-YouTube Video Clips

Just a quick update to regular visitors that we have streamlined and cleaned up the video content on our Vimeo channel as well as having started experimenting with a cover video there. For better video sharing and HD video creation, look into Vimeo’s superior features here: http://vimeo.extole.com/s/imagehoppers. Check it out, see what Vimeo has to offer, and watch our video.

Click to watch one of our most popular video clips on Vimeo right now.

Best Solutions for Self-Hosted Contests, Giveaways, and E-mail List Hosting

To be able and find the best tools for self-hosting giveaways, contests, and e-mail lists on your own website is becoming more important all the time. Many of the recent changes with a range of the established providers — or even niche offerings — are presented. The article also goes into how they are making it increasingly difficult for small businesses and independent entrepreneurs to find good and affordable solutions for their marketing tasks they encounter in the course of [click here to go to the full Best Solutions for Self-Hosted Contests, Giveaways, and E-mail List Hosting article].

It is not just-YouTube who unilaterally and even retrospectively (and hence unfairly!) for Channels already meeting the 10,000 views threshold between September 2017 and early 2018 significantly upped their requirements. Other platforms appear to  [this is a snippet of the full article, click here to read the full Best Solutions for Self-Hosted Contests, Giveaways, and E-mail List Hosting article].

Plugins recommended in this article include ‘Shortstack for WP‘, ‘Simple Giveaways‘, the FatCat Apps Plugin Contests & Giveaways, or add-ons for WooCommerce like WooCommerce Free Gift.

[click here to read the full Best Solutions for Self-Hosted Contests, Giveaways, and E-mail List Hosting article].

 

Four Years of Real-Life Usage: Pros and Cons of the Nikon D3300

The Nikon D3300 continues to be one of my favourite low-priced but at the same time very versatile DSLR cameras. Click here to read why and see the full article on the marquix.net webiste.

One of the takeaways is that we can always recommend the Nikon D3300 as it can shoot HD1080p@60 fps for excellent super-35 compatibility at a very competitive price!

Overall, the good sides of the Nikon D3300 really dominate. The camera is easy and pleasant to use in most situations — for photography even more so than for [read the full Nikon D3300 DSLR camera power-user article by clicking here!]

Water Filters: Caveat Emptor, If You Want to Really be Safe from Contaminants

After some research into the more popular as well as some lesser-known water filtering units, it turns out that there are mainly two models of water filters out there really doing their jobs properly. Depending on what you want, i e dependent on the contaminants you seek to reduce (or ideally eliminate), the outcome might be slightly different.

For every-day use, water contamination with pesticides, heavy metals, antibiotics and other medical residues should be the focus of your attention. These are most common contaminants in the public water supply in almost every country today. (Water from a private well may still be exposed to nitrate as well as rain-borne contaminants as well as pesticide run-off from agricultur, a. k. a. conventional “farmers”.) To get rid of these, the AcalaQuell filtering system has one of the best set-ups. Also, this filter treats pressurised water that has run through a domestic water system to decompress and let it find its natural characteristics again, which basically means the water can “breathe” or re-naturalise before it is consumed as drinking water.

The German-made AcalaQuell system is available directly from the manufacturers via the AcalaQuell online shop as a rectangular-shaped desktop water filtering jar or a pitcher-style or “pouring can” variant with a slightly more ergonomic handle (or in Germany from Amazon.de as well as their other local-language versions).

AcalaQuell filters beat those popular Brita filters by miles. Be aware that laboratory tests have found Brita filters (along with “Culligan”, “Pure”, and “Seychelle” filters) to actually INCREASE aluminium contamination in water by 33.9% (ouch). This is possibly due to some aluminium parts within those cartridges, so what’s the point of using Brita, really…), see these in-depth water test results by Mike Adams for more! The Acala filter is not known to have these problems. AcalaQuell know a thing or two about Good Water and their filters are among the best thought-out on the market.

An excellent US-manufactured filter is called ZeroWater. This variant excels at removing heavy metals, including radioactive contaminants like uranium, caesium, strontium, plutonium (and others that might be present during a nuclear emergency and as the “payload” of alleged weather engineering cocktails appearing in regular aircraft exhausts for reasons unknown), from your drinking water. So if general heavy metals filtering or even getting rid of radioactive contamination are the main filtering need, the pitcher-style ZeroWater filter is clearly and by far your best choice (also available from local Amazon stores like amazon.de or other language versions.

At the end of the day, we got both filtering systems, the Zero Water “just in case” or as a preventative measure along with the AcalaQuell for more regular or “every-day” use. The latter we ordered with a supply of filtering cartridges. Each of them is said to have a useful life of 2 months. This gives you plenty of output for your money and is a lot cheaper and more convenient than bottled water. (Without any fungi issues, it is also the much better option over bottled water).

Website Clean-Up, Spam Removal, Search Engine Removal and Restriction Management

Today’s way of mainstream internet use has created a ton of “new problems” for businesses and publishers. Anyone running any kind of website will be aware — from unpleasant experience, I assume — of how widespread unsolicited advertising or submission of useless content serving only the purpose of sneaking in some hoped-for publicity for the benefit of the creator of this annoyance (“Spam”) is these days.

Spamming another person’s website with meaningless and completely off-topic rubbish like that — as seen so frequently from shady SEO ‘experts’ who, in fact don’t know the first thing about their occupation  — is still the rudest thing you can do, and it is the bottom-of-the-barrel of online low life there is. Period.

Dozens of scripts and CMS Plugins needed to be developed to counter that kind of abuse, even changes in Google’s Algorithm have been brought about by it, and many other attempts of solving the problem that spreaded like wildfire all over the internet during recent years. If you need a consultant specializing in cleanup, Spam removal, search engine restriction management, and all kinds of similar recovery measures, check out imageHoppers and talk to a qualified specialist there. Despite all the available solutions and preventative measures, some losers continue doing just that, trespassing on websites and  submitting Comment Spam, not even realizing how useless their methods are. We see it every day on the marquixNET IT Services website, too.

Comment Spam may now even be counter-productive (because of Duplicate Content traps and a whole lot of other reasons). Anyone doing this is only proving one thing: how dumb and incompetent they are, and that they better try finding other ways of making money instead of destroying other people’s content while potentially even defrauding their SEO clients (if they have any) promoting links to websites like that.

iOS 10.2 and Newer: Apple Silently Introducing Hard-Wired Ethernet Over Lightning Connectivity

Apple have very silently — one might even call it covertly — introduced a great hard-wired Ethernet (LAN) option into their mobile operating system iOS 10.2 and newer versions. To even SEE it on your device, you FIRST need a special cable though (Lightning to RJ-45 or Ethernet adaptor). Only when that one is plugged in, you will see ‘Ethernet’ between “WiFi” and “Bluetooth” under “Settings”.

We have tested this Ethernet Adaptor for iOS Devices and found it to be working nicely with both iPhone and iPod touch on one hand as well as iPad tablets on the other.

To be on the safe and EMF-free side, simply use an adaptor like that, power it FROM A GROUNDED power supply and a grounded outlet over a STP Cat-7 cable and you will be able to avoid all RF and most of the Electric Fields as well as DE while still using those apps.