(006) OK Computer

Yesterday's blip was a journey back into the world of 'analogue photography' but today I've been trying out some of the features of the camera on my new phone. One of the clever tricks incorporated into the software is a voice activated shutter that allows me to take a photo without touching the phone. To test this feature I positioned the phone to capture a view out of the car windscreen as I drove from Kirkcaldy to Glenrothes. The  Expert RAW mode allows shutter speeds as long as 30 seconds but I chose 8 second exposures and triggered the camera with a "shoot" command at various points on my journey home. I'm impressed with image quality straight out of camera but also surprised to find that the image files are download from Google photos as DNG files which give much greater scope for image manipulation than the basic JPEGs that I had expected. In case you were wondering about the blip picture,  that's a bus approaching a roundabout.

Blip title today is a double reference. Firstly, I thought of the Radiohead album, of which, Wikipedia has this to say "The album's lyrics depict a world fraught with rampant consumerism, social alienation, emotional isolation and political malaise; in this capacity, OK Computer has been said to have prescient insight into the mood of 21st-century life"

The second thought was a scene from the 1986 Star Trek movie, 'The Journey Home' where 'Scotty' attempts to interact with an Apple Macintosh Plus computer via voice command and, of course, fails. Turns out he was only three and a bit decades too early.