As I understand it, the viii does away with optical zoom and goes for a bigger sensor instead. I can see that this probably inevitably improves image quality at the ~70mm end of the range, but what about at the other end, where you are relying basically just on enlarging the image?
Those with the VIII: what have you found in practice: at maximum zoom do you get better or worse results?
I've had the Xperia 1ii for about five years now - I'm pretty impressed with how well it still functions, generally flawlessly. But a few things, mainly the declining battery life, suggest that I'm going to have to replace it soon.
I want a phone camera that lets me have full manual control when I want it. The photography Pro app on the 1ii gives me this. It can give me RAW files and it can give me JPGs that haven't been subjected to aggressive post-processing.
Of course I also want something with good lenses and sensors, and this matters too, but to some extent the level of control is the critical issue.
My question: are there any phones from other manufacturers I should look at, alongside the most recent Xperia ones?
This blog post discusses insulation in the context of summer overheating:
It talks about Thermal Mass, which is connected to a material's specific heat capacity.
And it talks about "phase shift" or "time lag", which it says is "the time between heat being absorbed on the outside of a material and released on the inside".
But I am not sure that's really correct - is it not the case that this time also has a lot to do with the material's thermal resistivity? In the scenario of the interior of a building overheating, if the wall has very low thermal resistivity then the internal temperature will rise very soon after the external temperature rises - say 10 minutes. If the wall has somewhat higher thermal resistivity, then the internal temperature will take a somewhat longer to reach the external temperature - say 2 hours. I'm choosing relatively short time spans for now, so as to ignore what happens when the external temperature drops later in the day.
So there is a "time lag" that is directly related to the thermal resistivity, independently of the specific heat capacity of the materials.
The specific heat capacity is to do with how much energy it takes to raise the temperature of the material itself. If the wall is made of something with a large mass and a large specific heat capacity, then it can absorb a lot of energy raising its own temperature. What I'm a bit unclear about, is does this in itself slow the passage of heat from one side to the other? In other words, if you have two materials with the same thermal resistivity but different specific heat capacities, will the inside (cooler) face of the one with the lower specific heat capacity warm up more slowly?
The blog post says that "for summer overheating, a long-time lag is crucial". I think that what it really means is that ideally the time lag is co-ordinated with the 24hr cycle of warming and cooling of the external air. But I think it then makes things confusing and over-simplified by talking about insulation having a long or short "time lag" and giving the impression that this is determined by thermal mass.
The reason I think this matters, is that this thermal mass is only helpful in certain scenarios. For example, in a climate where it is hot in the day and cold at night, heat can get stored in the outermost portions of the walls during the day, and then released at night. But in a climate where it doesn't cool down that much at night, this isn't going to work - the thermal mass will just get warm right through and stay like that. If you have really a lot of thermal mass, then you might be able to gradually absorb & store up the heat in the summer, and then release it in the winter. But this effect isn't going to come into play in the slightest if we are talking about relatively thin layers of materials like woodfibre insulation.
Therefore I feel that the blog post over-eggs the benefits of thermal mass of insulation materials, in a UK summer overheating context.
Is my thinking (partly relying on physics learned several decades ago) largely correct or are there things I'm not understanding correctly?
Is there any way to use an ipad to monitor what the phone's camera is seeing (and press the shutter button) while the phone is on the end of a long stick?
If it's not possible on an ipad would it work on an android tablet?
So far I've found an ipad app that lets me press the shutter button remotely via bluetooth, but it doesn't let me see on the ipad what the camera is looking at, so pointing it in the right direction is mostly guesswork.
After some years of editing my website on the fly I've decided to start doing it properly with a staging site.
My provider (Hostpresto) advertises a "staging environment" as part of their "Managed Wordpress" plans.
Getting this set up wasn't quite the one-click process I'd hoped for, but now something exists, which is basically a subdomain of my main website (ie staging.mywebsite.com) and a button in my plan controls that lets me clone from production site to staging and vice versa.
I have three questions:
As currently set up, the staging site is basically publicly visible to anyone who adds staging to the front of the main site URL. Is this normal practice? I had expected it might be password protected in some way.
Do I need to worry about stopping search engines seeing the staging site? Obviously I don't want pages from their appearing in search results.
In my initial testing of the staging site one thing came up with the Jetpack plugin telling me I was in "safe mode" and asking about making fresh connections. In reading their rather confusing guidance on this, it suggested that for the staging site, there is a variable WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE that can be set to "staging". I checked with my hosting provider, and they said it's set to "production". What would the normal expectation be here; should I ask them to change that to "staging"?