From morse code to smartphones and everything in between

BELIEVE it or not, young people, once upon a time there were no mobile phones.
               

When I was a boy, most houses didn’t have a phone and before that nobody had a telephone.

In the early days of Adelaide, the only way to get an urgent message to someone was to run, or ride a horse, and pass the message face-to-face.

Around 1850, if there was a fire, someone would run to the police barracks on North Tce, the duty inspector would send out an officer on horseback to find the constables walking the beat. He would then send them running back to the police barracks to collect the fire pump and either tow it by hand or hitch it to horses and gallop to the fire. Just imagine how long that would take.

As most of Adelaide’s buildings were made of wood and thatch, there wouldn’t be much of the structure left by the time they got water.

When the telegraph was introduced, a message could be sent to a post office using morse code and the message could be delivered by hand. Amazing!

A slight digression. When I started work at 5AD in 1959, and through the 1960s, we were still using morse code to communicate with the regional stations 5PI, 5MU and 5SE.

I got 10 shillings a week to know and use morse code.

Once the telephone came to Adelaide, only government offices and important businesses had the telephone connected.

You didn’t dial a number yourself, you contacted the “operator” in the telephone exchange by winding a little handle and she connected you.

Once people saw how convenient these phone things were, there was a demand.

Even the public wanted to use them, so public phones were introduced, and then phone boxes.

Throughout the city, little steel poles were erected with a box on top. They were police boxes, and suddenly police on the beat were in contact with the City Police Station.

Each officer had a key and they could be alerted or pass messages. It was a revolution.

Later, taxis caught on, and each taxi rank had a series of different coloured boxes to cover the various companies.

Taxis now didn’t have to go back to their depot to get a job.

Not many people could afford to have their own phone. I can remember we would walk about 25 houses away to Mrs Smith, who had a phone for an emergency, or we’d ride a bike around to Henderson’s grocer shop for the nearest phone box.

Samsung to cripple its Galaxy Note 7 phone with forced update

Anyone who still has a Samsung Galaxy Note7 had better stay off the internet from November 5. That's when Samsung will start pushing out a firmware update to effectively cripple the recalled phone, all but for forcing owners to bring them in for a refund or exchange for a different phone.
                 

The firmware update, which will install without user permission, limits the charge on the phone to 60 per cent, meaning it typically won't even last a full day between charges.

But Samsung is worried that, if the phone's battery is allowed to charge much more than that, it's at risk of exploding and/or catching fire: a problem that prompted the Note7's worldwide recall, and its almost unprecedented killing off as a product.

Android firmware updates usually require the user's permission before they download and install, but Samsung says that because this update is a "safety measure", it's allowed to push it onto phones automatically. It's already pushed the update onto the original Note7s, and now with this update, it's pushing it onto Note7 devices that were brought back in to have their battery replaced, back when Samsung thought it could simply swap out the defective batteries rather than completely remove the phone from the market.

And, let's face it, anyone who still has a Note7 this far into the incredibly well-publicised recall is holding out  and won't return it without a bit of extra cajoling.

Samsung has been pushing messages twice a week to any phones that are still out there, telling owners to turn them off and bring them in, but apparently that hasn't been enough for some people.

This is NYPD's official crime-fighting phone

That's right, the New York Police Department has finally -- finally! -- caught up with the modern age and equipped its officers with smartphones, nearly a decade after the first iPhone came out. The department began handing out it first smartphones to the city's 36,000 police officers in April 2015 and finished equipping the entire force earlier this year. Now new officers at the New York City Police Academy in College Point, Queens, get phones along with their guns and badges.

Just as the advent of smarter phones brought improvements to regular folks' daily lives, these handsets have likewise made it easier for the city's finest to fight crime. Officers are able to respond to 911 calls faster, solve crimes more efficiently and create stronger ties to their community, according to NYPD.

Solving crimes

The NYPD has already seen tangible benefits of using the phones. In one case, a fare-beating passenger who ran out of a taxi likely would have gotten away if the responding officers didn't have their phones on them.

Instead, officers were able to use the database on their phones to figure out that the thief was hiding in his girlfriend's apartment building right next to where he had run off in Rockaway, Queens.

The thief had used the driver's phone to call his girlfriend before fleeing. Officers ran a search through the NYPD's system with the phone number and found her address through a criminal record.

Strengthening community ties

Among the apps and high-tech additions, the phone's most basic function -- calling -- is what has helped community relations the most.

At the time, it was against NYPD policy to give out personal contact information. Victims who wanted to reach the officers who took their report would have to call the precinct and leave a message, sometimes to voice mailboxes shared by entire squads.

The 4 Best Apps To Organise Your Phone's Photos

These four apps are specifically built to organise your photos with very little effort at all.

           

1) Focus

Focus (Android) lets you take the same approach with your photos that you might do with your Gmail, giving you a customisable labelling system to quickly group your pictures into any kind of bucket you like: photos of the kids, photos from a particular trip, photos with you in them, or just photos that stand out from the rest in your camera’s picture gallery.

2) Cleen

If you’ve ever wanted to sort through your photos using the same at-a-glance appraisals and finger swipes you use to find dates on Tinder, you’re in luck. Cleen (iOS) lets you swipe up to save photos, swipe down to trash them, and swipe left or right if you don’t want to decide right away. There are no albums, no labels, and no extra fuss.


3) Slidebox

Slidebox (Android and iOS) also lets you keep or delete images with a simple swipe of the finger. Additionally, you can place your pictures into specific albums with a tap on the screen, and it has a few more features than Cleen (like an easy album creation menu).


4) Photo File
Photo File (iOS) takes a slightly different approach to sorting your pictures. It asks you to categorise them before you actually take them. You use the app’s own camera to take pictures, and just above the shutter button is the label you’re about to apply. A swipe to the left or the right changes the category, and a tap on the shutter button takes the photo.