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Today in the Twitter log cabin beat: Twitter installed its previously purchased log cabins, which we reported on here, into its office at 1355 Market Street. The log cabins are part of the company’s mid-Market office expansion, which includes a new cafeteria. Twitter now occupies seven floors of the 11-floor, 77-year-old SF Mart building.
As if the numeric symmetry weren’t enough, there’s one big historic coincidence involved in the cabin timing. As Neetzan Zimmerman points out, Abraham Lincoln – perhaps the world’s most famous log cabin dweller — was assassinated 149 years ago today. I’m sure Lincoln would be chuffed to know the future usage of his signature domicile would be an ironic one. Did they even have hipsters back then?
While the price of the log cabins was not disclosed, here’s a more down market version selling for around $12.5k. Our team guess is that the largest expense to Twitter would be transportation and assembly, and that the architect (Lundberg Design) would have had to re-notch the dovetails and sand blast the wood to make the cabins safe for work.
From Karl Beckmann, the guy who sold the cabins to Lundberg: “We advertised them for a year and we pretty much got a lot of crackpot calls. When you think about it, buying a 100-year-old log cabin that has been exposed to the elements is not a very practical idea unless you’re doing something exactly like what is being done here.”
Guess there’s much opportunity for prank calls rife with wood and log jokes when log cabins are for sale. In the silliest Twitter comms email exchange since “…,” I have emailed Twitter for comment. “Are they supposed to be birdhouses?” is an actual question I have asked.
Disclosure: I hold Twitter shares. I don’t think the cabins will affect the stock price.
Images via Doug Bowman and Paul Stamatiou
If you're eager to start photographing the night sky, but you want to do so on a budget, it can be done—even with just a smartphone and a telescope.
First of all, you'll need a telescope. You get a very reasonable starting telescope on eBay now, for as little as $50. Feel free to spend more if you wish, but bear in mind you'll need to buy eyepieces too.
You also need camera, but the one on your smartphone will probably work. All smartphone cameras are good enough, if not great these days. I've personally used the Lumia 925 and 1020, iPhone 5, and Nokia N8.
That's all you really need, but it can be tough to get a photo from the telescope's eyepiece by hand. It's doable, but extremely tricky. A better way is to buy a clamp specifically for attaching phones to a telescope. Yes, that's a thing! I like the Orion Steadypix Universal (shown above). It's completely universal and so can fit a wide range of devices.
It obviously won't be winning you any awards in National Geographic, but you can get some pretty cool shots, and it's a fun little weekend project.
Getting your baby to look at the camera lens, or at your smartphone's camera, isn't easy. Reader Sidin Vadukut shares a great tip to divert your toddler's gaze where you want it while keeping your hands free to take a photo.
If you want to take good pictures of babies, but find it hard to get them to look at you properly, stick bright stickers on the back of your phone. My wife figured this out, and now she (the baby) looks approximately at the lens opening. Ish.
You don't want to have gooey residue on the back of your device either, so it might be best to put a screen guard first and apply the sticker on that. Screen guards come off easily without leaving your gadget sticky.
Thanks @sidin!
It’s a pretty big day for the folks over at Dropbox. First, they introduced both the desktop and Android versions of their popular Mailbox app, and now they are also bringing us yet another new app called Carousel, this time for archiving videos and images.
Dropbox has had the ability to instantly upload and back-up your pictures for a while now, but Carousel aims to perform the same functionality with a little more flair. Carousel promises a system that automatically groups and organizes everything, while storing all snapped photos and videos at their full resolutions.
As you’ll see in the video below, this means it is easy to look back throughout the years, group various pictures and vids, and share them with others. Speaking of sharing, Dropbox says that Carousel has special tools that all your to share your videos and pictures with any phone number or email address, regardless of whether or not the user has a Dropbox account.
Carousel is a free app, though at the moment it has yet to hit Google Play. Dropbox says the app will be arriving later today, so you’ll want to keep an eye of Carousel.com for more details.
What do you think of the Carousel app, like it or do you feel it was unnecessary for Dropbox to spin off this functionality to a separate app?
Today we picked up our LG G2 mini test device and were able to take a few pictures to test out the main camera found on the mini version of the LG G2 as we rode around Berlin on our bikes. What the LG G2 mini can do and whether the camera is up to par can be observed in the pictures below.
© AndroidPITThe weather in Berlin today was a picture-perfect beautiful April spring day: the sun was shining and birds sang harmoniously in the city’s wooded area. We were able to test the panorama mode, the HDR function and the normal mode, some of the many functions found on the G2 mini. The results? Quite satisfactory!
The sun shone in the Tierpark wooded area of Berlin today....and on the G2 mini too!/ © AndroidPIT 
HDR Mode was able to bring out the sunny spots of the pictures better. / © AndroidPITThe camera packs a resolution of 8 MP, however only in 4:3 format. I usually prefer the 16:9 format, however this format is only shot with 6 MP. Also, I wouldn’t even bother using the digital zoom, and I also wouldn’t zoom in too much even when viewing the pictures on your computer screen, the results are very pixelated.
When viewed on full screen mode on my computer screen, the camera results were quite impressive, the sharpness was sufficient, lighting and white balance also appeared realistically, the panorama function merged pictures smoothly together, while HDR mode took a little while to process but was effective nonetheless.
Panorma mode looks much better on a bigger screen, but the results are nonetheless good. / © AndroidPIT 
Next to a university, the clouds started to fill the sky.../ © AndroidPIT 
And at Alexanderplatz it started raining. © AndroidPIT 
Time for a coffee break to dry off! / © AndroidPITWhat do you think of the LG G2 mini pictures. Not bad, right? The G2 mini will be heading to Europe in April and there is no current date for its release in the USA, but there are already rumors that it will be coming to Sprint.
EyeEm, the Berlin-based startup which focuses on high quality photo-sharing, has signed a partnership with Getty Images to license EyeEm images across its platforms, including on iStock by Getty Images and a bespoke collection where they are royalty-free and rights-managed. The EyeEm collection will be populated with images from its community.
It’s worth pointing out that this is a pure distribution deal – Getty is not investing in the startup. But clearly this is going to mean decent revenues of for the company which to date has raised $6 million from Passion Capital, Wellington Partners and Earlybird Venture Capital.
The marketplace is opt-in for the users themselves, but EyeEm maintains control of who gets to join, helping to keep the quality of photos high. Those users, many of whom are professional photographers b day taking casual snaps with the smartphone, add their best snaps work to the marketplace. These smartphone photographers then get repeat revenues, because of the deal with Getty. The upside for the users is that they hold all rights and can leave the marketplace at any time.
This arrangement between EyEem and Getty effectively competes with ShutterStock and Fotolia (the France-based image service).
The key thing here of course is that Eyeeme is very different, in that these are real-world ‘authentic’ photographs from real people, not your average image stock stuff.
