in tuft we trust

"Self Portrait"
Skin oils on coated wood door, 2023.

(the shitty camera challenge is a very real month-long event where you take a daily photo with the jankiest camera you can find! it's mostly a thing on bluesky though)

and I have just the right camera for the job!

presenting my Shitty™ gigaset gs110 (which is a €60 phone), with ~350mb ram and less than 200mb free storage. the result is that this phone usually crashes or freezes while taking photos, which yields absolutely incredible out of focus shots full of glitches and artifacting.

It seems to be a regular smartphone at first sight, but it has Issues. Also, it has a detachable back and easily removable battery, which pretty much only the Fairphone has nowadays. Due to its astoundingly low memory capacity (it has 1GB on paper but 650MB is system reserved, permanently), it just straight up SUCKS at things like "calling", "keeping time" and "running any apps in reasonable timespans".

Anyway, so I'm using that for the #ShittyCameraChallenge on bsky. Which otherwise is full of people posting very acceptable images using analog cameras, I'm just out there putting up absolutely atrocious photos of digital gunk gumming up my eyeballs.

#ShittyCameraChallenge Day 1: "Photo Out the Window Because I'm Super Tired"

The #ShittyCameraChallenge on bsky

More on that phone & my experiences with it below the ReadMore!

Here's the phone by the way:

I printed a tuftie on it with work's industrial inkjet, of which the giant printing head accidentally crushed the back while it was determining the medium thickness. Oops.
I also forgot a white layer, so it's just black dots on a dark green background, which makes the whole thing pretty much invisible. Oops 2.

I had it lying around as a backup phone in case my phone broke. Which it did, so I used the GS110 (that stands for GigaShit btw) for the next year or so (without going insane, somehow). Lemme tell you, using such a phone as a daily driver works wonders for your patience!

Until you notice that sometimes your alarms (which are supposed to get you out of bed for work) just straight up stop working, because the clock just froze. I've had situations like this more than once:
"Huh...Is it still 8am? Feels like it has been 8am for a whi- ....oh FUCK it's 10am, AAAAAA"

Also, sometimes the loudspeaker straight up didn't work so you'd get called and hear nothing while the other end hears you yelling "hello?? anyone?? is this thing on??" in complete confusion.

Oh, and it could only run one app at a time. Sometimes less. I've timed it, and in some occasions it took over 1.5 minutes just to boot the Twitter app. And sometimes it would straight up forget it took a photo, so it just never actually saved them & that cool thing you saw is lost forever.

Great phone, 10/10 do recommend it if you're in need of beyond godlike patience. My patience has surpassed even the most patient zen monks and I will gladly wait for any slow software nowadays without trouble.