Bluetooth Selfie Remote

A while back I went to a local Oracle “high-end summit” — yes, that’s in scare quotes.

Calling it a high-end summit really just meant an ad for Oracle’s current push into healthcare IT. The engineer doing the talk worked hard, doing his best to explain in plain language to a room of paunchy “decision-makers” who know nothing about databases what “cloud services” are, what “IaaS” is, what “PaaS” is, what “SaaS” is, and so on. He kept insisting the future is cloud, that storing your data in the cloud and buying cloud services would be such a great deal, so much easier than maintaining your own data with your heart in your throat.

Didn’t do a damn bit of good.

From what I know, my boss doesn’t trust this stuff one bit, and he has a point: a lot of that data is private and can’t just be handed out. The other part is that he just doesn’t get it — the moment he hears something means he doesn’t have to build his own server room, he gets this repulsed look.

Not my problem anyway. I was there to make up the headcount and sit in the back.

Oracle was generous, though. They fed us well, and I got to eat a bunch of things I’d never tried. After the meal everyone got some gifts: besides a few boring books and a Seagate-branded external drive, there was this “selfie神器” — this selfie gadget.

You know I never take selfies, and I hate anything that beautifies them — beauty filters especially. I think beauty filters are a giant explosive charge rigged to destroy basic trust between people, turning two folks who could try facing each other honestly into utter phonies, making you think a pig’s head actually has a barely acceptable face…

Got a bit off track. Anyway, I tossed the thing somewhere when I got home, but my mother was fascinated by it and kept telling me to figure out how it works and then tell her, so today I finally had to open it.

Before opening it I thought it was a telescoping selfie stick. Then I looked — holy shit… it’s worse than a selfie stick.

It’s just a stand.

So here’s the body. This thing is the body. Put in two button cells, long-press the switch, and a little light on top comes on.

Then you pair it. It seems to register as a keyboard — probably the one-key kind.

So the stand does nothing but hold things up. The only useful part is this remote button — press it in camera mode and it takes a photo.

That’s it…

Seriously? So this so-called “selfie gadget” is nothing but a Bluetooth keyboard with a single button?

Yep. That’s really all it is.