Continue reading »]]> About two weeks ago, I did something I very rarely EVER do. I broke my phone. 3 years – no drops, dings, nicks or bad scratches. Originally, I had planned on upgrading my iPhone 3G at the end of the month but I was shuffling some stuff around on my desk and the phone slid off the edge. Normally, it wouldn’t be a big deal – I’ve got a case for it and it’s only about a 2ft drop. Apparently this time it was enough. Phone fell flat on the front face. I picked it up an when I turned it on – white screen of death.

After a couple hours fiddling with the internals and some Google searching I had two options – hope the internal connection re-seating fixed it or replace the entire LCD screen and digitizer. Breaking it apart and putting it all back together didn’t work and I figured I was so close to swapping it out anyway, I might as well upgrade early. So after about 2 hours in line at the local Apple retail store that night, I walked out with a new iPhone 4.

So. A lot of really cool things with the new hardware platform. One of the best – the on-board 720p HD camera. I had a chance to goof around with it last weekend while we were at Centennial Park. Madeline was at the play ground so I thought I’d give the camera a try.

There are a couple caveats:

• Shake is hard to control when you walk around, over, through stuff. As far as I know, the phone doesn’t support any sort of hardware/software correction. Ultimately, shake contributes to a decrease in video quality when you try to rip or convert one format to another so it’s something I need to work on reducing.
• Lighting – wash out from reflection or glare occasionally interferes with the visual quality in HD.
• Conversion compression. This is the toughest part of all. A raw 90 second .MOV video at 720p from the phone pushing roughly a 10kbs data stream comes out to about 126mb in size. Not much these days file size wise but still too large for most web blogs posting videos without streaming or smart bit-rate streaming (unlike YouTube, Hulu, etc.). Since I’m just linking video directly into my player code, I need a compression that reduces file size but still maintains some of the HD quality in the feed. FLV is usually the most common type and it’s what I’m going to be experimenting with the most. After conversion, I was able to reduce the FLV file to about 24mbs and still maintain a decent frame quality.

Anyway, I think the final cut turned out pretty good considering I created the entire time-line on my iPhone using the onboard camera and the iMovie app to splice two different shots together and add some additional titles/overlay. iMovie isn’t very powerful but it does let you get something patched together with a little creativity and experimentation. It also lets you export your final cut into 360p, 540p or 720p MOV formats.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Raw downloads: 360p (44mb), 720p (130mb)

Continue reading »]]> It’s not often that commercial technology in the public sector makes such an intuitive leap into the modern world that I actually notice the change. Sure, plenty of stuff changes behind the scenes all the time but we pump gas from the same kind of terminals that have been in use for 20+ years, pay for products using the same small plastic cards (or cash), stack our groceries on the conveyor belt, etc. It might not sound like much but you develop a habit of doing things. All the steps you go through to accomplish some mundane task.

Take deposits for example. Sign the back of the check, find a damn deposit envelope (always seem to be out when you need one), fill it out, enter the amount into the machine, confirm the total, etc. Pretty much the standard procedure for ATM deposits for the last 10+ years (not having to fill out the envelope is the only change I can remember). But when I went to deposit a check at my local Wachovia branch this morning, I was completely thrown for a loop.

The old machine was gone, replaced by a brand new design. This ATM didn’t have a hard to see, 8″ green CRT monitor running some outdated piece of ATM software from the 80s. The new machine was sleek and modern. A large, brightly lit touchscreen LCD dominated most of the front panel with a user interface that was actually pleasant to use (I didn’t have to fight with the card reader to accept my bank card either). However, the most noticable difference was the lack of a deposit envelope container. As I stepped through the deposit process I realized Wachovia had just made deposit envelopes obsolete. You select the deposit account, feed the check into the slot and the ATM auotmatically scans the check for the amount. All you do if verify the total and finalize the transaction. Apparently it will take up to 30 checks or a stack of cash all at once.

This is really nothing new – desktop/commercial check scanners have been around for years so it’s not like the banking industry just figured out how to scan a check digitally. I just want to give them credit for actually putting that tech to good use in a way that makes this annoying process even easier.

That’s pretty cool.

Continue reading »]]> Overall, I like some of the new changes in IE 8.0 but one feature in particular is driving me crazy: the delete option on the drop down URL list. The little red “X” is located in a column almost immediately beneath the drop down arrow. Mechanically, my natural URL selection motion drops the mouse pointer right over the delete button or close enough to it that every third or fourth time I scroll down to select a URL, I accidently delete the address I’m looking for. Very poor implementation of a GUI feature especially considering IE8 doesn’t offer any options to change the behavior.

I’m not the only person who thinks this “feature” is annoying.

Continue reading »]]> This one came directly from a friend and fellow iPhone user I met in Columbus, Ohio last weekend. At the moment, AT&T doesn’t officially support tethering. They have a seperate 3G USB adapter product that costs an extra $60/month. However, with the latest 3.0 OS release, somebody over at BenM.at figured out a way to modify the default carrier profile to enable the feature (already built into the new OS).

It doesn’t require jailbreaking or a funky SIM/Service hack, it’s 100% reversable and on U.S. carriers, doesn’t seem to affect IMs. You can turn it on/off via a config interface under Settings -> General -> Network -> Internet Tethering.  It supports both USB and BlueTooth connections (after pairing with your laptop, look for a new network adapter).

Of course at some point, I’m sure AT&T will try to squash this hack. We already pay for “unlimited” data service via the iPhone interface so I assume that as long as people keep their tethering usage to a minimum, not much will happen until AT&T figures out how to trap and charge people for the service.

Continue reading »]]> I can’t speak for anyone else’s network but all the hype concerning Conficker turned out to be … rather disappointing. No zombie PCs run amok unfortunately. Just another normal April 1st for this IT guy.

• CONFICKER: CYBER SECURITY HYPE?
• The “no bull” guide to Conficker
• Conficker Hype Used by Rogue Gangs
• Conficker worm reaches go time, to no effect

Continue reading »]]> I‘m pretty obsessed with gadget technology. Unfortunately, most of it gets classified as “a want” vs. “a need” by my financial planner (i.e. my wife) and for good reason. I could easily go broke keeping up with the technology equivalent of the Joneses. I mean seriously, some this stuff is pretty frickin cool.

1. Laptop sexy: Onyx Adamo or a Inspiron Mini 9 (Hackintosh!)
2. Hardware Firewall: Open Firewall Pico by Yoggie
3. Trash your remote pile: Logitech’s Harmony One
4. Tune in Tokyo: Yaesu’s FT-857D (not a Ham? Become one!)
5. Tough enough: Olypus Stylus Tough-8000
6. Solar ftw: Solio Magnesium

Continue reading »]]> FYI: Leave it installed. Otherwise you’ll spend 20 minutes trying to figure out why your iPhone/iPod/iTouch won’t sync or kick into charge mode. A little more important than say, Bonjour.

Which btw, is a completely useless discovery protocol that CAN be safely deleted off your Window’s network as long as you don’t run anything related to Mac OS X or a handful of applications like Tivo desktop.

Continue reading »]]> There, I said it. After 5+ years of supporting Blackberry devices on a corporate network, I’ve come to the conclusion that they are only marginally better than Palm at syncing data and even worse at making it easy on the guys supporting them.

This weeks issue: I had to dig up a forum post from 2007 that describes how to fix a desktop installer issue that continues to plague even their most recent release: The wizard was interrupted before BlackBerry Desktop Software could be completely installed.

Excuse me? You want me to do what? Reboot into Safe Mode before I can install your software? Are you kidding? I can’t install your software unless I’m in safe mode? Laugh. Oh wait, if that doesn’t work I have to dig into the registry hive and delete anything labeled “Research in Motion” and then do the same within the file system:

Remove the following keys:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Research In Motion/
HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Research In Motion/

Remove the following folders:
C:\Program Files\Research In Motion
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Research In Motion
C:\Documents and Settings\%Username%\Application Data\Research In Motion

So after almost 3 years, the Blackberry programming staff are either too lazy or too stupid to include a cleanup routine as part of their default installer package. Or better yet, fix the damn installer application so it doesn’t choke on legacy install information.

Because that would be too easy.

For the record, it took about 10 minutes to configure my Mobile Windows PDA and my iPhone to sync with our corporate Exchange server and I haven’t had a single issue in over 2 years. It took me 3 days and several multi-hour conversations with SuckBerry technical support to get their Enterprise software package to install and it still floods my event log with errors to this day that nobody seems able to fix.