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)

Chris Low from ESPN talks about potential Florida playmakers for the 2010 season:

Notable Players
Quarterback:
WR:
RB:
TE:
LB:
Team Stats

Regular Season
9/04 12:00pm Miami (OH)
9/11 12:30pm USF
09/18 3:30pm @ Tennessee
9/25 Kentucky
10/02 @ No. 1 Alabama
10/09 No. 17 LSU
10/16 Mississippi State (HC)
10/30 3:30pm @ Georgia (Jacksonville, FL)
11/06 @ Vanderbilt
11/13 South Carolina
11/20 Appalachian State
11/27 @ FSU

SEC Championship:
12/04 SEC East vs. SEC West

BCS National Championship:
01/11 BCS No. 1 vs. BCS No. 2

iCal subscription link: http://goo.gl/O35m or download for direct import.

I’ll keep my master Google calendar updated with game times, Win/Losses, etc as the season progresses and more information becomes available. If you have it set up as a iCal subscription, any updates I make will sync with your client automatically. However, if you import the iCal .ics file directly, it won’t. I’ve included the entire 2010 Fall Gator Football schedule plus the 5 BCS National Title games.

iPhone/iPad Calendar Subscription

1) On your iPhone/iPad navigate to: Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> Add Account -> Other -> Add Subscribed Calendar
2) For the server address, type the following (case sensitive): http://goo.gl/O35m
3) Click Next and leave all the other default settings as is.

Once it verifies the link, you’ll be able to view it like any other calendar loaded on your phone/iPad. If you type the short URL incorrectly, you’ll get a generic subscription entry with no additional calendar content.

Outlook

1) Download and save the basic.ics file to your local hard drive
2) Navigate to: File -> Import and Export -> Import an iCalendar or vCalendar file (.vcs)
3) Click Nextand then navigate and select the basic.ics file you downloaded in step 1

Because Outlook imports the calendar directly from a file, it won’t update the entries automatically when I make changes to the my master Google calendar.

Anyway, I’m really doing this site an injustice by not posting. My photo log is backed up, I’m averaging about one post per month and it’s been a struggle lately to figure out what to post. I need to develop a posting routine like my friend David over at davidgagne.net and his Daily David/Friday Five even if it’s just random bits I find interesting and not related to anything Tober.

hmm.

Summary:

Myakka State Park is pretty typical for a South Florida lake/wetland. Full of wild life, flooded during the rainy season and miles of densely packed palmetto scrub brush with the occasional island of mossy oak or scrub pine. Oh and it gets hot. Really hot. And muggy if the humidity is up. Did I mention mosquitoes? But if you’re lucky and you time your trip right, hiking in South Florida can be rather pleasant. Myakka is close to the Gulf so in the spring when the sun starts to set, a nice breeze kicks up keeping most of the evening bugs at bay and provides some relief from the afternoon heat. The only real issue is dodging around days or weeks when the spring rains have flooded the low lands, basically putting everything under 2-3 inches of standing water. We managed to get everything but dry trail so I can’t complain too much about the trip.

As a reminder, Florida has several species of snakes. Some of them more poisonous than others. The 3.5-4ft fellow in the picture above was stretched across the trail sunning and after a long afternoon of hiking through muck and water, they can be easy to miss. I’m lucky this particular snake was paying attention because I wasn’t. I got about 3 feet away before he coiled and started rattling. After a 15 minute standoff, we decided the safest way around him was to scoop him off the trail. We couldn’t safely walk around him because the scrub brush was thick and crowded both sides of the trail – he was coiled smack dab in the middle which put his potential strike range across the entire trail. I’m not an adrenaline junkie by any stretch but I can tell you, facing off against a pissed venomous snake with only a hiking pole and a palmetto leaf is invigorating to say the least.

Myakka State Park Day 1

Myakka State Park Day 2

I love the Ngallery mod for the backend, I just need to figure out a better way of displaying and organizing the photos on the front end.

Congratulations Scott & Nicole!!!!

Florida Crew Alumni,

Invitations were sent out last week to the 4th annual Florida Crew Family and Alumni Weekend. Some of you may not receive one because your physical address is not on file. A copy of the invite is attached to this message. It explains how to RSVP and gives a description of the event. The festivities start Saturday, February 20th. The event continues to grow every year and I guarantee it will be worth the trip to Gainesville.

Hope to see you there!
Family and Alumni Weekend Invitation

Regards,

Mark Gallrein
Florida Crew Alumni Coordinator
FloridaCrewAlumni@gmail.com