I had no plans of upgrading my camera, but found out about a great deal that a member posted on the hv20 forums. The website samys.com has a refurbished HV30 model for $450. I decided to look on ebay and see what my camera, the previous model, the HV20 would sell for. I was amazed to see that used ones sold roughly between the $450-$550 range. I decided to go ahead and order the HV30 and then promptly put my HV20 up on ebay. Instead of an auction I decided to try a fixed price listing at $500 and had the option for potential buyers to make an offer. Over the last couple of days, I had offers ranging from $200-$400. I counter offered at $450, but no one took it. I then had one of the potentials who lived in Australia offer the $450 if I would ship it out today, so he could have it in time for a shoot he was doing. In the process of working out that deal someone hit the buy it now of $500 and got it at the full price. I’m really happy it worked out this way because with the ebay fees and such I pretty much break even with the new model.

continue reading "Canon HV20 to HV30 Camera Upgrade"

Monday, Apple finally approved some IM apps that now support push notifications. Included in the updates was my app of choice, Beejive. When it first hit the app was a little slow and had a problem with signing into AOL. I think the slowness was everyone wanting to try it out and the AOL issue was resolved within a day. Everytime I have tested the push it has come in within a second from when the other user send me a message. I am very happy with how this is working. Since then I am now always signed in with my phone instead of my work and home computers. My only complaint is I wish Beejive had a little louder sound when the push notification comes in. I was thinking they would have just used the text message sound, but instead it is the iChat bubble sound when you type in a message. It is a very small complaint that I can live with. Some users have reported unsuitability with it, but I haven’t had any of those issues either. Here is a pic of what the push notification looks like.

Another new feature in 3.0 is now support for bluetooth Stereo headphones. I wanted to give these a try, but figured they would be at least $50 and was going to pass. I read some reviews and found out the Insignia NS-BTHDP model is quite affordable on ebay. I bought them for around $18 shipped, so I figured I couldn’t go wrong. I am amazed at how well they sound and it is really nice to cut the cable when I want to listen to music/podcasts. The headphones have a built in mic for answering calls as well, but I think mine were defective, as I haven’t been able to get the mic to work with my phone or computer. I’ve emailed the seller to hopefully get a replacement, but it isn’t a huge deal. I mainly wanted them to listen to music when mowing the lawn and doing other things around the house. They aren’t the most attractive headphones, but they do sound good.

I have had some people ask me about how to create ringtones for their iPhones, so I thought I would do a quick tutorial. On the mac you can also use garageband, but I personally prefer to use Quicktime Pro. These same instructions should also work on Windows with Quicktime Pro as well.

The first thing I do is create a ringtones folder somewhere on the computer. I simply put it in my documents folder, so it is easy to find.

Now in iTunes find the song that you want to convert to a ringtone and simply drag it to your desktop.

iTunes makes a copy of the file on the desktop, so we are not modifying the original.

Right click on the file and choose open with Quicktime player.

Ringtones can only be a maximum of 30 seconds, so we have to trim the song. You can use the little sliders that appear below the play head to adjust the area of the song you want to keep. Look at the picture to get an idea of how this works.

Now that we have an area selected chose edit from the menu bar and then trim to selection. Now the clip will only play the area you have selected. You can do some more fine tuning if the clip still happens to be over 30 seconds long and repeat the steps above until you have it exactly the way you want.

The next step involves exporting the file. Go to file on the menu bar and then export.

Under export choose movie to mpeg-4 as shown. You can export this file now to your ringtones folder. Just chose your destination and click save.

Now you can rename the exported mp4 file to however you want the file to show up on your iPhone.
This next step is very important. You need to change the extension of the file from .mp4 to .m4r This tells iTunes that the file is a ringtone.

Go back to iTunes and select ringtones from the item list located on the left hand side of the iTunes Window. Now drag your ringtone over to the white space area and it should show up.

Now you need to setup your iPhone to sync the ringtones. Plug in your iPhone and select it from iTunes. Click on the ringtones tab and chose sync ringtones.

The ringtone now should show up on your iPhone after the next sync. Hopefully these instructions make some kind of sense.

Yesterday the Internets were a buzz over the fact that Apple rejected a Commodore 64 emulator for the iPhone. Being a C64 fan myself I would love it if they could get this approved. Apparently the developer spent a year on this and had approval from the owners of the rights to the Commodore. I think Apple’s main concern is the fact that an emulator can run code from within the app that they have no control over thereby they could cause crashes or things of that nature. Hopefully the makers can get something figure out with them to get this out. One way I think they could do this would be to provide game bundles. Where as you buy say a pack that includes 10-20 games and then you can only play those games with that purchase. That is basically what Sega is doing right now. They have their own Genesis emulator that they used to port Sonic the Hedgehog in which they charge $5.99 for. Last week they released another Genesis game Golden Axe which is its own separate app which costs another $5.99. Both games are running on the same software, but are contained within their own app.

The official site for the project can be viewed at http://www.c64iphone.com/

Below is a video of the app in action.

Zagg is doing a deal right now to get 30% off an invisibleshield for the iPhone and the Pre. At first I was weary of these when I saw the kiosks in the mall and it seemed pretty expensive for just a film covering on a device. I did some of my own research though and decided to get one back when I had a 30 gig iPod a few years ago. Needless to say it seems to provide very good protection. That iPod still looked new even after a few years. When I got my iPhone 3G last year one of the first things I did was get a shield put on. They had some issues with the 3G version, but I kept up to date on it, and they replaced it for me with each revision for free until they got the cut of the shield right. The only issue I have had, has been with keeping my iPhone in my pocket. The shield picks up lint on the edges and comes loose over time. I figure it isn’t a big deal to pay the $10 installation fee once or twice a year to keep my iPhone looking like new. My iPhone screen and back are scratch free. For anyone with an iPhone or Pre this is a good deal on their site. I imagine you could buy one here and then still take it to the mall kiosk and pay the $10 to have them put it on. They look like a lot of work to put on, so I decided to just pay to have them do it. Below is the ad that links to the official page.

Also, here is a video showing how the protection works with someone actually taking a key to their iPhone. I actually had a guy at a T-Mobile booth give me a demo by doing this to his iPhone. I thought he was nuts, but it did work.