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July 23, 2016

Framingham Time-Lapse

Here's a short time-lapse video of tonight's sunset in Framingham. This was taken with my old iPhone 5s.

The time lapse functionally on the iPhone works really good, and the video quality on the old iPhone 5s is still pretty decent.

Some tips on making the video:

  • I would highly recommend connection the iPhone to a tripod to minimize and camera shake from the wind.
  • Once you got the perfect angle, reduce the screen display brightness so it doesn't drain that much battery.
  • Connect the phone to a USB power bank so that you don't inadvertently run out of battery while taking that awesome footage.
  • Put the phone in airport mode so a phone call or phone notification doesn't stop the Time Lapse recording.

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July 13, 2015

Taking Videos with the iPhone

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If you taking any video with any type of smartphone it helps to hold the camera the proper way. When taking videos, you should ALWAYS hold the camera so the longest side is parallel to the ground.

The logic behind this is simple all TVs and computer monitors are in the landscape format ( also known as X in the media business) and have been that way since the 4:3 display format was adopted in 1999.

When you hold the camera the other way, you cause a display issue when you try to view it on other platforms - that includes YouTube and Vimeo. What ends up happening is you'll see black bars that are vertically align to the video. The video basically looks weird every place but on your phone.

Some television networks have created an effect to make a blur version of the video in the background so it looks a bit better. Still not an optimal way to show amateur footage.

Get in the habit of holdings the camera correctly and you'll have much better quality videos to show on YouTube and TV.

If you do take a lot of video with your iPhone, you should look into using FiLMiC Pro ($5). It's a great application that helps you take really good videos, as you have a lot more control than the standard video capture that comes with the phone. The only downside is the application does take some time to learn how to use. I use it off and on and find it to be a useful app.

If you disagree with my opinion, on how to properly hold the camera, let me know. I would be interested in hearing from my blog readers.

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May 30, 2015

Playing Podcasts with MapMyRun+

Do you want to play a Podcast on your next run using the MapMyRun+ application? Are you frustrated that when you play a podcast that it's hard to stop or skip to the next broadcast while your running?

Here's how to "hack" your iPhone so that you can sync any number of podcasts broadcasts so that it will work with MapMyRun+ application. This should also work with other applications that play music, but my goal was to make it work for MapMyRun+.

    First you will need to download various broadcasts that you wish to hear, I would recommend Everyday is Saturday.
  1. Using iTunes on your computer, select the iPhone in the left nav and create a new empty Playlist and call it whatever you want, example "5K Podcast"
  2. Select the PodCast icon/text just above your new playlist
  3.  You'll see a list of all the Podcast on you iPhone, select the Podcast that you want to hear and drag it to the "5k Podcast" playlist. Obviously select as many as you want from different authors.
  4.  
  5.  Now select the "5k Podcast" and you should see all the Podcasts that you put in the playlist in the main window. You should order them how you would like to play. There's no need if you are using MapMyRun+ shuffle mode.
  6.  
  7.  Disconnect the iPhone from your computer. 
  8.  

After you completed the above steps, you should be able to go into MapMyRun+ and select your new playlist in the Music category. The Podcast will play in the order that you put it in unless you selected the shuffle option.

Note: If you check out the playlist using the Music App, you won't see anything. Technically that's correct since there isn't any music in the Playlist. Yes, you can mix music with Podcast clips.

You can only manage this playlist from your computer, so if you want to add or remove clips from the Playlist you will need to connect the phone and manage it in iTunes.

Bonus: Since you may listen to multiple broadcasts from the same author, did you know that you can change the start time of a Podcast? You may want to do this so you don't have to keep hearing the same intro during your run. In iTunes, Simply right click on Podcast and select info, then select the Options tab and adjust the start time. Usually most Podcast run their intro during the first 45 seconds of the broadcast.

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December 10, 2014

Google+ App

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By downloading the Google+ App, you can have Google automatically back up your photos. Even better, you can set it up so that backup only happen when your connected to a WiFi network. (No burning valuable cellular minutes.) All backup photos and videos are kept in private area of Google+.

Photos that are at least 2048px are backup for free on Google+. The iPhone uses 3264 x 2448 for photos. If you choose to have the full version backed up, just make sure you manage your account frequently. Google gives you 15GB for free, which means that you would only be able to store approx 7,500 photos. The 15GB is shared with other Google Apps such as Mail. Taking movies, that uses up more of your Google+ space.

I know that 7,500 photos sound like a lot, but remember if you don't manage your photos, the storage space can add up very quickly.

This is very handy App to have when traveling to Disney World. Take all the photos you want during the day. When you get back to the hotel room, you can backup your photos when you connect to the free hotel wifi. When it's all done you can go through the photos camera roll and delete unwanted photos or videos. Do you really need to keep 200 photos of the parade?

If you only plan on using the photos online, don't bother using the full size backup. You wouldn't notice the difference of quality, and you don't have to worry about how many photos you have on Google+. Basically you'll be able to take a years worth of photos without paying Google anything.

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September 24, 2014

Twitter Notifications

Great tip from LifeHacker on changing the Twitter notifications, this is how you turn off the dreaded "@blah and 1 more just followed @someone"

Lately, Twitter has been rolling out some extra notifications that you might have seen show up that you really don't care about like "People are talking about this" or "Three people you follow just followed this guy." If you'd like to get rid of these, there's a setting for it, but it's buried.
On both iOS and Android, the fine-grained notification settings are tucked away under less-than-obvious menus. As Mashable points out, on iOS, you first open Twitter's main settings panel and tap on the account you want to change. Scroll down far enough and you'll see options for notifications for things like "Recommendations," "News," and "Other." While none of these are very obvious labels, they're also not direct interactions with you, which we assume you're most interested in.

You can read the whole article on lifehacker.com.

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April 25, 2014

Camera+ Metadata

On my iPhone 5s I have been using Camera+ and Apple's Camera app for a while. Recently I was wondering if I could tell the difference of photo quality.

I was browsing through my photos in iPhoto and was trying to figure out which photos was taken with which app. I noticed something pretty interesting while looking at the Metadata. There's a very slight difference between Camera and Camera+.

Photos that were taken with Camera+ had iPhone 5S as the camera name, where as Apple's Camera app says iPhone 5s. Yes, the folks at tap tap tap put a uppercase 's' as the camera type. If you see the metadata of a picture with a uppercase 's', you'll know that it was taken from Camera+.

The image with today's posting has the metadata for Apple's Camera on top and the metadata Camera+ on the bottom.

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December 10, 2013

Emailing Multiple Photos or Videos

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Have you ever wanted to send multiple photos from your iPhone and thought it wasn't possible, since the Camera Roll only allows you to select one image.

Well it turns out that you can and it's very easy! The key thing is this menu when sending your email:

iPhone Email Menu

Here are the steps to send out multiple photos:

  1. Using your iPhone 4/5/5s, open up Mail
  2. Create a new email. (Click on the icon on the bottom right.)
  3. Enter in the email address where you want to send the pictures and click the Subject line
  4. Enter in any subject message and click on the body of the message.
  5. Touch and hold until you see a magnifying glass and let go, you should see a popup menu with three options, Select Select All and Paste.
  6. Click on the Arrow to the right of Paste.
  7. You should see two new options, Quote Level and Insert Photo or Video.
  8. Click on 'Insert Photo or Video'
  9. Select the photo that you want, You'll see a 'Choose' selection on the bottom right to select that one picture. (Note: You can only select one photo at a time.)
  10. To add more photos to this email, simply repeat steps 6 through 9
  11. When your done Click Send
  12. You'll have the option to select the image file size that you wish to send.

That's it! As you can see it is ery easy to send out emails with multiple photos!

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November 15, 2013

Video Resolutions

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Recently I was reviewing some videos that I have taken over the past few years using various cameras. I decided to record some of the video settings:

 

iPhone 5s1920 x 1080H.26429.99 fps
iPhone 41280 x 720H.26429 fps
Sony DSC-HX200V1920 x 1080H.26429.97 fps
Flip Video H1280 x 720H.26430 fps
Fuji FinePix e900640 x 480M.JPEG30 fps

 

What this tells me is that I should use the iPhone and Sony cameras to shoot video. The Flip video might be good for some situations, but I will loose out on video quality. The Fuji FinePix is a great camera that I have used to take great pictures, but I didn't realized how poor quality the video are.

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November 8, 2013

iPhone 5s Hearing Aid Compatibility

If you wear hearing and experiencing problems with the iPhone 5s, you should know that by default the iPhone 5s didn't enable hearing aid mode. Here are the instructions from Apple:

Activating hearing aid mode in the iPhone 5s

To activate Hearing Aid mode on iPhone 5 or later, go to Settings > General > Accessibility. Hearing Aid mode on the iPhone 5 modifies the phone?s acoustic settings to improve compatibility with hearing aids set in "T" or telecoil mode.

This obviously works best for those that have hearing aids with a telecoil mode. Most newer hearing aids have Blue Tooth so the connection is slightly different and the above settings doesn't apply to you.

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October 25, 2013

iPhoto and PhotoSync

I use my iPhone camera every day to take lots of pictures and send the best ones to a distribution list. I usually do this on my work computer. The big problem is that usually I take 30 pictures and I have to select around 10 to send out. It takes a lot of time to figure out which ones are the best.

Recent updates by Apple with iPhoto and iPhone 5s has made this process a little easier. Here are the steps that I do to move photos from my iPhone to my computer.

  • On the train to work I open up iPhoto App and start going through all the pictures that I took. When I find ones that are good, I mark them as favorite using the 'heart' icon. This moves the files to a new Album in my Photos call 'iPhoto for iOS.'
  • Then I open up PhotoSync App and select the Album and click on the red icon on the top, Select All and then move them to where I want. In my case it's to Dropbox.

The reason why I do this method is because iPhoto makes it easy to see the photo and then tag it. I can quickly look at a bunch of photos and tag them. 

I use PhotoSync because the transfer doesn't actually happen until I get on a wireless network, so I am not using any of my bandwidth. The process is very simple and makes transfers very easy.

Doing picture selection on the train is great use of downtime since I don't have to have internet connections to do this. Once I get to work, I can quickly put together the collage and send away.

Technology is wonderful.

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