Heath C. Ice

Many iPhone, Blackberry, and Android smartphones are now equipped with high definition video cameras. Most smartphones, however, lack a standard tripod mount connector.

Camera Tripod Mount

GorillaPod Flexible Tripod

I recently needed to mount my iPhone to a tripod to help a friend shoot a show. This made me remember the GorillaPod Flexible Tripod I had seen at the store. For approximately $17, I was able to create a tripod mount for my iPhone 4 that worked great for stationary filming. Granted, this mount is not suited well for a moving camera. All you need is a a GorillaPod Flexible Tripod and a 1/4-20 Coupling Nut. The nice thing about this mount is that it will hold most any smartphone or camera.

Here’s my iPhone 4 mounted using this quick and easy rig.

I am a lazy bastard and I have been meaning to test this for days. Last week, Apple released a software update as shown below.

I found this strange since Apple is typically pretty vague about what it has fixed in many software updates. Good job on the part of Valve and Blizzard though in putting pressure on Apple to fix it’s graphics drivers. Anyways, I was curious if this would allow my Starcraft II install to run better on OSX. Previously, I could not run Starcraft II on “Ultra” graphics settings without having a framerate issue on my quad-core i7 iMac. With this new update though, I am not able to run with “Ultra” settings! I am happy. Granted that when I ran this test, Blizzard also installed an update, so that could have also affected the results. Anyways, I am looking forward now to better and better graphics performance in games on OSX!!!

Blizzard, you almost had your Downloader for Starcraft II correct. Fortunately, you are one of the companies smart enough to use bittorrent to distribute your installers and patches. This is a fact that I love as it typically leads to faster downloads and I am more than happy to contribute most of my upload bandwidth towards allowing others to download from me, which eases to burden on your servers and allows more people to gain access at one time. Please note, though, that I said SOME of my upload bandwidth. For a reason that I cannot fathom, other than laziness on your part, you have failed to include explicit upload/download rate controls in your Starcraft II Downloader. After 3 hours of downloading and having issues with websurfing (due to your program saturating my upload bandwidth), I finally had to disable peer-to-peer downloading and instead burden your server with the full download of Starcraft II. I may decide to turn on peer-to -peer connections when I go to bed in a few hours, but seeing as my download is progressing at the exact same speed either way, I really don’t care. Please, for the love of god and all that is holy, IMPLEMENT throttling in your downloaders from now on! Every bittorrent client I have ever used has this ability, except for yours!

As a sidenote while I am at it, Apple, IMPLEMENT TORRENTING SUPPORT AND THROTTLING IN ITUNES!!! I am sick of large podcast downloads making my internet unusable for half an hour or more at a time!

Ok, so Apple likes to use the tagline “There’s an app for that” in it’s commercials, but this is somewhat ridiculous. Steve Jobs announced last week that people who bought “iPhone 4″s will receive a free bumper to fix the reception issues. In order to receive these bumpers, Apple created an iPhone App instead of simply putting the free bumper program on their website. It seems a bit excessive to me, but oh well.

Here is a sample video using the rear facing hi-definition camera of my iPhone 4. Make sure to set the video’s playback resolution to 720p and watch it in fullscreen mode. The non-fullscreen video only has a width of 480pixels.

Here is a sample video of the same location using the forward facing camera of the iPhone 4. Make sure to set the video’s playback resolution to 480p. The non-fullscreen video should be wide enough to show full detail at the camera’s resolution, but watching it fullscreen will give a better appreciation of the differences in the two videos.

If you value your free time in the slightest, I beg you for the love of god and all that is holy DO NOT DOWNLOAD THIS GAME. Angry Birds is an iPhone game that is immeasurably addictive! I found out about this game Saturday afternoon from a friend. I have since played approximately 14 hours worth of the game in the 24 hours I have known about it.

The objective of the game is to slingshot various types of birds into structures in an attempt to knock them down and kill the pigs inside. The levels have almost the perfect difficulty. You will get frustrated at times and put the game down only to find that a few minutes later you have to try just one more time to beat the level. This is the most addictive game I have played in a long time.

While this is only an iPhone game, it looks beautiful when scaled up on the iPad screen. There is an iPad version of the game for $5, but since the iPhone game looks just fine and is only $0.99, I cannot see the point in buying the actual iPad version.

As a final note, I have been writing this post for 4 hours because I can’t stop playing the game long enough to concentrate.

YouTube and Apple really need to fix the YouTube app on the iPad. I have been trying to watch a music video on YouTube that is available in 360p, 480p, 720p, and 1080p. When I attempt to watch the video over my home wireless connection the application insist on choosing the 1080p stream, which is too large for my 3Mbps internet connection to smoothly stream. While I am waiting on the video to cache, the iPad will usually go to sleep since I can’t do anything else on the iPad while the video caches. So, I figured I would try the 3G connection since I know that via the 3G connection the iPad will use a lower quality video stream. Well, the video did load completely in about 10 seconds via 3G, but the video quality was so bad that it wasn’t worth watching. All of this could be solved by having a tiny little option that allows me to choose what video quality I want to use over WiFi. My home internet connection typically streams 720p YouTube videos with few issues.

Now for the second issue. AT&T has apparently announced that they are doing away with their unlimited data plan for both iPhone and iPad (http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9G30GCG0.htm). They are replacing it with a 200MB/month for $15/month plan and a 2GB/month for $25/month plan. Apparently current iPhone subscribers can keep their unlimited plan at the current rate, but new users have to choose the lesser plans. Also, for iPad 3G users, if you currently have the $30/month unlimited data plan and CONTINUOUSLY pay for it every month from now on, you get to keep the unlimited plan. However, if you ever don’t renew, you only options become the 200MB/month and 2GB/month plans. In my opinion AT&T intentionally mislead thousands of people who bought iPad 3Gs by initially promoting the “unlimited $30/month, activate and deactivate as needed” plan a few months ago. This seemed like a great deal to users who only traveled every now and then and wanted to have the option of unlimited 3G only when on the road. AT&T, this is a dick move and you know it. I truly hope that there is a class-action lawsuit started over this bait-and-switch advertising. I do not believe for a second that AT&T didn’t plan this out as “let’s entice users to buy the 3G model by advertising a great data plan for iPad but then after enough are sold, we’ll do away with that plan and royally fuck them over on their purchase.”

Anyways, I trust that Apple and YouTube can at least easily fix my first complaint. Too AT&T though, FUCK YOU!