Iphone failures – Uploading Photos

Filed Under Apple | 2008-07-26, 22:49

So I took a couple photos as we walked around Monterey this afternoon with my new 3g iPhone. It seemed like I got some nice quality shots with the 2mp camera as far as I could tell when looking at them on the device. I downloaded Shozu, an app that looked really promising as far as features go. In short it interfaces with a number of sites and allows you to upload photos and browse the sites from a streamlined interface. I installed this free software so I could upload photos to Flickr from the car.

It kind of worked. My photos are indeed on Flickr, but not exactly as I expected. First off, I had to upload some images twice before they would show on my Flickr stream even though Shozu said they uploaded fine. Then I go to check to see how close to our actual location the iPhone was able to geotag the photos. There were no geotags. Hmm, ok maybe the gps wasn’t able to get a strong signal on a clear day, by the beach, while we were outside for an hour. But why doesn’t it have any other exif data? Also, why didn’t it upload a full size 1600×1200 image? A 2mp camera is worthless if my photos are sent in 640×480 resolutions.

At first I thought all of this was Shozu’s fault, but then I tried emailing a photo to Flickr and saw that it was posted without exif data, meaning no geotagging. At least it got posted in 800×600 though. It’s still not the full 1600×1200, but it’s a step in the right direction. But this doesn’t mean Shozu is off the hook. Shozu did something I think really sucks. They added their own tagline to my photo description without asking, plus they tagged my photo with “Shozu”. The lower resolution, auto-tagging, and photo description spamming means I’ll be uploading my photos to Flickr via email or a better app in the future.

All in all, I’m very disappointed in how the iPhone handles sending images. What point is there in geotagging photos if that info (along with all the other exif data) is stripped out when you send them? And why can’t I send a full resolution photo? Limited to only one photo attached to an email? Oh, and one last thing.. Apple, why the hell do you keep correcting exif to “exit”. Exif is a completely valid word in the realm of cameras. I wish you would let me add words to the autocorrect ~~bug~~ feature. iPhone for the fail when it comes to mobile uploading of photos.

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Dance Dance Immolation on Forbes.com

Filed Under Fire Art | 2008-07-25, 15:17

As many of you already know, Dance Dance Immolation is a project from Interpretive Arson, a fire art group I’m part of. It was originally built by a talented group of friends and is now maintained and improved by a number of people. We try to bring it out a couple times a year to run and show it off. Every now and then this results in some press. Occasionally we’ll get some random out of the blue mention in an article somewhere. The latest is a small blurb in a Forbes.com article entitled “Geeks Get Their Game On”. It’s an article about the different and unique games and activities geeks engage in these days. Here’s the blurb on us:

For those that like their fun with a frisson of fear, there’s “Dance Dance Immolation,” a game that pairs the hit music videogame “Dance Dance Revolution” with balls of flame. Participants boogie along with the game–a kind of Twister set to music–while covered in firefighter gear. Missteps activate blasts of fire, often to the face. The brainchild of Interpretive Arson, a California-based “fire art troupe,” DDI is mostly played at outdoor festivals.

It’s always cool to see DDI/IA in the news somewhere, and the kicker for me in this case is that Forbes decided to run my photo (original on flickr) with the article.

WordPress app for the iPhone

Filed Under Apple | 2008-07-22, 00:05

The app that I (and ever other blogger) has been eagerly waiting for is finally here! WordPress has released what looks to be a full featured app for the iPhone for all us on the go bloggers. I had to jump on iTunes to grab it because I wasn’t finding it in the app store on device, but I’m posting from it now. :). Oh, and the best part? It’s free!

UPDATE: After 2 posts via the WordPress app for the iPhone I have the following to say:
– It’s awesome.
– I wish it posted an image before the text instead of after.
– It made a weird test post that got picked up by TwitterTools plugin at first.
– It’s hard to make valuable posts without being able to copy and paste urls from the browser.
– Writing html markup in the post is amazingly annoying with iPhone keyboard.
– I really like the “local draft” feature in addition to saving a draft on the server.

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It’s time for iPhone Apps

Filed Under Apple | 2008-07-20, 23:58

Yes, I went out and did it. One and a half hours in line last Wednesday at the San Francisco Apple store on Stockton and I walked out with a 16gb iPhone 3G. So far I’ve been very impressed. It has it’s downsides, things that the Sidekick still does infinitely better, but it does do some things better than the Sidekick. The 3G speeds, integrated GPS, and App Store with tons of apps (500+?) are what finally sold me. I’ll be going into detail more on various aspects in the near future I’m sure, but in the meantime, here are the apps I’ve loaded in the last 4 days:

Pandora: #1 reason to get a 3G iPhone.

Twitterific: When it works, it’s good. Not great, but good. Likes to crash and reboot my phone every now and then

AIM: Blows. Sidekick is far superior.

MySpace/Facebook: Maybe I’ll actually keep in touch with friends when I can log in while in a stall.

Last.fm: Was buggy and not working last time I tried.

WeatherBug: A little more info than the normal Weather App

Movies.app: Was kind of neat to be able to pull up all the info on The Dark Knight, including directions to the theater in less than a minute

Yelp: Have yet to use this even though we use the website all the time. I doubt it’s handy much outside of the Bay Area from what I hear though.

Epocrates Rx: You never know when you might need to look up drug interactions

Remote: Controling iTunes and having album art on the remote is pretty neat, and will be handy for parties, but would be more useful if I had a dedicated iTunes machine and not a laptop I have to hook up to speakers

Exposure: meh.. Flickr access, but it needs work

Google: nice and quick Google searching, quicker than safari

Graffitio: augmented reality ftw! This is straight out of some cyberpunk novel, I just hope more people start using it, and the app gets improved.

Spanish/Mandarin Audio Phrasebook: I could use some freshening up on my foreign languages.

Urbanspoon: Haven’t used this yet, but I know one night we’ll be sitting around saying “Where should we eat dinner?” and I’ll bust this out, watch my girlfriend roll her eyes, and randomly select a place to eat.

Shazam/midomi: Haven’t used either of these yet, but figure they’ll come in handy sometime when I need to identify a song. I will be real curious to see if they’ll be able to pick up on songs in dj mixes that need identifying.

MealSplitter: probably worthless

PayPal: Will definitely come in handy. Another step towards this cyberpunk novel future where physical money starts getting phased out. How long before you can but vending machine snacks in the US with your phone?

TouchTrain: Damn, I’ve got some big fat thumbs.

Loopt/Whrl: I’m really interested in all the location aware apps, need more time to check them out

Tuner: Streaming shoutcast stations? yes please! BassDrive without a computer = awesome

JirboBreak: Figured I needed at least one game for when I’m really really bored

myLite: obligatory (free) flashlight app

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Violet Blue and Boing Boing Debacle

Filed Under Geek, News, Pranks, SF Bay Area, Websites | 2008-07-02, 17:03

For those that don’t know, Violet Blue is a well-known sex educator and Boing Boing is one of the most(?) popular blogs on the internet. If you haven’t heard about Violet Blue’s posts getting pulled from BoingBoing, there’s more than enough press out there about it. Even the LA Times picked up the story. I don’t want to get into a long post about my thoughts on the matter, but I did want to share something I thought worth sharing.

I setup VioletBlueVioletBlue.net to house all of the Boing Boing posts that had been “unpublished”. These posts are all taken directly from archive.org where the old versions of the posts are kept. Boing Boing publishes their stuff under Creative Commons, so I am redistributing their work with attribution. I wanted this content to remain around and in a form that is easily locatable, i.e. not buried in archive.org’s wayback machine. If you have a blog post that previously linked to the post on Boing Boing, then feel free to link to its equivalent on VB2. These posts aren’t getting unpublished any time soon.

If I missed anything or made any mistakes on the site, please let me know. I make no claims to being perfect by any means.

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