Iphone on Evan Hoffman

iOS 7 has ruined my life

Sun, 29 Sep 2013 23:43:29 +0000

I was looking forward to iOS 7 for a few reasons. I was glad to be rid of the skeumorphic design elements (stupid shit like the “Notes” app looking like a yellow notepad) but also glad to get the Control Center to turn off Wifi more easily - I only need Wifi to be on when I’m in my house or my office. It’s just a battery drain elsewhere. Ideally iPhone would just do this via geofencing, and the fact that it doesn’t is beyond retarded.

Frustrations with the iPhone, from an Apple admirer

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 13:44:46 +0000

I got my first “smart” phone, a BlackBerry Pearl, in 2007. I got it from LetsTalk.com for $0.00 with a 2-year AT&T contract. It was EDGE-only - no 3G - and certainly had a lot of problems, but I loved it. At some point the ball fell out of it and it became unusable. The iPhone 3G was out by that time and I ended up getting my wife an iPhone 3G for Mother’s Day in 2009 and one for myself a few weeks later. I pretty much fell in love with the iPhone, and my concern about the on-screen keyboard was negated by having a real web browser after suffering with Blackberry’s for so long. And 3G was an amazing step up from EDGE speeds.

Displaying currently-playing iTunes track in the Mac menu bar

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 14:48:42 +0000

In an attempt to teach myself Objective C, and because I couldn’t find anything that did what I wanted, I wrote a little utility to display the currently-playing iTunes track in the Mac taskbar. Originally I had it display the full track name right in the taskbar but it was too much text for such a small space (especially on a 1440x900 screen), so now you click a little musical note and it shows you the info in a menu.

My first trip to Walt Disney World - March 2011

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 15:25:24 +0000

Last week I returned from my first trip to Walt Disney World. We had a great time, and I figured it might be helpful to relay some of the things that helped make the trip better.

Walt Disney World with Kids 2011 - I had my doubts about this book but it had lots of good info for someone who’s never been to Disney World before, like which rides are best for kids. If you’ve never been to Disney World, this is worth reading. I didn’t know Fastpass existed until I read this.- Disney World Wait Times Free iPhone App - GPS-integrated iPhone app with wait times reported by other app users. Very helpful.
- Disney’s own mobile phone site - Disney’s smartphone page. They have wait times here, but I found them to be pretty inaccurate. E.g. the page may say a wait time is “see now” (i.e. no wait) but there’s actually a 15 minute wait. However, this page was very useful for finding character locations and Fastpass availability.

The best tip for maximizing park enjoyment is to get there as early as possible. We got to Magic Kingdom at 8:30 AM, which was already kind of late compared to the book’s suggestion of arriving 30 minutes before the park opens, but the lines were pretty moderate and we got almost everything we wanted to do (Dumbo, race cars, Philharmagic, Buzz, a few others) done by noon and spent the rest of the day walking around exploring.

Disabling (or enabling) geotagging of photos in iPhone camera

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 00:48:23 +0000

Some people may not be aware that photos taken with the iPhone camera have the GPS coordinates of your location embedded in the EXIF metadata of the file. This means that when you post the picture online or send it to someone, you’re letting them know where you were at a certain place and time. If you’re ok with that then there’s no problem. But if you want to disable it, it’s pretty simple.

One reason I hate iTunes.

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 08:04:43 +0000

I’ve always hated iTunes. It’s a huge pile of bloatware and it’s slow as poo. It’s like 100 mb or more for an mp3 player. I remember winamp playing mp3s when it was a 500k download. Anyway.

I keep all my music on a Linux machine running samba. This way it’s available to every machine in the house. When I had Winamp on all my machines this was wonderful. But now that I’m forced into iTunes (thanks to having an iPhone), it turns out to be a major pain. In iTunes I unchecked the box for “let iTunes keep my libary organized” to prevent it from copying the entire library to each computer’s local disk. Initially adding my library of ~4000 tracks to iTunes takes over an hour (100 mbit wire) - it would take about 5 minutes in Winamp, even reading the ID3 tags for each track as it was added (rather than lazily as the song was played).

Facebook for iPhone - "Places" hangs on "Locating you..."

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 14:00:38 +0000

I decided to see how “Places” stacked up with Foursquare. I reactivated my Facebook account and reinstalled the iPhone app. Went to “Places” and clicked “Check In,” and… nothing. It mentioned something about turning on Location Services. I know I already have that enabled because other apps are using it without problem. Turns out you need to enable Location Services explicitly:

First, go to the Settings app and select General:

Facebook for iPhone - "Places" hangs on "Locating you..."

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 14:00:38 +0000

First, go to the Settings app and select General:

Vonage iPhone App Calls Facebook Friends Free, So What?

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 10:59:58 +0000

Lots of outlets seem to have picked up the story about the new Vonage iPhone app that lets you call your Facebook friends free. I don’t understand why this is even newsworthy. There are a bunch of free VOIP apps for iPhone already, with Skype being the one that comes to mind first. But a couple of other things have me scratching my head about this story:

AT&T doesn’t offer the unlimited data plan for iPhone anymore, so this “free” call could end up being pretty expensive over 3G.
If you’re making a call to another friend with the iPhone app, then your friend probably has an iPhone. They’re also probably also on AT&T, so a regular voice call to them would be free anyway. So just call them?

This might make more sense to me if your friend is outside the US, or they come out with a similar app for other platforms, but even then… so what? Free VOIP calls aren’t new. Is it just the Facebook tie-in? I don’t get the buzz. Maybe it’s because I have 5,000 rollover minutes with AT&T.

Finally got this DVD ripped and copied to my iPhone

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 22:28:47 +0000

This was a lot more work than I expected. Then again, I am a newb. And lazy.

yum install streamdvd - This is what I used to rip the DVD to a VOB file. I played around with a few other utils, including vobcopy and dvd::rip, but this was the only one I tried that ripped the DVD to a single VOB file AND started the movie at the right place. I’m sure there’s other ways to do it, but streamdvd > whatever.vob worked well for me.- You need to recompile ffmpeg with AAC support. I followed this great walkthrough; you need to install a bunch of libs but when I was done I ended up ffmpeg supporting everything I needed:

[evan@evanfc12 ~]$ ffmpeg -version FFmpeg version SVN-r22963, Copyright (c) 2000-2010 the FFmpeg developers built on Jul 11 2010 11:48:47 with gcc 4.4.3 20100127 (Red Hat 4.4.3-4) configuration: --prefix=/usr --bindir=/usr/bin --datadir=/usr/share/ffmpeg --incdir=/usr/include/ffmpeg --libdir=/usr/lib64 --mandir=/usr/share/man --arch=x86_64 --extra-cflags='-O2 -g -pipe -Wall -Wp,-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fexceptions -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -m64 -mtune=generic' --extra-version=rpmfusion --enable-bzlib --enable-libdc1394 --enable-libdirac --enable-libfaac --enable-nonfree --enable-libfaad --enable-libgsm --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libopenjpeg --enable-libschroedinger --enable-libspeex --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-libx264 --enable-libxvid --enable-x11grab --enable-avfilter --enable-avfilter-lavf --enable-postproc --enable-pthreads --disable-static --enable-shared --enable-gpl --disable-debug --disable-stripping --shlibdir=/usr/lib64 --enable-runtime-cpudetect libavutil 50.14. 0 / 50.14. 0 libavcodec 52.66. 0 / 52.66. 0 libavformat 52.61. 0 / 52.61. 0 libavdevice 52. 2. 0 / 52. 2. 0 libavfilter 1.19. 0 / 1.19. 0 libswscale 0.10. 0 / 0.10. 0 libpostproc 51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0 FFmpeg SVN-r22963 libavutil 50.14. 0 / 50.14. 0 libavcodec 52.66. 0 / 52.66. 0 libavformat 52.61. 0 / 52.61. 0 libavdevice 52. 2. 0 / 52. 2. 0 libavfilter 1.19. 0 / 1.19. 0 libswscale 0.10. 0 / 0.10. 0 libpostproc 51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0 [evan@evanfc12 ~]$ - Used WinFF to encode the VOB file to .m4v, with these preset settings (conveniently included in the Windows version of WinFF):

Ripping a DVD on Fedora Core 13

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 01:16:57 +0000

I thought this would be a pretty straightforward task. It was, though it took several minutes to track down the CSS library needed for decryption of the DVD. All I want to do is copy Talking Words Factory to my phone so my kid can watch it in the car if needed. It looked like Brasero was the tool for the job, but I got some error about needing a plugin for it to be able to decrypt it. I found libdvdcss here and after installing the RPM, everything worked. Now I just need to encode it with ffmpeg.

libiphone / libmobiledevice is now in the official Fedora repo!

Tue, 25 May 2010 10:28:41 +0000

Hooray! This was strange though:

[root@ehoffman yum.repos.d]# yum install libmobiledevice
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
Setting up Install Process
No package libmobiledevice available.
Nothing to do

[root@ehoffman yum.repos.d]# yum install libiphone libiphone-devel ifuse
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
Setting up Install Process
Package libiphone is obsoleted by libimobiledevice, trying to install
libimobiledevice-1.0.1-1.fc12.i686 instead

…

================================================================================ Package Arch Version Repository Size

Installing: ifuse x86_64 1.0.0-1.fc12 updates 20 k libimobiledevice i686 1.0.1-1.fc12 updates 73 k libimobiledevice-devel x86_64 1.0.1-1.fc12 updates 59 k

Ripping a DVD to iPhone or iPod-compatible m4v for free?

Tue, 04 May 2010 08:43:48 +0000

I was stuck somewhere the other day wishing I had the full movie “Cars” on my iPhone. Surprisingly, this is not something you can presently do through iTunes. After some searching I figured out an easy way to do it for free. The two programs you’ll need are good old DVD Decrypter and WinFF. Put DVD Decryptor in IFO mode and set it not to split the .vob files by size (so it rips them to one huge 6+ GB .vob file). Then drag the .vob file onto WinFF (making sure to use the proper preset for iPhone/iPod) and click “Convert.” It’ll take a while but it works. With my first attempt there seem to be some audio/video sync issues but I’ll play around with it.

House

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 23:23:26 +0000

Guess we’re moving.

I’m reading about iPhone development. Doesn’t look terrible.

Debating a MacBook

Sun, 31 May 2009 00:25:02 +0000

I’m considering a MacBook. This is about 85% motivated by my desire to try writing an iPhone app, and apparently the SDK requires a Mac. I was thinking of a Mac mini but a laptop seems to have more utility.

I’ll have to think this over for several more weeks I guess.

Oh, and Starcraft Protoss mission 7 is quite annoying.

One-click converting .avi to .mp4 for iPod or iPhone

Wed, 27 May 2009 22:06:42 +0000

I found a way to convert my camera’s .avi files to iPod and iPhone-compatible .mp4 files with minimal effort. The .mp4 files are also significantly smaller.

Adventures in telephony

Sat, 16 May 2009 13:13:06 +0000

I’d resolved to get an iPhone a while back. It seemed to be the hands-down winner for online web browsing. My BlackBerry Pearl lost its trackball around 8 or 9 months ago and due to that experience I wanted a phone with no moving parts. I’d narrowed it down to the Nokia E71x or the iPhone. Well, I got an E71x after determining that the iPhone’s battery life to be too short.

I used to love my BlackBerry Pearl

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 12:19:42 +0000

I got my phone in April 2007 from LetsTalk.com. I got a good deal – a BlackBerry Pearl and 2 Motorola RAZR V3rs for… free. No rebates or anything, totally free. LetsTalk screwed up the account creation but I got that straightened out with Cingular.

The BlackBerry served me pretty well until around September 2008 when the trackball got so gunked up I couldn’t use it. I keep my phone in my pants pocket and not in some protective case, so I guess the lint and finger grease got to be too much. I dealt with it like this for a couple of weeks until I decided to try cleaning the ball. It’s pretty easy to remove the clip and take the whole apparatus out, and it was indeed very gunky in there. I went at it with a can of air (computer dusting stuff), a Q-tip and some rubbing alcohol. I got all the gunk off, put it all back together and it was pretty good for about a week or two. Then it was back to its old self - spinning the trackball didn’t do anything and I couldn’t navigate menus or use almost any of the features of the phone. Plus - this is the best part - the plastic clip that kept the trackball apparatus in place had apparently lost tension or something and would pop off, and by the end of 2008 the trackball had fallen out completely and is now lost to the ages.