Tonight I went with my good friend Bill Palmer (@beatweek) to check out a singer / song writer BC Jean (@bcjean) at the Hard Rock Cafe on Hollywood Blvd. We got there a bit early and had some fun playing an impromptu game of pong using the Faux-Microsoft-Surface-hung-on-a-wall that they use to show off all the music memorabilia on this interactive display. As I set out to blue screen the thing I ended up figuring out that you can fling the photos from one side of this 30″ plus display to the other and bunch everything up on one side. Bill was “Player 1″ and I was “Player 2″ and I ended up getting all of the photos on his side, I rule!

While sitting at the table waiting for BC Jean’s set to start I thought I’d try out this new app called SocialCam. SocialCam is a video recorder that lets you share video quickly and easily using an iPhone. I’ve used uStream and JustinTV in the past with very little luck getting something watchable out of them mainly due to using mediocre / spotty cell service. To fix that issue somewhat this app does it a bit different so instead of it being streamed as it’s recorded the app actually saves the video locally then pushes it out to their servers during recording which improves its quality quite a bit. I’m pretty happy with the results from my iPhone 4 camera in a dimly lit room. The video isn’t “Live” per se but its pretty damn close. What do you think?
 

 

 

 
After BC Jean’s set Andy Grammer (@andygrammer) got on stage and did his thing. He sounded great and got the crowd moving.
 

 
Jason and BC Jean
 
BC Jean and Bill Palmer

When I got my first iPod Touch Jailbreaking was just started up. The device was new and shiny yet we wanted more… jailbreaking allowed the adventureious geek to disable the built in security of the device and “root” it allowing them to login via an ssh connection and access the shell. See, I live by the idea that there is always something more to do with a device or technology then what it was really intended for. There was a lot of slick apps being added to the iPod Touch (this was before the official Apple App Store existed) and I was having fun adding new all sorts of cool stuff to the device. At the time my favorite was being able to add a wallpaper  springboard where the icons lived. Apps like Winterboard really made it so you could customize the device however you saw fit.

Later I sold my iPod Touch and got an iPhone which again I jailbroke but was very cautious in what apps I added to it. This was my primary phone and I didn’t need it rebooting in the middle of a phone call or something. When I purchased my iPhone 3G I tried my hand again at jailbreaking and had decent results but some instability problems. One day my iPhone outright died and I had to take it to the Apple Store to see about having it fixed or replaced. At the time I had “Make it mine” app installed which allowed me to have “TUCKER” displayed instead of “AT&T” as the carrier text. Luckily he couldn’t get the phone to boot so he gave me a new iPhone 3G. From that point I didn’t jailbreak my iPhone 3G but I did go home and restore from backup, it ends up that the carrier modification that Make it Mine did stays in the backup so I continued to have “TUCKER” and the carrier text even though it wasn’t jailbroken. Fast forward to 2010 and I have an iPhone 4 32gb that I’ve been itching to jailbreak due to the faster processor and more memory I had this feeling that the instability issues would be minimal on this more powerful device.

Before doing the jailbreak I mapped out my plan of attack:

• No UI customizations needed for me. I didn’t really care about modifying the aesthetics of the UI, now that iOS4 allows someone to add their own Lock Screen wallpaper and SpringBoard wallpaper I’m fine with just that.
• Find a way to get rid of the annoying popup notifications in favor of some non-intrusive notification method ala Android and WebOS.
• Disable the WiFi only restrictions that Apple (and AT&T) put in place.
• Enable the ability to create a WiFi hotspot.

Added Bonus:

• Add additional functionality to Copy and Paste action menu.

I found all the jailbreak only programs I needed to make the above happen then researched how to go about jailbreaking the iPhone 4. As of this writing iOS Version 4.1 (8B117)  is the current firmware and quite a few jailbreak apps have come out: pwnagetool, limera1n etc. I tried pwnagetool and ended up with a non activated iPhone 4, a iPod Touch if you will. I started from scratch and tried limera1n with much more success. I do hear that there may be some battery life issue with using limera1n and I’ll be looking into that in the next few days.

So, what apps did I install from Cydia?

• Action Menu
  Expands on the Cut Copy and Paste menu by adding additional features to it:
  Copy All, History, Lookup, Tweet, TinyUrl, Open Path, Search and much more
• Activator
  Activate apps via gestures, buttons and shortcuts. I’m mainly using this to activate Notified Pro so I can swipe from the top of the screen down to show my notifications.
• Cyntact
  Shows profile pictures in contact lists, if you have pictures of all your contacts it’s nice, if you use the iPhone Facebook  app enabled avatar sync and enjoy the new pictures.
• Mobile Terminal (iOS4)
  Allows me to access the shell on the iPhone
• My3G
  This app tricks applications / iOS into thinking they are connected to WiFi instead of 3G. Facetime, iTunes downloads, Podcast Downloads and high quality YouTube to name a few are all enabled when using this app.
• Notified Pro
  Notified for iPhone is a notification app it allows users to have more of an Android-style notification system. Something I’m surprised that Apple hasn’t improved on yet. 
  • Statusbar Notification
    When a new notification comes in instead of the popup being displayed (once disabled using Popup Blocker below) it displays the notification on the top status bar until clicked.
  • Popup Blocker
    Allows you to control just about every popup that you could get on an iPhone and/or iPod touch. Once installed, you can get to the app in your stock Settings application. Here you have the options to enable/disable the application, Block Away Items, turn on/off Wake On Alert (this turns on your screen when you receive an alert) and set Alerts. My favorites here are disabling the popup when the iPhone is in an active state (being used, playing a game) and disable that annoying popup when I plug my iPhone into an “unsupported dock”.
• SBSettings
  SBSettings is not like the regular iPhone app that can be launched from the home screen by tapping on its icon. To launch it, you have to swipe on iPhone’s status bar or tap the status bar using two fingers. Once SBSettings is launched, you’ll see various toggle switches that are available in the Settings app such as Wi-Fi, 3G, EDGE, Bluetooth, Brightness etc.
• MyWi
  This is an extremely powerful application that allows you to create a wifi hotspot (currently only Ad-Hoc is available, Infrastructure coming soon). This is something that is pretty popular in the Android community primarily with the Android Evo.

In later posts I’ll review each of these apps so you can see what justified me jailbreaking my device. Let me know if the comments what JB apps you use.

So far three of my friends and two of my co-workers have switched from iPhones and purchased Android based phones, why is that? What is so compelling? Is AT&T to blame? Are the restrictions that AT&T set in place with Apple limiting innovation?

To be perfectly honest I’m an Apple fanboy, I switched years ago and most of my computers in our home are Macs (or pretending to be Apple hardware). Both my wife and I have iPhones (my wife still has a 3G and I have a 4) my kids have feature phones with cheap yet limited internet access. I listen to podcasts and music and use my phone all the time to look things up. I have many iPhone accessories both for the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 4 and have bought quite a few apps in the App Store. With all that said I have quite a bit invested in iPhones, accessories and apps. I like the selection of apps that the iPhone App Store vs what I’ve seen in the Android Marketplace, it seems pretty limiting at the moment.

The things I like about the Android OS is the ability to create a wifi hotspot and how well it integrates with all of the Google apps. My iphone works well with my gmail accounts and my contacts and calendar sync up without any problems but I’d have to jailbreak my phone in order to enable wifi hotspot functionality or forfeit my unlimited internet access to tether my laptop to the iPhone 4.

So did you switch to or purchase an Android based device? If so, why?

If you’re one of my friends or not after reading this please take a moment and let me know why you switched in the comments below.

Today I had an incredible opportunity to go down to Gyro Hobbies in Laguna Hills, CA to visit with Chris Cloutier of f-Stop Aerial Media to run a few tests for an upcoming event with OCMMA. I recorded 2 streams for this test one with my iPhone and another on my laptop hijacked from the receiver that the helicopter transmits to. At the end of the second video I had Chris talk about his setup and how he make all this tech work together to make some awesomeness happen.

Stream from the Helicopter:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/9315586

Stream from my iPhone

I’ll have these 2 videos up on Youtube soon.

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/9315469

I’ve been experiencing some battery related issues lately with my iPhone 4. I’ve gotten pretty frustrated with how crappy the battery life has been and being the good geek that I am I started investigating more into this matter. I’ve tried a number of changes on the phone to see if I can figure out exactly why my battery life has been so crappy.

When the iPhone 4 first came out I had just my one GMail account enabled using IMAP. I also had push notifications on (I don’t get that many of them during the day at work) and after learning how background processing works I closed every app that I was not using religiously. Later during the week of owning the phone I added on my corporate exchange account and noticed my battery went to crap fast. After reading the event logs on the exchange server there was a misconfiguration on it for mobile devices (we’re a blackberry shop with a BES) so I made a few changes to be made so it would stop my iPhone from getting beat down. A few changes later and the battery life was satisfactory, this change also addressed the same issue with a co-worker’s Android Evo. After the latest update my battery life started going downhill fast. It was typical for my 100% battery at 8:30am to read 75% come lunchtime with little to no usage. I’ve tried restores from backup, starting from scratch and DFU restores / from scratch with no change to my battery performance. I have a feeling this is a hardware issue so I made an appointment with the Apple Store.

So after visiting the Apple Store yesterday and having the Genius at the bar do a DFU wipe my phone he stated that I should go home and plug the iphone in and to not restore   my settings on the phone from a backup. I reluctantly obliged and went home and did jsut that, started from scratch… again. I haven’t seen any improvement after doing this as show in the screenshots above.

Are my findings typical for an iPhone 4 battery? Is a new iPhone 4 the next step to solving this? How is your battery life? Leave me a comment of hit me up on twitter @jasontucker

Google Voice

So everyone is a twitter about Google Voice and using the service for all sorts of things. Having it call you and call a contact to make a “free” call. I’m an AT&T wireless customer and do not have a home land line, I don’t see how I can benefit from using google voice to make calls for me. Let me explain:

My AT&T plan gives me X minutes of talk time per month and “unlimited” talk time after a certain time and weekends. When I call a friend using google voice it calls me then calls them and we can talk. By doing so it’s eating up minutes on my phone since AT&T doesn’t provide free incoming calls (unless something changed I don’t know about). Lets say I use the GV method and call a fellow AT&T customer, now I’m really screwing myself since we both have AT&T and we’re not using our unlimited mobile to mobile talk time.

The only benefit I see here is that if you’re calling someone from a land line and want your GV number to show up on caller ID then you’ll be able to do so for free. Outside of that your paying for hiding behind your google voice caller id?

Am I missing something? Let me know in the comments please.

My Wife Jen ( @jentucker ) and I ( @jasontucker ) were standing in line for Indian Jones at Disneyland one day and overheard some people talking about the various “paths” that they have rode on the ride. The misconception that there are more than one path in the ride is quite common and I’d imagine this has spread by the phenomenon known as “Overheard at Disneyland”. So while Jen and were overhearing this I thought what if we were to come up with a way using mobile technology to capture these “overheards” and present them to the public to laugh or shake their heads along with us.

Twitter in all of its simplistic glory was the way to make this happen. So while waiting in line for an ice cream about 20 minutes later I created @OHatDL account and bought the http://www.ohatdl.com domain… all over my iphone I also went and setup the mechanism using a 3rd party to facilitate accepting twitter direct messages to @OHatDL to be tweeted on the persons behalf. After that I sent out the first tweet to the account:

Now we’re cooking with gas: Twitter, GroupTweet, and ohatdl.com. The rest of the day was spent listening to people say goofy stuff and tweeting about it. Since it was almost time for us to go home we only got a few more gems posted.

So next time your at Disneyland and you overhear something funny, silly, odd, or just plain weird send a tweet over to @ohatdl and we’ll share it with the world on your behalf

Not on Twitter? Really? I’ve heard of people like you Head over to http://twitter.com and sign up OR txt message 40404 and you can setup an account via text message.

My wife Jen and I bought Disneyland Annual passes yesterday (3/20/09) and we’ve been working on ways to make technology help us on our trips to The Park. Before we bought our passes (and went to Disneyland) yesterday I started looking on the iPhone to find some apps related to Disneyland and found these two:

• Disneyland California Mini Guide [iTunes, $0.99]
  Not the most in depth look at Disneyland by any means but it does not require internet access for the app to work. It displays a map ala google maps of the Disneyland park that can be scrolled around. It includes POI links to various attractions and where the bathrooms are (great since I have a 3 year old going into potty training). Also, the map can find you via GPS if your using an iPhone.
  

• Disneyland Resort Time Guide [iTunes, $0.99]
  This app does one thing and that one thing quite well display times for various events happening at the Disneyland Resort. The data is updated via an internet connection so if your have an iPod Touch you can just update via WiFi before hitting the park. On the iPhone you can update whenever since your internet connected via your data plan. This app is great because it shows all the things you need to know to get the most from your visit: Disneyland Park (DL) Park Hours, Magic Morning Hours, Parade Event, Fireworks, Billy Hill & the Hillbillies, Fantasmic, Flag Retreat Ceremony, Closed for Refurbishment and etc. It also includes times for Disney’s California Adventure (DCA) and times for Downtown Disney (including who is playing at House of Blues that night).
  

• I also started looking for online resources to help us out one of which is having our Deluxe Passes blackout dates on our iPhones. To pull this off on our Mac’s in iCal we “subscribe” to google calendar that has all these times listed. You can do the same on a PC using Outlook, check out the icons below to inport the Deluxe Pass blackout dates:
  
• Official Disneyland Resort Podcast [iTunes Link]
  What a great video podcast coming straight from the Disney company.
• RideMax is a great service for planning out your Disney trip. For $29.99 a year you plan out your day in the most incredible way. Instead of me explaining how the service works you can read their PR speak:
  RideMax is a computer software program guaranteed to help you save time waiting in line at Walt Disney World and Disneyland.RideMax allows you to specify the attractions you wish to ride during your visit, then uses a sophisticated scheduling algorithm to order your attractions so that the amount of time you spend in line is minimized.Using historical wait time statistics for each attraction as a foundation, RideMax analyzes millions of different ride sequences in order to create a minimum-wait-time itinerary. This schedule is tailored to the expected crowd patterns on the day of your visit, for the attractions you want to ride!

I know this is a partial list so if your an Annual Pass holder and have other tricks of the trade please let me know by leaving a comment and I’ll update the list above.

At the March OC Podcasters meeting I did a presentation on how to get wordpress to interact with some popular 3rd party web applications such as Twitter & Facebook along with sharing posts on social networks. The day started out with me putting the final touches on my Keynote presentation I’d be showing at the event. If you were to ask my wife she would say I spent all day messing with it… and most of the day before too. Never again will I wait until the last minute to prep my presentation like I did this one. I’ve never used Keynote before and was very impressed with what I was able to do with very little effort. I did have a learning curve but that’s to be expected with a new app. After I learned the ends and outs I was able to make interactive slides that didnt require me to go slide by slide to make elements change on the screen. I also was able to get the Keynote Remote app to work on my iphone which is pretty damn cool.

Anyhow, back to the talk… I started out with a quick intro on wordpress themes (I should have included how a widget works in the slides but I did discuss that which you can see in the video) then later went into something new and fresh: Facebook Connect. This tech enables you to allow your readers to login to your wordpress site using their Facebook login info. The plugin I finally settled with was the one developed by sixjumps which took the basics of just authenticating with wordpress to a new level. With this you can leave a comment on the blog and allow the comment to be sent over to facebook. You can also share links from the site to facebook with ease and lastly be able to see who else is using the site from facebook. Pretty cool stuff to be totally honest.

Later I went into some plugins to connect wordpress with Twitter: TwitterTools by Alex King, TwitMe by Johnny Mast and Tweetbacks by Joost de Valk. I love Alex and Joost’s work and their plugins kick some serious ass. TwitMe and its dev are new to me but there are some great features he put into that plugin. Lastly I discussed sharing posts with friends using using Joost’s plugin Sociable and ShareThis.

One thing I learned with this is the power of the masses… If your doing a presentation on social media or new media, get your audience involved by asking them to get their friends involved. At the beginning of the demo I put a tinyurl link up on the screen and asked everyone to hop on twitter and send that link out to as a tweet so we can get some people in the chatroom. I also learned to have a videotape in the camera before using a sony camera as a videosource. Ends up that without a tape the camera goes into store demo mode and did all sorts of fun with the video demoing how you can do mosaic and sepia and other things. Next time I need to drag Jacob Morales out and have him record me with his kick ass setup.

Below are various ways to consume the content:

YouTube Video of me doing the presentations:

SlideShare of the Presentation:

PDF and KeyNote if you’d like to use these files for your own presentation.

Below is my Creative Commons info for this project.

WordPress 3rd party web service by Jason Tucker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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On my way to work this morning I saw this amazing rainbow. I pulled out the jailbroken iPhone and recorded the video using cycorder. After doing so I gave my wife and call and told her to go outside so we could share this awesome view.

Happy Birthday Jen!