Streaming video from a RC Helicopter onto UStream.tv

Posted by admin on Sep 3, 2010 in General, New Media, Tech, iphone | 0 comments

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

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Don’t get screwed on new post-holiday return policies

Posted by admin on Dec 23, 2009 in Cool Stuff, Gadgets, General, Tech | 0 comments

I stole the following from this Consumerist article. I thought it was pretty important to share since I don’t want to see any of my friends get screwed over while returning presents this holiday season.

Consumer Reports released some advice for potential shoppers. Here’s their advice:

  • Get a receipt or gift receipt. Despite longer grace periods, retailers are becoming more insistent on a receipt in order to get a refund, and they’re more inclined to turn away customers without proof of purchase. Without a receipt, they may offer a store credit for the lowest price the item sold for.
  • Keep packaging intact. Stores are likely to refuse a return if the packaging materials are open or discarded. Even a missing instruction manual, cords and cables or warranty card can give retailers reason to deny the return.
  • Be wary online. Don’t just throw it in a box and mail it back. Online returns usually require a packing slip (typically included in any gift order), and a return authorization number. Call ahead to ensure that all requirements are being met.
  • Don’t break seals or cut out UPC codes. Items like computer software, video games, CDs and DVDs aren’t generally returnable for another title after the seal has been broken. If an item comes with a rebate offer, make sure it works before removing the UPC code to redeem the rebate.

    • Also, watch out for restocking fees at major retailers, mostly for big-ticket items.

    • Amazon.com: 15% restocking fees for computers and fine jewelry
    • Best Buy: 15% restocking fees on laptops, camcorders, digital cameras and GPS navigators
    • Bidz.com: 15% restocking fee on all items. Plus shoppers have only 15 days to return items.
    • Sears: 15% restocking fee applies to electronics products returned without the original box, used, and without all of the original packaging. The penalty also applies to some other products.
    • Home Depot: special-orders and some cancelled orders are subject to a 15 percent restocking fee.
    • Macys: 10% restocking fee on furniture
    • Newegg.com: 15% restocking fee on all major purchases if the box is opened

    Blatantly stolen from Consumerist who quoted Consumer Reports.

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    Google Voice and mobile phones.. am I missing something?

    Posted by admin on Jul 29, 2009 in Tech, iphone | 5 comments

    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 dont 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 certian 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 doesnt 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 benifit 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.
    Am I missing something? Let me know in the comments
    104870_gv-400

    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.

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    My experience with OHatDL – Week 3

    Posted by admin on Apr 20, 2009 in Disneyland, General, New Media, Tech | 0 comments

    ohatdl-2009-04-20_1023

    So it’s been two weeks since I started @OHatDL and OHatDL.com and I thought I’d talk about whats been going on with it.

    • Redesigned the website (thanks to Becky over at PodcastDesigns for the cool looking interface)
    • Began displaying statistics from the data collected in the DB, looking to expand on it once I figure out what else I want to display.
    • Visited the park a few times myself and learned to tune in to what people say and tweet about it. I’ve been overhearing some funny stuff and have been posting it. My latest favorite can be found here: Regret tat
    • Began a link sharing campaign with a few Disney forums and websites along with a couple of podcasts, if your interested in doing so please contact me.
    • Hoping that since @Oprah is now on twitter I can get some more “civilians” using the OHatDL service.
    • People love to share stuff they overhear and people that find the site / twitter account think that @ohatdl is the one posting these and don’t realize that @ohatdl is just a collecting / redistro mechanism for the #ohatdl community.
    • People don’t understand the #hashtag concept all that much yet. I have a few plans for that.
      • OHatDL.com now has a submission box as long as you have a twitter account it will do the submission for you. (all it does currently is pass the query over to twitter.com in their input box including the #hashtag, its a start)

    So if you visit any of the Disney parks feel free to post your “overheards” by using my service, @ohatdl. I look forward to reading the fun things you hear.

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    Project: Overheard at Disneyland

    Posted by admin on Apr 7, 2009 in Disneyland, General, Tech, iphone | 2 comments

    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:

    via @jasontucker: overheard someone talking about the various paths that indiana jones ride can take. @jentucker & I shook heads

    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.

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    Presentation – WordPress and 3rd Party Web Applications – OC Podcasters

    Posted by admin on Mar 12, 2009 in Cool Stuff, Gadgets, General, Mac, Plugins, Tech, Wordpress, iphone | 4 comments

    jason tucker - wordpress 3rd party web services

    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:

    Jason Tucker WordPress 3rd Party Web Services

    View more presentations from jasontucker.

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

    Below is my Creative Commons info for this project.

    Creative Commons License
    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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