Gadget Techie

This is part 2 of this series. Click here to read part 1.

My car has just hit 20k miles and so now I am back with an update!

As I said at the end of my Part 1 post, I changed my oil at 10k miles and planned to wait 10k miles to change it again.

My last change was at the 10,457 mile mark and this time I waited until 19,284 miles. I thought this was close enough to the 10k mark and due to the fact that I needed to go in to fix a small issue, I decided to just go ahead and get the oil change. Once I got home and did the actual math and realized that this was actually a change interval of 8,827 miles, I was a little upset. In my head I had estimated the numbers and thought it would be closer to 10k. Oh well.

Also, at about the 18,000 mile mark, I checked my oil level with the dipstick and saw that it was a bit low so I added 1/4 a quart of Castrol Syntec 5W/40. To my knowledge this is the exact oil that the dealership uses.

One big difference between my first oil change in Part 1 and this one was not just the fact that I was waiting longer to change the oil but also that I had gotten an APR Stage 1 flash done to my ECU. Throughout this whole OCI I was running my car with the 93 Octane mode which is the highest performance mode you can set without having to buy race gas (100 Octane). I was very curious to see if the extra performance boost from this tune would affect how often I had to change the oil.

I sent my sample in to Blackstone. I mentioned that I added a quarter of a quart of oil (as you can see in the report) and waited patiently and here are the results…

*Clicking on the image will take you to a higher def .png version.

Are you surprised by the results? Because I sure am! As you can read in the report, Blackstone Labs seems to think my engine passes with flying colors and the TBN is even better than my first oil change when I changed it at 5k miles AND didn’t have a performance tune! I asked them what they thought about extending the OCI to 10k and as you can see, Blackstone Labs thinks this will be no problem at all given the results of this oil analysis.

So there you have it. 10k mile OCI’s are the way to go! Just make sure you check your oil levels with the dipstick and add oil as needed.

With the release of Apple’s new iPhone 4 and Facebook’s updated app that lets you upload videos from your phone, many more people will have the ability to record and upload high-definition 720p videos to Facebook. However, there are many ways to upload a video to Facebook and they do not all produce the same results.

After recording an event with the iPhone 4 you are left with a 720p video. There are many ways to upload the video but the two quickest ways to do so from your iPhone are the following:

1. If you go into the Facebook app and upload this video, the iPhone will compress it and then send it to Facebook. Once Facebook receives it, it thinks it’s an HD video and so it designates it as such (appends “[HD]” to the title and lets you choose HD quality in the player).

2. You can also send this video to yourself via email (the iPhone will compress it and attach it to the email). Once you receive the email, the attached video will have been down converted to 568×320. You can then download this attachment and then use the Facebook app to upload it. Facebook will then see that the video is not HD but it is high quality and thus will give it the HQ designation (appends “[HQ]” to the title and lets you choose HQ quality in the player).

Everything so far looks good except that normally an HD video should look better than an HQ video. Well therein lies the problem. It does not turn out this way. The HD video actually looks worse than the HQ video on Facebook.

This then begs the question as to what exactly the Facebook app is doing with the video that causes the HD video to be compressed a lot more than the HQ video?

Now if you take the longer route and sync your iPhone videos to your computer and then upload it to Facebook using your computer, the video will not be compressed into oblivion. Instead it will be designated HD and look a lot better than HQ.

Hopefully, Facebook will fix this issue since it is very annoying. It almost punishes you for having a phone that can record HD videos.

By the way, this whole article was created using my iPhone 4

Just received my iPhone 4 pre-order (a day early) and first thing I did was start recording some 720p videos with it. As soon as I recorded my first video I decided to share it with the world so I sent it by email and uploaded it to Youtube right from the phone. Much to my surprise however, the resulting attachment in the email was NOT a 720p video but instead it was down-converted to 568×320!

At first I thought that I was doing something wrong so I went through all the possible solutions:

• Turned on Wifi… still no 720p
• Checked Settings menu for an option to turn 720p on… no option for that
• Rotated the iPhone so that it was in landscape mode when I pressed the share button… nope
• Sent the video using various email accounts to see if it was Gmail that was limiting me… not Gmail.

Frustrated, I hit the internet in search of an answer. Seems like the only sites I could find that mentioned “iPhone 4″ and “720p” were sites that had 720p videos from the iPhone 4 which made my situation even more frustrating since somehow they were able to get the phone to upload in 720p!

Then I finally stumbled upon a few forums posts here and there of people with similar problems and from these I learned what was happening and that there are two solutions to this problem. Basically, Apple decided that because 720p videos created pretty large file sizes, they would not allow you to email or upload them to Youtube using the phone itself unless you bought the iMovie app (which by the way is not out yet). Another way to (the iMovie app is out now and it turns out that it does not let you upload to youtube or email 720p video). In order to upload or email 720p video taken with the iPhone 4 you need to connect it to your computer and have iPhoto extract it. Then once the video is on your computer you can upload it to Youtube or email it in 720p.

Needless to say I am VERY disappointed in Apple. This is a caveat that they deliberately failed to mention when talking about the iPhone 720p recording capabilities and easy to share options. I understand Apple not wanting people to upload or email these large videos using cellular data but why not let you do it when connected to Wifi? And why allow it only with the purchase of iMovie for the iPhone?

Hopefully this post will help future iPhone 4 owners discover why their phones are not working as they should without having to scour the internet like I did.

UPDATE: After careful thought, I have concluded that Apple’s decision to down convert the videos for upload is indeed a good one. 720p videos are large in size (a small clip can easily hit 10 to 20 MB in size) and so uploading them would take a considerable amount of time even on wi-fi. Couple that with the fact that the average user would most likely hit the upload button on the iPhone and then forget about it , possibly walking out of range of their wi-fi, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. People would start complaining about failed uploads, uploads taking too long, extreme battery consumption, etc. I just wish Apple had made it clear that it is not possible to upload/email 720p videos from the iPhone.

UPDATE: This is part 1 of a 2 part series. Click here to go to part 2 where I show the results of my 10k OCI with an APR Stage 1 93 Octane tune! Back in the, not so distant, day it was common knowledge that cars should have their oil changed every 5k miles [...]

UPDATE: I highly suggest NOT updating your iPhone to the newest 3.1 OS. After using the phone a couple of days I have noticed that my battery drains A LOT quicker. And by a lot I mean it is under 20% at 4pm after not using it AT ALL and having fully charged it the [...]

Macs are known for their ability to just work. Software seems to behave very well and for the most part, you don’t get as many crashes or freeze ups as on a Windows machine. However, the more I use my Macbook Pro the more I realize that, while it is true that you get less [...]

UPDATE: I wrote this article back when there were no aparent free solutions to enabling emojicons. Now that is not the case and you can easily find free apps that enable emoji on your iPhone. All emoji apps are the same. Some add other useless functions but they all enable the same emoji keyboard so [...]

Parallels and OnTheHub are currently offering free copies of their amazing Parallels Desktop 4.0 to the winners of their Twitter contest. The instructions are on their twitter accounts and on the OnTheHub page but basically, all you have to do to enter is: Re-tweet #parallels4students. That is it! The contest might still be going so hurry [...]

Google and Hasbro are teaming up to bring you the classic game of Monopoly with a new twist: Google Maps! You will basically be able to play Monopoly using real locations. It is called Monopoly City Streets. Each player will start with $3 million and be able to buy property and constructs buildings to get [...]

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Today I was programming in Xcode and realized that every time I ran my programs, I would get these weird messages in the debugger console. They didn’t break anything or cause the program to end prematurely but it made the compile and run process take longer and flooded the console with the weird message “unable [...]

A lot of people always ask me what the easiest way to create ringtones for the iPhone is. Apple made sure to make the process time consuming and not that obvious for the average user. Instead they offer to create the ringtone for you through iTunes at a price. Well I am here to tell [...]

After installing the new OS X Snow Leopard on my Macbook Pro, I encountered some incompatibilities with some software. All of these incompatibilities were easily fixed by updating the software except for one: my HP printer/scanner/copier software. The printer was working fine as a printer but I was not able to scan anything. I would [...]

Up until today, I have been using hot corners in Mac OS X Leopard in two ways: To start the screen saver as a way to lock my machine (require login) To put the display to sleep when I am in class and wish to conserve energy or hide my screen without having to log [...]

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When deciding how to go about learning Objective-C and Cocoa Touch for the iPhone, I came up with various methods. My first method was to read online tutorials from various sites. I soon learned that this was not the way to go. Most tutorials are quick and dirty and as such don’t really go in [...]

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I have not updated this blog in a while and decided that now is a good time to do so. I am planning on learning Objective-C (Apple’s programming language) and creating an iPhone app. I still do not have an idea of the app I want to create. I just know that I want to [...]

UPDATE: Once you are done reading this post, make sure to go to the homepage of this blog (http://gadgettechie.net) to read the other parts of this series. You can also click on the Apple category on the right of this page. You can find the other parts of this series here: Part 1, Part 2, Part [...]

UPDATE: Once you are done reading this post, make sure to go to the homepage of this blog (http://gadgettechie.net) to read the other parts of this series. You can also click on the Apple category on the right of this page. You can find the other parts of this series here: Part 1, Part 2, [...]

UPDATE: Once you are done reading this post, make sure to go to the homepage of this blog (http://gadgettechie.net) to read the other parts of this series. You can also click on the Apple category on the right of this page. You can find the other parts of this series here: Part 1, Part 2, [...]

UPDATE: Once you are done reading this post, make sure to go to the homepage of this blog (http://gadgettechie.net) to read the other parts of this series. You can also click on the Apple category on the right of this page. You can find the other parts of this series here: Part 1, Part 2, [...]

UPDATE: Once you are done reading this post, make sure to go to the homepage of this blog (http://gadgettechie.net) to read the other parts of this series. You can also click on the Apple category on the right of this page. You can find the other parts of this series here: Part 1, Part 2, [...]

UPDATE: Once you are done reading this post, make sure to go to the homepage of this blog (http://gadgettechie.net) to read the other parts of this series. You can also click on the Apple category on the right of this page. You can find the other parts of this series here: Part 1, Part 2, [...]

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I am testing the WordPress app on my iPhone. Hopefully it works.

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