Clarifi by Griffin

When I saw that Griffin announced the Calrifi case for iPhone 3G at Apple Expo Paris I thought it was brilliant. The Clarifi proposed to solve a problem I experience with my iPhone 3G constantly, inability to take macro photos with the camera phone.

"Clarifi is a protective case that boasts a built-in lens to give the iPhone camera lens an optical boost. The lens slides into place for close-up shots, and then slides aside for normal photography. Clarifi allows you to move in to a close 4 to 6 inches, for crisp detail and accurate color; the iPhone camera alone is limited to about 18-inch close-ups."

When taking a pictures of things with small text like receipts, business cards, tags, serial numbers, model numbers or barcodes it is helpful to make the item as large and sharp as possible in the picture. The problem with the iPhone has always been that the photo is eitehr to blurry or to small; the Calrifi promised to help fix that.

Package Contents

The packaging is basic and includes the case, cleaning cloth and screen protector. There are two halves to the case which function as both the installation method and the easy dock feature. The bottom half separates from the top which makes installation a snap and allows the phone to remain compatible with the Apple Dock

Installation

How does it work? As a test I took a photo of a Starbucks receipt, I wanted to be able to document the information on the receipt by taking a photo in low light. I tried taking the photo with and without the Claifi lens from a distance of about 3-4 inches, check out the results below.

Without Clarifi

With Clarifi

To carry the case study all the way through I uploaded both receipt images to my Evernote account for text recognition. Evernote was able to pull all of the text from the Clarifi assisted photo and nothing from the regular iPhone photo.

Evernote

Altogether, I'm very pleased with the Griffin's ability to deliver on this concept. I think the idea is novel while extending the functionality and enhancing and everyday usefulness of the iPhone. The fit and finish on the product is very good but I think the sliding mechanism on the lens could be made tighter. However, I will miss the grippy rubber of the incase Protective Cover I previously had on the phone.

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powerbook battery

Joke all you want guys but my batteries and cables keeps going strong. ;-)

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Most apple laptop power supplies since the iBook have some sort of cable management / warping device built into the brick itself. Although this appears to be a "insanely great" innovation, it encourages poor cable husbandry and premature power supply failure; thus requiring one to fork over $80 for a new power supply. There are two main causes of cable failure, kinking and twisting; when these two are compounded a thin power supply cable can't hold out very long even if it were made of the very best materials. Therefore, proper cable care will help extend the life of your power supply.

Kinking:
Cables are challenged with the fact that in order to carry electrons one must use some form of metal, and any flexible metal will break if flexed enough times at the same place.

Twisting:
Twisting in the cable can also introduce unnecessarily stress since the individual strands of wire get twisted then stretched when tugged on causing breakage, the physics is the same as wringing out a towel by twisting and pulling.

Now think about what happens when someone grabs one of those apple power bricks, stretches the cable around one cable management "wing", making sure it is pulled nice and tight, and then proceeds to TIGHTLY WIND the rest of the cable onto the wings as if it were a spool of fishing line. This is about the WORST thing you can do for the life of your power supply, it kinks the cord where it exits the power brick, puts a new twist into it with each wind around while at the same time adding tension to the cable.

Here is a example of what not to do:

bad!

To prevent this from happening the over-under method of cable coiling should be used. This is what I do, lefties may reverse hands.

How to prevent Apple power supply cable failure:

Step 1/2

1) Rest the power brick on a solid surface for support, like a desk or your lap.
2) Grasp the cable near the power brick with your left hand.

Step 3

3) Then with your right hand make a loop about the size of a cd, lay the overlapping cable into your left hand.

Step 4

Step 5

Step 6

Step 7

Coiled

I simply lay the coil on top of the power brick and stash into my waterfield cableguy organizer pouch.

Waterfield Cableguy

You may experiment with loop sizes to find one that works for you, I like to try and keep the loop size roughly the same size as the largest face of the power brick. Just in case my instructions were not clear here is another tutorial.

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This is one of the best procrastination tools I have ever come across. Basically it is a database of cool things you can see on google maps' satellite images. Everything from tourist attractions to sunken drug smuggling planes and Chinese submarines. Now go waste some time. http://www.googlesightseeing.com

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Free Starbucks

Now until Sept. 30, 2006 use this coupon to get a free *$ (read: star-bucks) iced drink between noon and 9pm. Just print out this pdf coupon and redeem at your local bucks.

Starbucks Coupon PDF

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What's the nerdiest thing about you?

I am a licensed amateur radio operator. That is some serious geek.

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Toshiba D95-LMP

The lamp in my DLP projection television blew out this week. I had always heard people talk about these bulbs shattering but I guess seeing is believing. When I pulled the lamp assembly out I was surprised at just how destroyed the thing was. Toshiba is supposed to replace this lamp under warranty but I think I will still stock a spare just in case. If I had a spare now I would not be twiddling my thumbs wondering what happened on Entourage this week. Yes, I could download it but then it wouldn't be presented in all it's HD glory, so I'd rather wait.

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Trekstor

Is the world's most expensive MP3 player cast in 18 karat gold with 63 one-karat diamonds really necessary?

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After digging around allot and many test encodings later I managed to encode video for my Nokia E61. This method requires that you have quicktime pro, I played around with ffmpeg a bunch but wasn't able to find the correct settings. I could to go back and figure it out with ffmpeg but if it works with quicktime why bother?

E61-Export (Click to Enlarge)

Load the movie in quicktime, go up to File -> Export, select "Movie to MPEG4", then click on "Options" and apply the settings above. Pay attention to the text at the bottom of this dialog box, the settings for the audio tab are listed but now shown in the gui part. Feel free to play with the data rate to suit your file size vs quality tastes, 500 kbits/sec is probably on the high side but what can I say, I'm a quality whore.

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Hyperdrive HD80

I picked up a Hyperdrive HD80 for dumping Compact Flash cards from my DSLR in the field. This thing dumps a card faster than any other device out there. Unfortunately, the build quality is awful, the case is shoddy and the doors on either end are sloppy. Furthermore, after only dumping one card I managed to break it.

After installing a formatting the hard disk I tried copying some CF cards. The first card copied fine (very fast!) so I removed the card and tried to copy a second one.

While inserting the second card something felt wrong, it wouldn't insert all the way. I removed the card and looked in the slot to find one of the pins had been bent. I was careful to align the CF card with the rails and inset the card straight. The bent pin was longer than the other pins in the connector; this leads me to suspect that this pin was loose to begin with and when the first card was removed it was pulled up by the card. When the second card was inserted the alignment was not perfect on this longer pin and it was crushed.

bent pin on Hyperdrive HD80

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