LaurenandLloyd.com

where our wasted time becomes your wasted time

iphone

Sundays with Samith

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Samith brings Brighton into Seward on Sunday evenings to play basketball at Concordia’s youth basketball program (there’s some other name for the program, but, yeah). While Brighton is basketballing it up, Samith has been coming over to our house for what we have affectionately been calling, Sundays with Samith™.

We mostly just sit around, eat dinner and talk about things. But this time Samith came bearing gifts. Sometime ago, Samith was lucky enough to purchase a Bag of Crap™. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to purchase a Bag of Crap at the end of a Woot Off™, but I’ve never been quick enough.

One of the items in the Bag of Crap was a TruGuard (presumably also™) screen protector for an iPhone5. Samith knows that I like to live dangerously and don’t keep a cover on my phone, but this is just 0.3mm thick. He thought I could maybe live with that.

crap1

The instructions were so brief that we did a lot of assuming about how we were to do things, but it all turned out okay. Their selling point is protection, but the most amazing thing is that there doesn’t seem to be any fingerprint smudges on the screen anymore. That’s really pretty neat.

Thanks Samith, and thanks Bag of Crap.

Thanks, Uncle Rich!

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While we were at Lauren’s family reunion in Branson, Uncle Rich showed me an iPhone app that I had on my phone, but had never messed with before. It’s called Health, or something like that, and I don’t know what all it can do, but it does turn your phone into a pedometer (sp?).  It didn’t show any information when I first opened it, and I thought that because I hadn’t opened it before, that it wasn’t counting my steps. But after a bit, it made some nice graphs. it turned out that it had been counting my steps for years. Or maybe year? Or since October at any rate.

You can see by the graph above that I walked more in second semester than in first semester. I don’t have any idea at all why that would be. I believe the graphs are logarithmic, so changes in steps are more pronounced than you might expect from looking at the graphs.

Here’s the last month with a couple of annotations that I added:

walk it off

I think that the dashed line is the “recommended” “ten thousand” “steps” that “you” are “supposed” to take in a “day.”

Tadaa

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I’ve got an app that tells me when there are cool free apps. I showed this one to Lauren today, but she’s still making me write the post about it.

The app is called Tadaa SLR. It lets you take a picture that you already have and pretend like you’re a good photographer with a good camera. Let me show you an example…

Say that you have a picture like this just laying around:

Original Noah

In a few seconds you can do this to it:

Blurring your friends

Or, if you misunderstand the directions, you can do this to it:

Self blurring

Lauren wants you to know that it also works on cats:

Dem Cats

Super Slow-Mo

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My favorite feature of my new iPhone is the slow motion camera. But I’m not very good at using it. I try slow motioning things all the time, but they never turn out quite like what I expect. Until now.

Last week was Macy’s birthday, and I was ready. I was ready mostly because the week before, for Bethany’s birthday, I was not ready. So thanks Macy and Bethany for this footage.

Sorry about the sudden cut-off at the end. It turns out that iMovie on the iPhone is iSmall and iHard for my old iEyes to read. Also, I may not have had my iGlasses on.

Kickstarter

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So, there’s this website where people post ideas for things they want to build or produce that are going to cost money. You browse through the ideas and pick any where you think, “Wow, the world would be a better place if that actually existed.” Once you’ve found one that appeals, you decide how much you want to fund that project.

Most of the projects have lots of funding levels and most of the funding levels have various perks that you get for supporting the project at that level. Usually, that means getting one or more of the things that they are proposing to build or produce. If, over the course of a month, enough people agree that that would be a good thing to do then your credit card is charged whatever you decided to give. If the project doesn’t collect enough support to reach its goal, then no one is charged anything.

It’s really easier to understand if you just go check it out. Go ahead. I’ll wait here…

I’ve helped along two of the projects so far. I can’t tell you about one of them, because it might be Brad’s Christmas present. But the other one is not for Brad. Some guy is going to make these:

Duplex Billet Dock for your iPad and iPhone

Actually, he’s going to make docks like that for the iPhone and iPad singly as well, but I’ve been looking for something more effective than my current nightstand setup:

Everything you need in a night stand.

As I write this, he’s only got about $13,000 of his $50,000 goal, so if you know anyone who has an iPad, you might point them in that direction. There are some neat touches on the dock that I haven’t seen before. Of course, I’ve only been playing with an iPad for a week.

Less is more

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You might remember a few months ago that I sort of dropped my iPhone a little. I wasn’t worried, because I had purchased insurance for it. But I wasn’t in any hurry to be without it for a couple of weeks and the deductable was $50.00, so I just lived with it.

poor little iPhone4

I really wanted to get a wooden back. Lauren even thought it would be cool, so I looked for a place that I could order one. Unfortunately, the one place I found a nice walnut back didn’t ship to our zip-code (I know, what’s up with that?).

I did find a nice one for $16.38. It took all of three days to make it to our zip-code. It came with instructions and a screwdriver. It was easy to take the back off, and I looked around a bit.

Mostly battery and screen

But what is that stuff around the camera?

hair today, gone tomorrow

This calls for a closer look. Note: this is the first time that I have been glad that Lauren likes to have a microscope around the house.

not what I expected

There were lots of little hairs, and they were only present around the camera assembly. I wondered for a bit if they were Steve Jobs’ hairs that were put into iPhones so that he could one day be cloned, but decided they were not quite the right color.

So I got out a little brush and a tweezer and began the removal process.

there were more than I expected

Once the hair was removed, it was quite easy to put the new back on.

it makes me feel rich

Tomorrow I’ll be convincing 7th graders that I’m testing a prototype for the new iPhone5 for Apple.