Last week I went searching for a Mophie Juice Pack Plus battery for my iPhone as I’ve been traveling more and my iPhone doesn’t quite last all day when I use it. I did a Google search (after I decided that I wanted it over the other batteries) and found prices ranging from about $50 to $100. The list price is $100 so all the prices in that range seem legitimate. The $50 price on Amazon looked too good to be true. After reading through a bunch of reviews, I discovered the reason. It would appear that some Amazon sellers are selling counterfeit products.

I would have expected Amazon to better screen their sellers especially when they are fulfilling the orders for these merchants and are offering it via Amazon Prime. This also happened with an OtterBox case we bought for my wife; the build quality is not up to par and didn’t come it the retail packaging. Does it matter? Now that the case is falling apart, I’d have to say yes.

How can you protect yourself from counterfeits? First off, a tip off is “does not come in retail packaging to save you money”. Second, if the price is too low, there is likely a problem. However, I’m taking another stab at an OtterBox off eBay. In this case the seller says that it came from a store that they closed and it is in retail packaging; the packaging has AT&T on it and not OtterBox. After a little research, I found that the seller is an AT&T reseller, so this adds legitimacy to the seller. Third, is it shipping direct from China? Not everything that ships from China is counterfeit, but companies usually ship to distributors in the US and ship from the US.

Of course, buyer beware. Safe shopping!

When we switched to Ooma awhile back, I had in the back of my mind that someday we’d move and be able to take our phone number with us. I didn’t realize it would be so soon, but with this move, transferring our phone was one of the easiest tasks. I just unplugged the box, took it to the new house and plugged it in. Once the cable modem was connected, the phone worked. I just had to update our service address in Ooma for 911 service and I was in business again.

This is, yet another, reason that I really like Ooma. We’ve saved a ton of money, we have 2 lines, get voicemail sent as email, and I can quickly block telemarketers via the web interface.

When I post pictures to eBay or somewhere else that I’ve taken at my house, I strip the geotagged information in it as I’m a bit paranoid. I wrote a small app which basically does this for JPG images. The core of the app is below.

However, how do you do this with videos as the iPhone geotags video? At first I tried emailing the video and then exporting it via QuickTime Player to 480p format. That didn’t seem to work as I think it was already 480p and therefore didn’t convert. Next, I imported the video into iPhoto, dragged it out to the desktop, opened it up in QuickTime Player and then exported to 480p. Since the initial video was 1080p, QuickTime Player actually had to do a conversion and the process stripped the geotagging info.

I’m sure I could have written an app to do this, but I haven’t played around enough lately with the QuickTime APIs to know how to do this.

The source code below is © 2011 Scott Gruby. Redistribution in source or object form is permitted granted that attribution is given to me.

- (void) processFile:(NSString *) inPath
{
    NSString *extension = [inPath pathExtension];
    if ([extension caseInsensitiveCompare:@"jpg"] == NSOrderedSame || [extension caseInsensitiveCompare:@"jpeg"] == NSOrderedSame)
    {
        NSURL *pictURL = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:inPath];
        CGImageSourceRef sourceRef = CGImageSourceCreateWithURL((CFURLRef) pictURL, NULL);
        if (sourceRef)
        {
            NSDictionary* metadata = (NSDictionary *)CGImageSourceCopyPropertiesAtIndex(sourceRef,0,NULL);
            NSMutableDictionary *metadataAsMutable = [[metadata mutableCopy] autorelease];

            [metadataAsMutable setObject:(id)kCFNull forKey:(NSString *)kCGImagePropertyGPSDictionary];
            [metadataAsMutable setObject:(id)kCFNull forKey:(NSString *)kCGImagePropertyIPTCDictionary];

            CFStringRef UTI = CGImageSourceGetType(sourceRef); //this is the type of image (e.g., public.jpeg)

            //this will be the data CGImageDestinationRef will write into
            NSMutableData *data = [NSMutableData data];

            CGImageDestinationRef destination = CGImageDestinationCreateWithData((CFMutableDataRef)data,UTI,1,NULL);

            if(destination)
            {
                //add the image contained in the image source to the destination, overiding the old metadata with our modified metadata
                CGImageDestinationAddImageFromSource(destination,sourceRef,0, (CFDictionaryRef) metadataAsMutable);

                //tell the destination to write the image data and metadata into our data object.
                //It will return false if something goes wrong
                BOOL success = NO;
                success = CGImageDestinationFinalize(destination);

                if (success)
                {
                    //now we have the data ready to go, so do whatever you want with it
                    //here we just write it to disk at the same path we were passed
                    success = [data writeToURL:pictURL atomically:YES];
                }
                CFRelease(destination);
            }

            [metadata release];
            CFRelease(sourceRef);
        }
    }
}