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!

At the end of the walk last year, my wife said she wanted to do it again this year as she had a great experience and wanted to know if I’d walk with her. Of course, I’d walk with her and support her (and the MS Society). So now the begging, pleading, and hitting up everyone I know begins. In order to participate in the walk, I have to raise $2500 by September. I’m not one to go knocking on doors asking for money, but I’m going to knock on your virtual door.

Most people have charities that he or she donates to each year. If you’re one of those people and don’t normally donate to the MS Society, please consider diverting a small amount of your yearly donation to help sponsor me for the walk.

All you have to do is visit my personal donation page and make a donation. If you work for a company that matches your donation, don’t forget to find your company at the bottom of the donation page.

Like the famous people that host telethons say, “every dollar counts”. Please help me reach my goal.

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.

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);
        }
    }
}

Click here to view the embedded video.

After we moved into the rental, I got a $5 part from The Home Depot to hook it to the kitchen faucet and then we tested it out. So now that we had a working dishwasher albeit a little inconvenient, the question comes down to will we use it or wash dishes by hand? In our first few days in the house, the question answered itself. We’ve loaded up the dishwasher and run it every few days.

I have no problem washing dishes after family comes over or there are a lot of dishes, but washing a bunch of silverware, glasses, and plates is for the birds. It is time consuming and, in fact, uses much more water than a dishwasher. I know that people survived without dishwashers, but they also survived without computers and the Internet.

I’m going to have to say that an automatic dishwasher (I don’t count as a dishwasher) is a necessity in today’s life. Why should we have to do the manual labor when we have a machine to do it?

Since my choice for handling TV involved a SiliconDust HDHomeRun, I didn’t have to have coax directly to the TV; I just had to have coax near my network. This wasn’t a problem as I put the box next to the cable modem and my Time Capsule router. My Mac Mini and Apple TV that are hooked to our TV are connected over 802.11n to my Time Capsule and appear to function adequately for the first few days.

However, I started to notice that some of the shows that I recorded were jumpy. I suspected that this was due to lack of bandwidth. The HDHomeRun sends a stream of about 16 MBit/second for each show it is recording to my Mac Mini. 802.11n should be able to handle this without problems. My first step was to replace my Time Capsule with a newer version that supposedly had better performance. (I also went from 1 TB to 2 TB). Unfortunately, this didn’t solve the problem. I noticed the biggest issue when 2 shows were being recorded which meant that I was streaming about 32 MBit/second and then if we were watching a show, it added about another 10 MBit/second to the mix. So the Mac Mini was trying to push a lot of data and receive a lot of data over WiFi.

The next step in solving this problem (which I’ll know next week if it is the fix) was to run 50 feet of Cat6 cable from my office around a corner and over some blinds to reach the Mac Mini.

It appears that WiFi is decent for normal operations and some streaming, but is no replacement for a wired network. In theory 802.11n should be able to handle what I’m throwing at it, but the router can’t handle it, the Mac Mini can’t handle it, or the protocol isn’t up to what I want to see.

All of the agents had the same data for sales comparables. Each one chose to interpret it differently; our area only had about 20 houses sold all of last year and very few for the size of house we had. 1 agent basically used the data from houses for sale and not sold houses as his first number, but then revised his number based on average depreciation since we bought. His number turned out to be pretty good. The next agent who worked in our area for 30 years, used data for the last 90 days and came up with a number that was about 10% below what others said. The other agent from our area also came in low. The agent we ended up using who didn’t quite know our area all that well, used data from the last 9 months (I think) and came up with a number that was pretty much on target for what we were thinking.

We quickly discounted one agent because she came in thinking that we had four mortgages on our property; she either didn’t read the reports on our house correctly or didn’t think about what they said. We refinanced a few times, so in the time we owned the house, we had a few mortgages, but never had more than 1 at a time. Anyone that would have looked at the data would have seen that no one would have let me take out 4 mortgages for about the same amount on our property. Even with the loose lending rules of the recent past, it just wouldn’t have happened. In addition, this agent had the lowest listing price and used comps from the last 90 days which really wasn’t enough data. This agent also said that she and her husband loved doing open houses, despite her telling us that 80%+ of buyers start their searches on the Internet.

Another agent we discounted had never sold a house before. While people have to get their start somewhere, we didn’t want it to be with us.

So that left us with 2 agents, neither of which worked in our area. Both agents gave really good sales pitches, but there were a few things that made us pick our agent. First, while he said that most buyers start their search on the Internet, his firm also worked with a lot of relocations which could have brought a buyer. Also, he and his partner had a very good track record of selling houses in the last year. Lastly, we just felt comfortable with him.

In the end, does it matter which agent we picked? Yes and no. Once a house is put in the multiple listing service, it ends up on various websites and then people find it. We had one open house which almost seemed like a last ditch effort as our agent said that less than 5% of sales start with an open house (the agent for our buyers told them to goto our open house, so maybe it helped). Our agent handled most of the paperwork electronically which is probably the norm these days; it made things very convenient. We also found our agent kept us informed all the time which was very comforting. Since we believed that our house was priced well, was in a good location, and in good condition, finding a buyer was basically a wait and see game. Our agent (and probably most seller’s agents) aren’t really bringing in potential buyers, but guiding the seller through the process.

Luckily, we had an offer within about 30 days. I have no regrets on our choice of agents as we received our asking price for our house and it sold relatively quickly.

Almost eight years ago, my wife and I bought the house that we thought would be our last house. The house had all the room we thought we’d need, a large lot, a pool, and was in a good neighborhood with good schools.

After some discussion with my wife about how our plans have changed over the years, we decided at the beginning of the year to sell our house and look for a place that was smaller and a bit closer to the coast. The process began with 2 months of preparation cleaning out our house to get rid of things and store other things (we had plenty of storage). Our house went up for sale around the beginning of March and by the beginning of April, we accepted an offer.

The next step in the process was looking for a house to rent to give us time to scope out the market and find the “perfect” house. The rental house we found is about 1600 square feet. The house we just sold had close to 2700 square feet, so we had (and still have) a lot of “thinning” to do. The more we look at the stuff we have, the more we’re taking a harder look at if we need it. My wife and I both realized that we aren’t the kind of people that need a lot of material things; there are some things that we really like (our tech gadgets) and some sentimental things, but a lot of things we’ve collected over the years just aren’t used and we can’t even remember that we have them.

If we can survive in our rental with a lot less space (I am still determined to get both cars in the garage that is currently filled with an extra couch, a washer and dryer, a refrigerator, and tons of boxes), then I think we’ll be good to buy a house of similar size and eliminate more junk from our lives.

When we’ve mentioned to people that we’re “downsizing” our house, they kind of look at us funny. We’re not that old and downsizing of a house is something that people do as they get older and no longer have kids at home. However, for us, we decided that the timing is right. It is also helping us to realize what is really important in our lives.

The iFrogz case, however, was different. It is a two piece design with a button that makes it easy to slip the pieces apart and remove the case. I was almost instantly sold on it. I started my quest to find the case for as little as possible and while I wanted the all black case, I ended up with the blue/black version that I got off eBay.

I’ve been using the case for about 6 weeks now and it looks like it protects the phone (prior to this, I managed to scratch the back of the phone which the case would have prevented). It is easy to remove to go running and also when I need to slip it into my car mount for navigation. There isn’t a whole lot to say about a case; this case isn’t bulky and gives a nice feel to the phone. The only downside is that since it is metal, it seems to interfere with the compass on the phone. I have to remove the case to use star gazing apps or the compass app.

Pros

• Inexpensive.
• Provides adequate protection to the sides and back.
• Doesn’t look too ugly.
• Doesn’t add much bulk,
• Easy to remove.

Cons

• May interfere with compass functions.

Summary

If you’re the kind of person that wants a lightweight case for his iPhone, the iFrogz Luxe Original case is worth a look. I don’t know how well it will hold up in the long run, but the price is right and at a minimum, it will protect the back and sides of my iPhone.