Tips and Tricks

The Fujifilm W3 3D camera provides striking glasses-free 3D images on its lenticular display (though some people can’t see 3D for a variety of reasons). There is the problem of sharing 3D images to a wider audience on web pages since I can’t expect most people to have special and generally expensive displays or 3D glasses. My solution is to create red/cyan(blue) anaglyph photos that can be viewed with inexpensive (less than $5) red/cyan filter glasses. Anaglyph glasses are often provided free for 3D promotions of 3D TV events (those not requiring 3D TV sets), DVDs, or books.

How To: Turn a Fujifilm W3 3D MPO Image Into a Red-Cyan Anaglyph Using Freeware

The freeware Anaglyph Maker (for Microsoft Windows) software I use to create the anaglyph photos can create them in a variety of formats including one that attempts to maintain some of the color from the original stereo photos. Sometimes, however, it is not a good idea to do this. This illustrated in the set of photos to the left. I noticed a classic Pepsi Cola vending machine in an restaurant the other day and took a photo of it using the Fujifilm W3 3D camera. It looked fine in full color on the W3′s lenticular display. However, the red/cyan anaglyph color photo did not look good. A moment of reflection seemed to point to the Pepsi vending machine itself which is red and (mostly) blue. A grayscale version of the photo, however, looked great. And, since the vending machine is quite retro, it complemented the image itself with a 1950s look.

You can find the full-size 10 megapixel anaglyph photos for closer inspection here:

Anaglyph 3D photos (color & grayscale) of old Pepsi Cola vending machine

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.

Audible’s audiobook listening and management app for the iPhone does more that let you listen to audio books. It can download books from your library stored on Audible’s servers. It provides audio book news. And, it can provide statistics about your audio book reading behavior. Just tap My Stats on the options list at the bottom of the screen to learn about your current book listening, past week’s listening, by-month listening, and all-time. I was shocked to learn that I had not listened to any audio books at all in the September and October of last year. Note, however, that the app only provides statistics for audio book use on the specific device. So, if you split Audible audio book reading across, for example, a desktop computer, iPad, iPhone, and Kindle, the iPhone statistics only looks at audio books listened to on the iPhone itself.

The Audible for iPhone app is available for free in the iTunes App Store.

Audible 1.5.1 (iTunes App Store)

I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with and learning to use my Fujifilm W3 3D camera. One of the current problems with 3D photography is that it is a bit difficult to easily share the photos. The simplest and least expensive way to share 3D photos is to convert a stereo image pair (2 photos) into a single anaglyph image that uses color tinting (red and cyan in my case) to provide 3D viewing using inexpensive (less than $5) glasses with red and cyan (or blue) filter lenses. You can see a sample anaglyph to the left.

Producing this anaglyph is a two part process.

1. Fujifilm provides the MyFinePix software for their W3 camera than can split their 3D “.MPO” image file into two JPEG (.JPG) image files.

MyFinePix Studio ver.2.0 For Windows 7 / Vista / XP

2. The freeware Anaglyph Maker software for Microsoft Windows) can merge this pair of JPEG image files into a variety of 3D image formats including a color red-cyan anaglyph.

Anaglyph Maker

If you’d like to take a look at the full-size (10 megapixel) anaglyph image, you can find it on my personal tumblog (on Tumblr) here: Anaglyph 3D photo of a tree.

One of the most useful gadgets that I own is an Eye-Fi memory card that has built-in WiFi. The card that I currently own has 2 GB of storage space and can communicate with my home computer via my WiFi network.

With the card in my camera, the process of transferring new pictures to my PC is a simple matter of turning the camera on and running the Eye-Fi Viewer app on my PC. The file transfers automatically occur for all new pictures that are on the card, and you can configure the Eye-Fi software to automatically share the pictures on web sites like Flickr and Facebook.

One problem that I have with the Eye-Fi card that I have is that it can only transfer pictures via a WiFi network, which means that if I am in a hotel I have to configure the card to work with the hotel’s WiFi network. Eye-Fi has announced an upgrade for their X2 line of cards, which are the latest version, that adds a direct transfer mode to the card.

Direct Mode will wirelessly transfer pictures from the camera to a PC, tablet, or smartphone that is running an Eye-Fi app without the camera having to connect to a WiFi network. Eye-Fi has not yet provided information about when they will be releasing the apps.

Direct Mode is a free update to Eye-Fi X2 cards and will be released later this year. Unfortunately, I have one of the original Eye-Fi cards that cannot be upgraded. You will find the Eye-Fi cards at Best Buy, Walmart, Office Depot, Target, and Radio Shack stores, as well as online. Several models of Eye-Fi cards are available ranging in either 4 GB or 8 GB sizes.

If you own an iPad and like to read eBooks, you can buy books from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Apple, provided that you don’t mind using multiple eReader apps. Because you aren’t limited to one store for books, the logical question is which one has the best price for the book that you want to buy? You could visit each online store to check the price but a web app called Leatherbound retrieves the price comparisons for you and presents them, along with links to buy the book.

In many cases book prices will be the same, but prices do fluctuate. As you can see in the screen shot, I did a price check on the new Mark Twain autobiography and Kindle’s price of $9.79 is significantly cheaper than the Nook’s price, while the book is not available in the iBookstore.

The app works well in Safari on the iPad, so this is one site that you will want to bookmark on your iPad. You will find the site at leatherbound.me.

Here’s a handy tip for iPhone (iPod touch too) and iPad users. If you receive email with phrases that are related to event concepts, you can create a calendar event using linked event information automatically created for the phrases.

For example, two friends and I have regularly scheduled lunches twice a month. Of course, there are times when one or more of us can’t attend. In this case, one of my friends sent email with text fragments like “for lunch today” and “Tuesday lunch”. You can see these text fragments underlined in the first screenshot.

Tapping on one of the phrases results in an action balloon popping up asking me if I want to “Create Event”. Selecting that results in the second screenshot you see here. It took the email’s subject line and used it as the name for the calendar event. In this case, it didn’t make sense to actually create a calendar event for a cancelled lunch. However, it is a good example of email text fragments that can be used to quickly create a calendar event.

I don’t use the camera in my Nexus One as my primary phone, I have a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7 that I use to take quality photos, and a smaller Panasonic point-and-shoot when I don’t want to carry the larger FZ7. However, I still take a lot of photos with my Nexus One mainly because the phone is usually with me when I see something I want to shoot. Unfortunately, getting a good picture with the Nexus One seems to be a based mostly on luck.

Zack Stern of PC World has an article titled, Take Better Photos With Your Android Phone with suggestions that should work regardless of which mobile phone you use. For example, he suggests using flash for daylight pictures to compensate for under exposure on sunny days. Not all camera phones have the settings that Zack has on his DROID, for example, I don’t have the ability to change the ISO setting. Perhaps the best tip for taking better pictures with your phone is to learn all of the camera settings on your phone so that you can take full advantage of your camera’s ability.

Last week Google Voice turned one year old. If you are not familiar with it, Google Voice is a phone enhancement service from Google. Its key feature is the ability to route phone calls made to one phone number so that a call will ring on multiple phones at the same time. If you provide people the Google Voice number, and configure it to send calls to your mobile phone, you could switch phone companies and numbers without affecting people’s ability to reach you.

In celebration of the one year anniversary of Google Voice, Lifehacker has consolidated links to their tips for using Google Voice. Mark Stout has another great tip to configure Google Voice to record your own voice notes.

Google Voice has a bunch of features that I have written about, such as its ability to transcribe voice mail into text messages. The voice-to-text recognition isn’t perfect, but I find it good enough for me to get an understanding of what the voice mail contains. You can configure Google Voice to send notification of voice mail messages, along with the transcribed text to a text message or e-mail. I have Google Voice configured to send the voice message notifications to my Gmail account, which I then receive a notification for on my Android phone. I also have a filter in Gmail that sends a copy of each voice mail notification to my Evernote account, so the transcriptions and links to all of my voice mail is stored in my personal repository. If I choose, I can then make notes regarding that message in Evernote to keep track of all correspondence I have had with that message.

Unfortunately, Google Voice is not yet open to everyone and people can only obtain an account through an invitation from someone who has an account. To answer the obvious question, I do not have any invitations left. Now that one year has passed, perhaps Google will finally open up Google Voice to everyone.

While Todd placed his order for a new iPad today, I received a new gadget yesterday, the Google Nexus One phone and desktop dock. I resisted the urge to buy the Nexus One when it was first announced back in January and have been using the T-Mobile myTouch 3G as my main phone, but I decided that with the number of new apps that Google is releasing that only work with Android 2.1, it was time for me to upgrade.

I know that I am a-typical in that I switch phones more frequently than the average person, who may find the process of moving from one phone to the next to be a pain. The process is worse with smartphones. If you own an iPhone or Android phone with a bunch of applications installed, imagine replacing that phone and installing all of your favorite applications on the phone. Fortunately, I found a few tips that made the process of getting my new Nexus One setup to go pretty quick.

A big benefit of the Google applications in Android is that they store data on Google’s servers, which means moving data from one phone to the next to not be an issue. Once you enter your Google user id and password the first time you start the new phone, it automatically synchronizes your data, so moving data is very easy. Getting your applications and settings on the new phone is another matter. App Referrer saved me a ton of time installing applications on the Nexus One.

I wrote about App Referrer last week, and the key feature that helps here is its ability to send an e-mail that lists every application installed on your phone and includes links to the applications in the Android Market. I ran App Referrer on the myTouch and sent myself the e-mail list of all my apps, then opened that e-mail on the Nexus One and simply tapped the links of the applications to install them.

Another migration tip is for those who listen to podcasts, which is to use Google Listen for downloading and listening to podcasts on your phone. The key feature of Google Listen that helps with migration is that it stores the RSS feeds of podcasts in Google Reader. When I started Google Listen on the Nexus One and went to My Subscriptions, all of my podcast subscriptions appeared without I having to enter a single one, because they were all being read from Google Reader.

You may not switch phones as often as I, but it only takes one time for one to discover that it can be a painful process. App Referrer and Google Listen makes the process much easier, you will find both programs in the Android Market.

If you carry a lot gadgets and not heard of Scottevest, then you are in for a treat. Many gadget lovers suffer for the lack of pockets, and what Scottevest sells are jackets, vests, sweatshirts, and shirts with lots of pockets. I recently bought the Scottevest Cotton Hoodie that I have been enjoying very much.

The Hoodie has 13 pockets and is very comfortable, even when the pockets are full. Most Scottevest products include a system for securing headset wires inside the garment so that you can walk around without having the wire dangling outside your clothes. The Hoodie has two clear view, zippered pockets on the chest that I use for my cell phone and MP3 player.

You will also find two large hand pockets in the Hoodie, which include two small change pockets that are secured by velcro. The hand pockets have magnetic closures and during a recent stay at a hotel I did have issues with the hotel door key being messed up by the magnets, so I suggest being careful handling cards with magnetic strips in these pockets.

Where Scottevest products really shine is traveling through airports. With all of gadgets that I use secured in the pockets of my Hoodie, I just took the Hoodie off and put it in one of the bins for the x-ray scanner. Once I got through the security line, I just picked up my Hoodie and put it back on and went on my way. The Hoodie was also very convenient while on the airplane as I had everything I needed in in easy to reach pockets.

At $70 the Scottevest Hoodie is more expensive than most hoodies that you find, but the added convenience of the pockets provide makes the purchase more than worthwhile. Scottevest products are available for purchase on their web site.