Nokia N8 | My 808 Pureview with red LED mod
I have two hacks on my 808 Pureview. The first installs the Pure font. The second is a mod that makes the breathing light solid red when charging. Very handy in the car, because my car charger plug is never secure.
I have been using a service called 4square&7yearsago. It uses the foursquare api and shows me my check-ins from a year ago. This morning I was reminded that my Nokia N8 is now a year old.
N82 | My first hands on
I have really enjoyed using my N8 over the past year. Most of the photos on this blog from the past year were shot with the N8. I am really glad there was a camera ui update for the Symbian Anna release. I switch modes a lot and the update made it easier to do so. I hope a future update makes the camera available from the lock screen.
N97 | N8 and the CR-115
Living in LA, I drive a lot. While most of the time I know where I'm going, I will use Nokia Maps anyway. The newest version has been working well in getting me around traffic spots. It reminds me when I'm speeding so I don't get a ticket. A lot of the time it gives me a weird route, so I disobey the directions. Hearing "route recalculation" is a bit annoying.
N82 | Watching news
I download a lot of podcasts. Watching a lot of video podcasts eats up bandwidth. Some months I use up 10 gigs of data. Glad I have an unlimited plan.
N82 | Belle on a green N8
Updates have been delayed over and over. Belle is due soon, but not here yet. Still, I'm pretty happy with my N8. There's nothing on the market right now that makes me want to change phones.
I went to two art shows this past month. The common element was poor ventilation at both venues.
First was the Art in the Streets exhibit at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. This exhibit was presented by Banksy and focused on street art. I got there for the last hour of the last day of the exhibit.
N8 | Art in the Streets
I also visited the opening night of Super iam8bit. This exhibit focused on video game inspired art from the 80s and 90s.
This past weekend the fine folks from Wom World Nokia invited me and 19 other members of their community out to Las Vegas for a meet up.
They flew me out Friday morning out of a 60 degrees cool Burbank. After a bumpy ride, I landed into 100 degree Las Vegas. I met with a couple of other bloggers both old and new and headed to the hotel.
N8 | Wanted posters and Nokia bags
The hotel turned out to be a beautiful resort out in Henderson called Green Valley Ranch. After checking in I saw a table of wanted posters. I giggled because my poster has a power ranger on it.
N8 | My wanted poster
N8 | Nloggers in the sun
I spent the afternoon at Green Valley Ranch's Pond pool chatting with the other bloggers. More and more people arrived until there was no more room to sit.
N8 | As evening arrived, we were herded onto a bus and headed to Planet Hollywood's PBR Grill
N8 | Dessert
After wandering through the casino, we found our way to the PBR Grill. The food portions were ridiculously huge. Nobody cleared their plate. My dessert above was a Vanilla ice cream cookie plate. Afterwards we headed to see the mechanical bull. Only two of us were brave enough to ride with a full stomach.
Afterwards we headed back to the hotel and almost lost a person who got lost in the casino. While some of us called it a night, some of us enjoyed the outdoor lounges at the Green Valley Ranch. In the morning we reconvened for breakfast in the morning at the buffet. I recall getting four plates of food.
N8 | Filling forms on the bus
We were herded on a bus to head out to the desert. We had to fill out some waiver forms. We were informed that we needed to find the cowboy and we might win a prize. I made sure to get notified every time the cowboy made a move.
N8 | Nokia Ranch
We arrived at the Nokia Ranch and were greeted with a nice breeze that brought the temperature down. We were given cowboy hats and embroidered shirts with our twitter handles on them. We split up into two groups to set off for the challenges of the day. My group went to go ride the ATVs first while the other group went horseback riding.
N8 | Getting ready for ATV rides
I had a C7 Astound attached to the front of my ATV, which shot a full 60 minutes of footage. I wish I could post something interesting, but a) I suck at video editing b) the Astound was mostly pointed at the sky. Riding the ATVs was a ton of fun. We had a few straight-aways where we could go full throttle, some steep downhills and some treacherous turns. Nobody in my group tipped over, although many came close. One of the guys in my group was in a cart and filming. Every time I saw him I hammed it up by taking my hands off the handlebars.
N8 | Me and Chief
The groups switched activities and I hopped on my horse Chief. Riding a horse wasn't too hard. We had a relaxing ride through the desert. Chief kept very close to the horse in front of us. Only a few times did I have to steer him, although I had to pull him when he tried to eat some grass.
C7 Astound | Storytellers
After the horse ride, we headed inside to get ready for a mine tour. The walls were heavily decorated by the owners with all sorts of stuff from animal heads to old trinkets. They showed us pictures of bad animal encounters as well as some frozen rattlesnakes. They gave us a history of the mine and how some filming often takes place there at Techatticup.
N8 | Looking up deep inside the mine
We headed inside the mine and heard about the trials of living here back in 1887. At some places the mine went 600 feet straight up and 600 feet straight down.
N8 | Cowboys on the horizon
It took a while for everyone to exit the mine, so some of us explored the area a bit. When everyone got out, we watched a drop test of a Nokia C7 Astound, HTC HD7 and Samsung Galaxy S 4G. They were dropped 3 times from heights ranging from 5 to 15 feet. This wasn't enough, so we headed back to the ranch to drop them from the second floor of a barn at 25 feet.
N8 | Test results
While some of us grabbed dinner, the phones were dropped. The HTC HD7's screen was shattered and done for. The C7 Astound's screen became disconnected, but remained functional. The Samsung Galaxy S 4G surprisingly survived.
After dinner, we learned some rope tricks and sang songs by a campfire. I was happy to see so much dark sky and stargazed for most of the evening. We then hopped back on the bus and returned to the resort.
N8 | Green Valley Ranch pool area at night
When we got back to the hotel and everyone went back to their rooms for a shower. Some of us came back to meet up at the Lobby Bar. With my 2nd check in, I became its mayor on Foursquare. I wasn't too long afterwards that I noticed the cowboy had tweeted his location in the lobby. I was first to find him and won a prize, a Nokia BH-905i bluetooth headset. My friend Jeb mentioned he never saw me drunk, so I proceeded to order 4 really strong drinks over the course of the night. After spending time in the lounge, jacuzzi and another bar, I became too drunk to stand upright and was walked back to my room.
N8 | Breakfast!
I woke up and headed to breakfast. I said goodbye to a few that left early. I hung out with some of the bloggers in the outdoor beds when the cowboy dropped off my gift. I unboxed my new BH-905i and charged it up. I said some more goodbyes and then had lunch at the Pond pool. Lounging at the pool, I was quite surprised with how popular tattoos are nowadays.
Me and my small group of travelers were escorted by Donna from Womworld to the airport so she could return her rental car. I fired up Nokia Maps and it crashed right away! After a reboot and some u-turns, Nokia Maps was ready to roll and we made our way to the rental car return. In the terminal, I tested out the BH-905i and was wide eyed with wonder. On the flight back, they worked out wonderfully. After landing I picked up my bags and headed home exhausted from an amazing weekend.
I am very grateful to WomWorld and Nokia for inviting me along for this magnificent ride.
Last Sunday I had the extreme pleasure of seeing Ghostland Observatory at Club Nokia. Ghostland Observatory has a reputation for being an incredible live band. I've known about them for about 3 years but never had the chance to see them.
N8 | Sad Sad City
When I first heard about the show, I decided to get VIP tickets so I could sit down when I needed to. This was the first time I got VIP tickets at Club Nokia. It was a bit strange going into the theater from the VIP entrance. I also found it interesting that most of the seats were partitioned off with a curtain. First time I had seen that. I had a second row seat, which wasn't so great because the space in front of me was used for walking. Towards the middle of the show, I jumped into the front row since the people who had seats there never came back.
N8 | Give Me The Beat
The show was phenomenal. The music sounds a lot different live compared to on their albums. There was a also an intense laser light show that was well synced to the music. It doesn't come out well in my videos due to the fog. Towards the end of the show, I had to take my glasses off because the lasers were making me dizzy.
N8 | Silver City
My N8 only had 3 bars when I got to Club Nokia after spending most of the day checking in. I managed to record 3 songs before hitting getting the battery warning at the end of the show.
I saw some ants outside and decided to test out the continuous auto focus capabilities of CameraPro. It works well for the most part, I couldn't keep it in focus while travelling up the beam. I added some music in the N8's video editor and uploaded it with pixelpipe.
I've been doing HDR on my Nokia camera phones for a few years now. I had figured out a method to do it on my N82 that involved using a bluetooth keyboard and a tripod. However, this was cumbersome and took minutes to bracket photos at different exposures. I can do this on my N8 a lot more easily now.
I recently purchased the HDR Photo Camera app from the Ovi Store. I love this app. It automatically brackets photos in seconds. It can also merge the photos, but that takes a long time and the result is only about 1 megapixel big. Thankfully, you can turn this feature off and just have the app bracket photos. The problem with this app is that it doesn't remember settings. If you forget to turn off the merge option, it takes a couple of minutes for it to process. Processing is very resource intensive, if there are too many apps in the background, the merge will fail. It does remember other settings such as exposure level or size. Unlike the built-in camera, the UI is nice and simple. An updated version is coming out soon.
I spent yesterday afternoon at Woodley Park and took a few photos. The first photo is from the built-in N8 camera. The next two were shot with HDR Photo Camera and tone mapped in Photomatix 4. I had fun shooting these photos and am looking forward to new opportunities to use this app.
N8 | This is a regular shot from the N8
N8 | This is an HDR version of the same scene.
N8 | This came from the same set of photos, but with different tone mapping
