fidgetware

First of all Iomega insisted that the issue was the power supply, which I knew was not the case.  Why would a drive that starts whining and then wont start again have a power supply issue?  As it was going to take a few days for the replacement power supply and then a few more for a replacement drive to arrive I went out and bought a new external hard drive.  I was wondering if going with Iomega again was foolish.  So often reviews are written when the box has just been opened and the customer is so excited with their purchase they rate the product 5 stars.  Anything else would indicate you made a bad purchasing decision.  But will they still be so excited 6 months from now.  In the end I decided to go with the same 1TB drive, but the only 1TB drive on the shelf had a damaged box which was quite obvious from mishandling.  The sales assistant interpreted the dents as being from the security device wrapped around the box.  I looked at the other pristine boxes with security devices and decided to pay $30 more for an extra 500GB.  1.5TB for only $140 with tax, quite unbelievable.  I still remember paying about $600 for a 20MB drive.  Back home I used the new power supply on the old drive and heard the familiar beep click noise.  Another quick online chat with Iomega and they shipped out the new drive which arrived before I started looking for tracking information.  I did pay $25 for the expedited shipping where they ship in advance.  I now I have two backup drives and need to figure out how I want to duplicate files across them.

My Iomega Prestige 1TB backup drive crashed today, well really a few days ago.  It apparently was hot and making a load whining noise and so was turned off.  Now I get beep, click, beep click…. when I turn it on.  Iomega support says that it is the power supply but I think that is a stall tactic.  I may go out and buy another drive today so that I have two backup drives.  But should I buy the same drive that failed?  It had a great reviews, but this drive just sits on top of a desktop computer and is not moved at all and has failed within 6 months.  Yes I have lost a handful of files, but not worth spending the $800 or more to recover them.

The update of Math Explosion is going well.  I want to make it so that you can change the colors of the picker/spinner as well as the keypad.  I have the colors changing for the spinner and you can turn the grunge look off and on.  I have more work to do with the grunge effect.  I hope to be in a week and then will start charging for the Math Explosion series.

I finally finished the demo video for the Pill Puzzle game.  Things did not go smoothly as I needed to show the action of the accelerometer.  No matter how I tried to video the iPhone I would always get reflections or some kind of shadow on the screen that made the game hard to see.  I tried filming outside and inside.  But no matter what I tried as the phone the was moved to roll the balls I would get a reflection.  In the end I used still photos and angled them to get the appearance of motion.  I then used iShowU to record Pill Puzzle in the iPhone Simulator.  The iPhone simulator however does not use the built in accelerometer that the MacBooks have.  Instead I used a simple app called AccelerometerSimulation by Otto Chrons.  It allows you to broadcast accelerometer info from your iPhone onto the network.  The Pill Puzzle game in the Simulator then uses this data to mimic the real phone.  It was a little more complicated but the images are clear.

iMovie was the next stumbling block.  It could not handle a handful of video clips that I had trimmed.  It kept on lagging and would freeze on a frame and then playback a few seconds later.  That was a major hassle especially when you are trying to be precise with your editing.  I hoped that an upgrade to the faster Snow Leopard would help but it did not.  Instead I had to install xcode again as the old iPhone Simulator had been removed.  The next step was having to recompile Pill Puzzle as the old version would not run in the simulator.  A handful of issues then cropped up that did not exist with the older 2.2.1 code.  After finally fixes the code issues I created the final video sequence and did the voice over.

Once again the lagging in the video was problematic.  I essentially had to time the script and read it knowing that what I was seeing on the screen was not syncing correctly.  A final publish from iMove and now it is on YouTube.