2008 November | johnbiehler.com

Gaming on the iPhone [interview]

John / November 27, 2008 / Photography / 3 Comments

A few months ago, I was contacted about doing an interview with the Georgia Straight which is the local weekly entertainment newspaper in Vancouver. It has finally made it to print (you can read it online here) and I think it turned out pretty good (thanks Chris!).

I was worried that some (or all) of what I said at the time may not be relevant anymore (we talked alot about the SDK and other things that have changed since the interview) but for the most part it all still holds true.

I do come across a little more excited about iPhone gaming than I probably am though. Super Monkey Ball on the iPhone isn’t that amazing.

Thanks to Peter for taking the photo of me to go with the article. Unfortunately, they didn’t attribute him in the print version.

Sadly, Cheech & Chong (who appear on the cover) weren’t available for my photoshoot.

AppleTV + Boxee and XBMC

John / November 24, 2008 / Hacking, Video / 7 Comments

Apple recently updated the AppleTV software to version 2.3 and I finally updated after seeing Christina’s post about Boxee. I had signed up for a Boxee account awhile ago and finally got my invite last week. Watch this quick video to see why Boxee is pretty cool:

quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo.

You can easily install Boxee (and the excellent XBMC) onto your AppleTV without much trouble or voiding your warranty. All you need is a USB thumb drive. Just follow the steps here. Once you’ve installed it, you will need to run the updater in the Boxee/XBMC menu before running either Boxee or XBMC – at least I had to otherwise I’d get an error.

There is a fair bit of content available in Boxee.

Unfortunately, hulu doesn’t work from Canada so that’s a huge chunk of it’s content you can exclude.

Fortunately, there are lots of other things available:

An awesome bonus is the installation of XBMC which I’ve been using in some form since the original Xbox came out. Between these two apps, you should be able to play just about kind of media content on your AppleTV…not to mention, stream it from your local network (from say a network storage device) or the internet.

D90 + Fisheye video

John / November 17, 2008 / Photography, Video / 1 Comment

I shot this video awhile ago and never posted it here for some reason.

Shot at night with my 10.5mm fisheye lens on the Nikon D90 from the backseat of a Mini Cooper S while driving from downtown Vancouver to the north shore.

Coming soon to a store near you

John / November 6, 2008 / Video / 5 Comments

A while ago, Paul & Mike called me up and asked if I’d be interested in working on a project with them. You may have seen their work in London Drugs and a ton of Apple resellers from here to California. They are planning a huge expansion into the US shortly so it’s pretty exciting to be asked to be involved.

The project is a video training course called Quickstart to iTunes 8 which is geared towards people that want to fully utilize iTunes and all the devices that it works with like iPods, iPhones and even the AppleTV.

I’m in good company too…Derek is doing the Garageband course.

Last month we shot an introduction video for the course. It turned out better than I thought (still have trouble watching myself) and hopefully I don’t look as goofy as I felt while shooting it. Fortunately, the actual course only features my voice with iTunes providing the visuals.

[flash medium=2]

I guess I can add ‘trainer’ to my resume now. I’ll post more details when the course is complete and ready for purchase….I’m sure some of this site’s audience could use the course as a stocking stuffer for a friend or relative.

Update: My course is in stores now!

Nikon Pronea-S APS film camera

John / November 4, 2008 / Photography / 2 Comments

This past weekend, I dragged myself out of bed early to go to a camera swap meet with Peter. Didn’t expect to find anything (we did bump into Reilly) but ended up finding this camera in near mint condition, complete with box, manual and even the warranty card for $15:

Why is this a good thing? This camera came out in the late 90′s and was generally considered to be junk. The cool thing (to me) is that it’s a fun little film camera that fully supports all the Nikon lenses I already have. This means I can play with my fisheye lens on a film camera for only $15. I found out that APS film (slightly smaller than 35mm film) is still quite plentiful around town and that everyone that sells it seems to process it. While not the best scans ever, I can quickly get a roll developed and scanned to CD for the grand total of $2.99 at Shoppers Drug Mart.

It even had a roll of partially exposed film inside! Aside from a few blurry photos taken inside the swap meet, nothing interesting was on the film roll so Peter and I took advantage and used up the rest of the roll for some goofy photos outside the swap meet with the fisheye lens: