Stuttering Final Cut / January 13, 2013 by Paulo Fierro

I've been shooting some video with the GoPro Hero 3 Black which can do 1080p at 60fps which looks lovely.

Yup, in OS X 10.8.2 playing back 1080p video at 60fps on my MacBook Pro results in so much stuttering its unusable. Trying to edit it in Final Cut Pro X is basically impossible or will drive you crazy in the process.

You get lovely warning messages like this:

As VLC handles it fine I know my laptop has more than enough fire power to play it back, so it must be a QuickTime issue (Final Cut uses QuickTime to decode video as far as I know). According to multiple discussions on the Apple support forums its possibly related to a GPU driver issue and will hopefully be resolved in 10.8.3.

I hope so...

Learning to kitesurf / January 9, 2013 by Paulo Fierro

At the end of November last year we had our good friend Chris Ross come over and visit us. His visit had a caveat, he had to do the PADI e-Learning course online first so we could go diving while he was here.

On the flip side, we would learn how to kitesurf — I for one had no idea you could actually do that on the island... So we took a few lessons and kind of got there but not really. Turns out learning to dive is much, much, much easier.

In any case, I've now had five lessons and found that was enough to go out and try some riding on my own, slowly building up confidence and lets call it technique.

This first video is the drive to Barkers Beach, sped up 20x, shot with a GoPro Hero 3 Black attached to the windshield with a suction-cup mount.

Next up is some shots taken while riding using CamRig's Universal Strut Mount and a standard board mount.

As its the "windy season" I look forward to getting better, and maybe even learning how to turn without stopping.

Coconut Villas / October 16, 2012 by Paulo Fierro

A late afternoon dive off Coconut Villas while Mark was visiting, led as always by Stephen.

Changing dates with Automator / October 15, 2012 by Paulo Fierro

For my birthday Niqui got me this dive mask from Liquid Image. Its a nice mask and the video taken with it is great but the four rechargeable AAA batteries power it for about 90 minutes. Most of our dives are an hour or less so that's not a problem, and the mask comes with a battery recharger – however while charging the batteries the camera forgets the date.

You have to set the date each and every time. Its a minor thing but it annoys me so I don't do it. For some reason the default date is set to Monday, January 8, 2035 – a strange choice.

So because I'm lazy and don't change the date on the camera every time, when I eventually drag the video files into Final Cut I get crap like this:

Having some events with the right date and some in the future makes organising video for projects a nightmare. So after googling around I found that I could use the touch command in the Terminal to change the creation date. If I do this on each file before importing it into Final Cut I avoid the problem. So the command is basically:

touch -t yyyymmddHHMM <PATH_TO_FILE>

Still, doing this on multiple files is a massive pain so I toyed with the idea of writing a script for it. I have used Automator in the past and figured doing things like selecting items using the Finder's File Selection dialog is easier than using a command line script so that's what I did and you can see the "recipe" below.

It accepts a string which is the date you want the file to have been created, you select the files and you're done. It keeps the original time too, which may not be something you want but I don't really care about the time. As long as the files have the right date and are sequenced correctly its good enough for me.

You can download the application here. You can also open it up with Automator and modify it as you see fit.

While doing this I learned Automator actually has support for variables – who knew? Its a powerful tool and I don't think I use it enough.

iOS6 Maps and the Cayman Islands / September 20, 2012 by Paulo Fierro

So iOS6 is now officially released so we can talk about it. We've been using it since WWDC in June and in general there's so much to like in this release. The one thing that is still lacking is mapping data.

Having used the beta while we were in California I know first hand how great the maps can be. Turn by turn navigation when driving from San Francisco to Las Vegas worked well and the maps were pretty detailed showing local businesses, restaurants, etc. Once you leave the US however, the mapping data is substantially worse, with the exception of a few 3D flyovers.

There's been a lot of noise on Twitter and people holding out on buying a new phone or upgrading until this is fixed. The good news is that this is all on the backend so Apple can roll out improvements behind the scenes and most likely not require us to do anything.

Most of the complaints I've seen however still have some data visible to them. Maybe not all that accurate, but something.

However here on Grand Cayman the Maps app has gone from useful to completely useless. On the left is a screenshot of iOS5 that has roads and place marks – directions work too. On the right is iOS6 that shows a place mark for the airport and otherwise a lot of sand. Directions do not work.

They replaced our roads with sand. Thankfully we got to keep the airport.

The satellite view isn't as bad, but quite cloudy and the more you zoom out the more the clouds appear.

There is also something weird that happens to the shape of the island around the middle right.

This appears to be because they draw the outline based on existing data. As you get closer you get to that location in satellite view you can see a bad stitch job between what I assume are two different data providers. The image on the right is basically black and white.

In any case, I look forward to the day when the maps here are as gorgeous as they are in San Francisco. No doubt the Maps team in Cupertino are quite busy and we're not very high on the list of priorities but hopefully we'll see something soon.

Update: Haha! My buddy Peeks just let me know that the image I submitted to "The Amazing iOS6 Maps" Tumblr made it onto Wired.com :)

Update #2: And TechnoBuffalo. And CNET. And Jest. And Broadband Reports. And Droid Life. And Huffington Post.

Update #3 (June 24, 2013): I just had a look and to my surprise we now have a road!

Update #4 (April 18, 2016): Not sure when this happened, but Maps seems to have been updated and looks like we now have all our roads and directions seem to work too! Amazing! And all it took was 4 years 😎