When: Tue Jan. 31st, 2012 7:00pm to 11:00pm
Where: Golden Road Brewing (@goldenroadbrew) located at 5430 W. San Fernando

Barcamp usually lasts 2 days straight, however this year the venue aquired cannot accommodate this, so it begins around 9am-5pm Saturday and then Sunday again. Each session/demo is usually about 30 minutes – 60 minutes long with smaller ones in between.

Breakfast will be served in the morning, and beverages/snacks will be on hand throughout the day. Barcamp LA also plans to have a couple of food trucks during lunch time that will be arriving for a no-host choice of food!

If you decide to come, keep in mind this is an un-confrence, which is a volunteer-organized type of confrence. Myself, and a few other people all collaborated since November of last year. The team has been incredibely passionate and resource-helpful to make this happen. We promoted it though Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Groups and other social media online sites over the past few months. This year we’ve received sponsorships/donations from:

Guidance
Fortis
Microsoft
PickAnExcuse.com
BlogDowntown.com
CorporateEspionage.com
and others

Although this is the 8th Barcamp LA, it has not happened in the past 2 years because of the bad economy and lack of sponsorship so its been a challenge for sure to get it off its feet again.

Attendees who come are encouraged to bring something that might help such as:
Powerstrips
Extra Snacks/Soda
Your own water bottle
Internet Hotspot ability

Tickets are still available and can be purchased in advance on Eventbrite:
http://barcampla8.eventbrite.com/event/1234980861
Prices are now $55 for a normal ticket & $20 for a students.

If you enter in the promo code “ILOVEBARCAMP” you will get 50% off the normal ticket price

If you absolutely cannot pay the full amount PLEASE contact Barcamp LA to work something out for you, we really want everyone who wants to come to do so, as this is an open event.

Experiencing Barcamp LA is a unique and educational experience. People you meet there are always the most helpful and passionate with the topic they represent. I love to learn about technology, so to have an unconfrence right here in Los Angeles of people with the same like-minded passion for it is amazing to support. Past Barcamp session favorites of mine include Mac OSX, WordPress, Lucid Dreaming, Social Engineering, Hacking, Geocaching and iPhone Jailbreaking sessions. The tech oriented community is one of the most fascinating/interesting types of people and when they all come together, great things happen. I look forward to seeing you there!

Ecto - Download

A very small and lightweight app that lets you post to any blogging system you might be using. I use WordPress and this app fit my needs perfectly. Of course theres always MarsEdit as an alternative that WordPress announces on their site but I liked the very straight-forwardness of Ecto. To each his own. (Ecto is also cheaper)

These apps have found their way onto my Mac and have proven themselves worthy for my uses, I hope they do for you as well! If you have any suggestions for what apps should be in Part Two of my “Handy Mac OSX Programs” let me know in the comments!

Do you buy Amazon Kindle books a lot? I love them, not only do they have a great price usually but its the instant gratification of knowing you’ll be reading it within seconds of buying it wherever you are. Many of you might have a Kindle Device but what if you also got an iPad for reading?

If you have an iPad, I’m 99.9% sure you most likely already downloaded the Kindle app and iBooks app for it by now. It was great at first, until I started to realize one small ever-growing problem. That I will eventually have TWO sets of digital book libraries on my iPad. Not good! So how to resolve this problem?

First, I had to decide which app I was more comfortable reading in. For mainly aesthetic reasons I chose iBooks over the Kindle app because of the fancy page turning graphics as well as the built-in store behind it if I ever did want to buy a book on the spot. (As opposed to going to a browser from the Kindle app) The *only* thing I would like to see iBooks do that Kindle does is the ability to choose a black background for night reading. Although the lowest brightness setting within iBooks does just fine for me.

So, my journey began like all journeys now’a days – with Google. Searching and reading up on how I can get my books from the Kindle app to my iBooks app. There were a lot of different helpful websites but none really had all the information I needed in one place, hence this blogpost for you.

For now I will be focusing on iPad users, and how to get the Kindle books from the Kindle app to your iBooks, and NOT Kindle Device users specifically (however with a little know-how you can use this same guide anyway without much changes to the later instructions)

Formats

First let’s start out with what you need to know – iBooks uses a format called .ePub which is basically a text document that can have re-flowable content (which means you can make text larger/smaller, etc) has embedded metadata, inline raster and vector images along with CSS and XML functionality. And yes, it also unfortunately supports DRM.

Another format you need to be aware of is .PRC which is a format that the Kindle devices and Palm eReaders are familiar with. For those Kindle device/Palm users out there you might also recognize this format as .MOBI, it is the same exact thing.

One last format to note is the .AZW format which is a Amazon Kindle specific format for the ebook. Note that all of these formats can be converted assuming that they do NOT have DRM on them. There ARE ways around the DRM but that is NOT what I will be discussing on this post. You will have to find out how to do that yourself.

Software You’ll Need to Convert:

Thankfully, this is a post I don’t have to spend too much time talking about the programs you’ll need for various Operating Systems. “Calibre” is a multi-platform program that allows you to convert many ebook and text documents to another format with a few clicks of a button. You can download it here.

METHOD 1:

With your jailbroken iPad (or iPhone/iPad – whatever your using for the Kindle app) your going to need to sFTP into it and locate the Kindle folder within the Applications folder. Usually, its not named “Kindle” but rather a long string of numbers. My Kindle folder is located in

/private/var/mobile/Applications/

If you don’t feel like sitting there and going through every single folder to find out which one holds the Kindle.app, a quick workaround is to delete the app from the iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch and then go to the AppStore and re-download it. This way, when you go back to your FTP program you can sort the Applications folder by “Modified Date” and the newest modified folder should be the Kindle.app folder. (You might need to open the Kindle app first)

Once the Kindle folder is found, you will want to navigate to:

/Documents/eBooks/

In this folder you will see a bunch of paired files with the same name twice, for now your only interested in the .PRC and .AZW files. Go ahead and copy them to your desktop (or wherever you want on your computer) and you can close out the FTP program once finished.

Method 2:
But what if you don’t have a jailbroken iPad/iPhone/iPod touch to do this? Well, where there’s a will theres a way. Basically your going to need to extract the contents of your back-up’s from iTunes. To do this you’ll need special software:

Windows users can use – Reincubate Download Here
Mac OSX users can use – iPhone Backup Extractor Download here

Once you’ve extracted the Kindle folder to your desktop look for the eBooks folder with your .PRC, and .AZW files inside. From here you can continue to the instructions below using Calibre.

Converting the Files

Now that you have the PRC and AZW files, you’ll want to open up Calibre. If you need some help configuring Calibre you can watch the below YouTube video the developer made which helps guide you through the process.

Simply drag the PRC files into Calibre and select the ones you wish to convert. Select “Convert e-Books” at the top panel and you will be able to edit the Metadata if you desire.

Make sure the output format on the top right is set to “EPUB”. If all the settings are set to how you wish (I chose the default setup) click on “OK” in the bottom right.

It shouldn’t take very long and after Calibre finishes, it will place the new EPUB version of the eBook in the folder you specified Calibre save them to. Now, its time to open up iTunes and drag n’ drop that ePub file into the “Books” section of iTunes.

You are now ready to sync those books up and they will “magically” appear on your iPad iBooks app!

One last note: There are .PRC and .AZW files out there that have DRM locking it down, making Calibre unable to convert it. There are ways around this but that is not what this post is about. If you really truly want to get that nasty DRM off, I will say that Google, is your best friend as always.

Enjoy reading your books!

I finally got my hands on an Eye-Fi X2 Pro 8GB SD Card and was extremely excited to see the possibilities it would allow me to do. If you haven’t heard, Eye-Fi creates SD cards with Wi-Fi chips embedded inside them allowing you to take pictures with your SD card compatible camera (point-and-shoot or DSLR) and instantly have it uploaded to a social media or photo sharing website of your choice. In the beginning the only drawback was that your computer and camera both had to be on the same Wi-Fi network. Over time, Eye-Fi came out with different SD cards that allowed more flexibility. The recent release of its “X2 Pro” gives people the most options when trying to upload pictures on the go.

For about $150, you get an 8GB SDHC card that has 802.11n built-in. An “endless memory” mode, letting you take pictures continuously, and since your uploading the pictures as you take them once you have no more space the SD card immediately starts deleting the first pictures you started with to make room for new ones. (It will not delete any if it hasn’t safely delivered it online.)

You also get a year access to AT&T hotspots (Starbucks, McDonalds, Hotels, Restaurants, etc) for uploading pictures with your camera if your Internet-less, and free lifetime Geotagging of your photos. The X2 Pro supports RAW formats too! (.CRW, .CR2, .NEF, .NRW, .DNG, .PTX, .PEF, .RAW, .RW2, .MPO) You of course can always upload JPGs only if you wish have speedy uploads for your picture sharing websites.

So, what did I have in mind for the Eye-Fi card? With the X2 Pro, you now also have the ability to connect to Ad-Hoc networks. Perfect for those iPhone and iPads that have been jailbroken and have an app that creates a portable Wi-Fi spot. I use one called MiWi with WEP security so others don’t hop on and steal bandwidth if they happen to be in the area.

A few minutes of setting up the network and privacy settings in the Eye-Fi Control Panel and I’m good to go. Now with the 3G data connection as my Internet source, and the iPhone Wi-Fi network for my Eye-Fi card, I can start shooting! I can leave the netbook and laptop at home and completely bypass SD card adapters all together. No more stopping what Im doing, transferring pictures, reformatting the SD card and wasting precious shooting time. I turn my WiFi network on the iPhone and set my Canon DSLR to take both RAW pictures at high quality and JPGs at medium quality giving me the most flexibility later on. I set Eye-Fi up so that it only uploads JPGs that I choose and ignore RAW files when Im on my personal iPhone WiFi network. That way, I can share what Im shooting and if I want to edit the picture later in RAW I can do that when I get home.

There are plenty of picture sites you can choose to upload to.

Its not listed in the photo services above, but in the Control Panel you can set up your Twitter account for instant tweets once a photo is uploaded. (Although I’m not sure how this will work in the next few months once Twitter goes all in with OAuth forcing 3rd party services to use that as a means to connect to Twitter.) I love the fact that you can choose FTP as an option too, giving people true freedom to do what they want with their pictures once uploaded if other social media sites fail to do what the user wants.

After testing it, I found that a 3088 x 2056 JPG (shown above in a thumbnail) takes about 20-25 seconds on a 3G connection. Not – bad – at – all! Considering thats a “medium” setting on my Canon XSi, I can choose to even bump that down to a “Small” setting and uploading something on the scale of a 1024×682 for even faster uploads. (Probably around 5-10 seconds per picture!) Still perfectly viewable for sharing.

I can’t wait to put this thing to the test this weekend and take batches of pictures at a time, without lugging around a netbook/laptop I feel Eye-Fi has given me more freedom to do what I want creatively as a Photographer.

For even more creative ways to Eye-Fi on the go, check out ShutterSnitch app for both iPhone and iPad. It allows you to create rules for Eye-Fi pictures in case you wanted to upload only certain types of JPGs (like ISO specific shots, etc).

I predict this will be a big hit with iPads since the only way at the moment to currently import pictures is to have them already on your desktop and sync them, or to buy the iPad Camera Connection Kit for $30.

I hope this helps any photographers who want another option to wirelessly share pictures while on the go, if you have any questions tweet me or comment below. Thanks!