My Tesla Just Got Better

It seems the folks over at Telsa Motors have been busy. They just announced details of the new v1.5 transmission that will be going into the Tesla Roadster starting around production #41. As I'm the owner of #97, I should benefit from this change. Don't feel bad for the first forty, they'll get a free retrofit.

You can read a good overview from Wired here or get all the gory details from the Tesla CTO Straubel here.

Number 97 is scheduled to be built in October 0f 2008 which probably means delivery in January 2009. If I'm lucky I might just get it from Christmas this year.

iPhone Blogger Posting Tip

With Blogger you can post to your blog by sending email to a special address. See Settings/Email under your blog's dashboard for details.

You can even include pictures in the email and they will show up in your blog post along with the text. I recently setup the blog http://ifood.beguelin.com this way and I use it to send in pictures of food. I use my iPhone to take the pictures and send in the email. It's a pretty easy way to get some interesting (to me) content on a blog.

Recently the picture part of the posting stopped working. After playing around a bit, I realized that one thing had changed, I was using my Yahoo! email account, not my Google email account to send email from my iPhone to Blogger. When I switched my iPhone back to using gmail, things began to work again. There seems to be some Blogger bug related to sending email from your iPhone to Blogger but it can be resolved by using a gmail account. It's easy enough to set your default email account to gmail in the iPhone. It's just odd that Blogger doesn't handle other email providers correctly with the iPhone.

Visual Hub Rocks

I'm getting ready for another long trip and have been going nuts ripping video for my iPhone. I was using HandBrake for a while, but I find that VisualHub (Mac only) is much nicer. It has a lot of little extras, like "Add to iTunes" and "Stitch Together Video" that make it worth the registration fee. Note that VisualHub doesn't work with copy protected DVDs so you might need something like HandBrake if you're dealing with protected DVDs. If you don't feel like spending $23 on VisualHub, try it's free cousin, iSquint. VisualHub and iSquint are both sassy software. The dialog boxes and user documentation are a hoot.

VisualHub also seems to work much faster than HandBrake.

One trick I've learned, is to have VisualHub copy the video to an external USB drive so my internal hard drive doesn't get filled up. You need to make sure you don't have the Copy to iTunes Music Folder when adding to library option selected. Otherwise iTunes will create another copy of the huge video files to your internal hard dive. It's no fun when your startup drive is full.