Note that SpeakOut’s SIM cards do not have the extra-small micro punch-out size. So if you have a newer iphone (4/4s), you have to shave it down to the micro size.

To activate the minutes you purchased, dial *818* plus the voucher number printed on your receipt. If you need additional minutes, buy more at the Seven Eleven store.

This SpeakOut prepaid solution does allow for data, but you should probably use WIFI while traveling in Canada, so turnoff the Cellular Data setting at the Settings > General > Network.

A Photosynth created indoor panorama with no post image pixel manipulation. Click to enlarge.

The rock gym panorama above was created with 12 capture frames

Photosynth is an iPhone photo stitching iOS program developed and introduced to the Apple Apps Store in 2011 by Microsoft. This highly rated (4+ stars) app is free. Most iPhone panorama apps can only stitch horizontally, but Photosynth can stitch horizontally and vertically creating a sphere-like and slightly fish-eyed image perspective after the image-stitching engine is done.

Photosynth's capturing modes: green; automatic, yellow; manual user over-ride, and red; can't capture.

All panorama apps have the photographer capture a series of aligned frames to stitch together to create the final panorama. Photosynth does not require the photographer to visually align each successive frame of the developing panorama like some apps similar to Pano. Also, the user doesn’t have to manually engage the camera’s shutter when the frames may (or may not) be properly overlapped. Photosynth just asks the photographer to slowly move the iPhone around until the app is happy with the next potential frame alignment (indicated with a green rectangular frame), upon which, Photosynth records the frame on its own approval. If the next frame is not aligning properly (indicated with a red rectangular frame) no frame is captured and Photosynth waits for the photographer to move and hopefully improve the camera’s holding position. The shooting process is difficult to explain, but the app interface is very intuitive and simple to understand after only a few panoramas. Hats-off to the app devs who created this unique user interface, the UI (User Interface) is so elegant and simple, that iPhone photographers can quickly understand this panorama shooting process.

The Photosynth app has image sharing features and photo geo-tagging integration with Bing Maps. The only negative that I have encountered is the low image resolution compared to what the 8 megapixel iPhone 4s camera can capture.

Photosynth has two viewing modes; plain image and interactive panorama. To view images interactively, you must have a web browser that is running in 32-bit mode and has Microsoft’s Sliverlight plugin, then, you can control the magnification and view direction of the panorama.

The Colorado Avalanche Information Center (CAIC) has developed a web page for mobile devices including; Android, iOS, and Blackberry platforms. This page is formatted for small screens to present basic avalanche conditions and alerts, if you need greater details you can click within each mountain zone for more specifics. Each mountain zone displays the “avi rose” for the range, an avalanche statement, and a weather forecast. If you’re a powder seeker (I am not), I believe CAIC does a better non-basis forecast of potential snowfall for each region. Also, you will find the two most current zone tweets giving you the zone forecaster’s snow insights. Note: This is a web page not a mobile application, so just bookmark; http://avalanche.state.co.us/m/index.php within your mobile browser to get Colorado avalanche updates.

Getting a Movistar SIM card is a quick and fairly simple process but you must find a Movistar office that sells their SIM cards. All Movistar stores sell extra minutes but many of the smaller kiosks do not have SIM cards in stock. Movistar Mexico does not sell any GSM phones with the so-called micro SIM cards, though this probably will change, as most carriers are now selling the punch-out SIMs, which allows you to punch-out either the traditional or micro-sized SIM shape at purchase. This means you need to trim the traditional SIM down to the micro size. This takes some care, but not surgical skills. First time you attempt this procedure, under-trim the card initially, and if necessary, shave the card more until it just fits into its SIM slot.

A prepaid Movistar SIM card costs $12 or 170 pesos and your new account will also be credited 100 minutes. Have the Movistar sales agent activate your new SIM card with the agent’s personal phone in the store. If you need to check your Movistar balance dial *12536, you will receive a text message with your current balance. You can use cellular data with a prepaid account on Movistar’s EDGE network which is fine for email downloading, but limit your cellular data roaming. If you use WIFI for most of your heavier data needs, you can easily continue to use your iPhone in Mexico for a reasonable price.

First off, a standard free Vimeo account is much like You Tube’s service; not good enough. Grainy web videos are not up-to-par with the high quality HD videos that can be found on the Internet nowadays. Only after I upgraded to a Vimeo Plus account did I finally get video quality that I considered acceptable. Vimeo Plus cost $60 a year, which is pretty reasonable for nearly unlimited streaming video. That’s $5 per month to have a streaming video server, HD quality resolution, for an unlimited number of videos. If you don’t have a Plus account, you are going to be a second class client with Vimeo. A basic free account has restrictions and limitations that push you to a Plus account and this is how Vimeo makes money.

When you sign up with Vimeo you are creating your video library on Vimeo’s streaming server. From Vimeo’s website you can manage your videos within your account. Video from Plus accounts is always “processed” ahead of free accounts and there are no limitations on how many videos or how large your videos can be when uploaded to their servers. A basic Vimeo account can’t upload enough video data (size: h x w) to get good video quality. As a Vimeo Plus user, your account has many more options which you can select during the production of your web video. The Embedding settings will allow you to customize your video player and eliminate ads within your player. Privacy settings allow to control who can watch your video content including it being only viewed from your domain.

I have a website hosted on a web server, but the server is not a streaming video server. A streaming video server is absolutely necessary to deliver video content to your website. Keep in mind that your videos are stored on Vimeo servers, not on your web server. They are displayed on your website by embedding a video link from your website to Vimeo’s servers. This is good because serving videos from your server will eat-up your website’s bandwidth quota quickly. Web host admins, like myself, want our clients to keep their video content on streaming servers not on a web server. A video server has been optimized to stream your video content much more efficiently than a standard web server. If you don’t have a website, you can still share your videos with others by viewing them from Vimeo’s site.

What really helped get my videos looking better was when I uploaded so called HD videos to Vimeo with minimal video compression. Let Vimeo do the prepping and compression of your videos. Vimeo recommends uploads with the H.264 codec, size of 1280×720, and a bit rate of 3000-5000 kbits/sec when exported from your video editor application. In iMovie’s Share menu you will find Vimeo’s export panel. Enter your Vimeo account login and size to publish. HD 720p produces good results for all devices with less download bandwidth. If you use HD 1080p, your movie will double in size, but would be good for presentation on a 27″ monitor.

Video resolutions of 1280×720 or greater are considered high definition and with a Plus Vimeo account, your uploaded source video is processed more thoroughly by Vimeo, resulting in superior video compression and containing far less pixel artifacts (blur spots). If your video meets Vimeo’s specs for HD quality, you will see the HD logo at the bottom of your movie player control buttons. You should see clearer video when compared to non-HD video.

HD/Non-HD difference: The extra video compression can be seen on the right around the text.

Here is an example of using Vimeo Plus correctly with HD content. Granted; good photography, Nikon cameras, and a helicopter help too.

There is also a free iOS application available from Vimeo. Once you login into your Vimeo account from the Vimeo app, you can produce and distribute video content from one application on an iPhone. As crazy as editing video on a mobile phone sounds, in a pinch, you can trim your clips, add text, add audio and get them online quickly.

Video editor in the Vimeo app

Another issue with serving video content on the Internet is who are you serving your videos to? What size of video do mobile browsers need and what formats do they require? Vimeo’s post-production takes care of these unknowns for you. Vimeo will create mobile versions of your video for you. In the example to the right, Flash video is not supported by iOS devices, so Vimeo provides a H264 encoded version to the iPhone. With Vimeo, you don’t have to worry about optimizing your video for web viewing or different mobile devices, just get them enough data, and they do the optimizing.