Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with flip

Here's Looking at YouTube

deCadmus — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:07:53 -0800

My sweetie gave me a Flip (UltraHD) for my birthday. I've never had a video recorder before... besides the obvious recording of fambly events and such, what sorts of cool, interesting, and potentially artsy things can I do with it? I've actually somewhat carefully skirted the world of video for a long, long time, worried at some level that I might be bitten with a virus that would make me an annoying Spielberg / Lucas / Kubrik / Capra wannabe.

Maybe I'm grown up enough now to keep things in perspective. Maybe.

Turn, baby, turn

littlerobothead — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:13:29 -0800

Unless we can turn the baby over, Mrs. Littlerobothead is going to have a c-section on the 23rd. Although c-sections are perfectly normal—and we will be just fine if it happens—we'd really like to try and get her to turn. What are your tried-and-true, sure-fire ways to get a turn to happen? We've already done the ECV and the chiropractor with no luck, which puts us squarely in the realm of "try it, it can't hurt". Any ideas or stories, even ones about not turning? This is our first, and we'd love to not have to go through surgery to get her onto the earth.

Extra bonus backstory: she turned once, and then turned back again. She must be comfy. We'll be swimming tomorrow, with some headstands for good measure. Our little family thanks you for any suggestions!

Which mini camcorder should I choose?

hot soup girl — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 17:55:44 -0800

Which mini camcorder should I get - the Kodak Zi8 or the Flip Ultra HD? I'm trying to choose between these two camcorders, both priced just under £150.

I thought I'd settled on the Flip, but then heard about the Kodak Zi8 and am now flummoxed! The Zi8 becomes available in the UK next Thursday, but has been on sale in the US for about a month; I've been reading the reviews.

At this stage, the Kodak Zi8 seems the better choice as its image is a bit crisper; it also has image stabilisation, an external microphone jack, and most importantly, an SD card slot. However, reviews suggest that its battery life isn't great (40 minutes to an hour?) and some users have complained of a whine when using the internal mike.

If you've used either of these models, I'd be grateful for your opinion!

(Incidentally, I have seen this question, and it was somewhat helpful, but both models mentioned are a little older.)

Help me Flip

LittlePumpkin — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 09:24:29 -0800

Can you teach me how to do a swimming flip turn? I used to know how. But I haven't swum in a while -- so not only have I forgotten how to flip, I also seem to have developed a fear of the wall.

Any quick and easy flip tips?

What mini camcorder should I choose?

ismaelsobek — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:29:26 -0800

Which mini HD camcorder should I buy—the Kodak Zi6 or the Flip MinoHD? I'm torn between these two camcorders. On the one hand, I've heard that the Zi6 has better white balance (and therefore truer colors) and a more sensitive mic. On the other, I've heard so much good stuff about the Flip in general…

Alternatives to FlipShare for Managing Video on a PC

muckster — Tue, 05 May 2009 11:04:00 -0800

Can you recommend software for managing Flip videos on a PC? I recently got a Flip MinoHD, but a) the built-in software refuses to work on my system and b) it's a little too simple, anyway.

I'm looking for something that will let me import, file, play, and tag the clips from the camera. Picasa 3 looked promising, but somehow, playback of the H.264 files stutters (according to the forums, this is a widespread problem.) Tagging is important to me, so FlipShare wouldn't do even if it worked.

Is there anything similar to Picasa or Lightroom for short movies that will work with the H.264 files produced by the MinoHD? Thanks much.

Mummy ! They won't ship my new toy to Belgium !

Baud — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 04:03:27 -0800

The Flip Mino HD with my own image will not ship outside the US. How can I have it reshipped to Belgium ? This has me dropping of small river of saliva on my laptop keyboard.

Alas, the personalised design will not ship outside the US. I live in Belgium. How can I have it reshipped to Belgium in a reliable, affordable way ?

How long will it take ?

Flip Video on PS3

mzurer — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 20:39:57 -0800

Anyone have any luck getting Flip Video clips to play on a playstation 3? It's an F260. Doesn't work over a media server or hooked up directly.

Cheap Camera

mccarty.tim — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:09:02 -0800

What's a good video/digital camera for a college student on a budget? I'm a pre-engineering education student at TCNJ, and many of my classes call for photography to document the design process. I like the cameras on my cellphone and MacBook Pro, but I tend to find the white balance on them to be weird, and the stills and video to be grainy.

I recently saw a Flip Ultra Video 30 Minutes on sale for $99, and I remembered that David Pogue said he uses them for his podcast. Do they take really good stills at a resolution good enough for a PowerPoint? I mostly take these pictures in a woodshop with florescent lighting. I also like the idea of getting a small camcorder at a low price with decent quality, and no need to deal with tape, external batteries, or any of the other problems regular digital camcorders have. It's something I'd been thinking about buying otherwise, and if the stills were good, this could be the thing that pushes me over the edge. I might also consider the 60 minute one.

If the thing takes bad stills, are there any good digital cameras with decent resolution for somewhere in the $50-120 range? I don't want to need to borrow friends' cameras anymore, nor do I like awkwardly holding my work in front of my MacBook Pro's camera. The cell phone takes such awful pics, I'd be embarrassed to use them in a presentation.

Please help my Flip learn to count past five

The corpse in the library — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 17:48:49 -0800

I record videos with my Flip video camera. I download the videos. The file names are VID00001.AVI, VID00002.AVI, etc. Next time I make a video on the Flip, it starts back again at VID00001.AVI. How do I get it to keep on counting up, so I don't end up with multiple files named VID0001.AVI on my computer?

Why do flip flops go flip flop?

IndigoJones — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:55:34 -0800

Why do flip flops go flip flop? As opposed to flip flip or even flop flop? I can only think that the sandal acts as a sound board and there's enough difference in every pair (to say nothing of the effect of each unique foot wedded to each sandal) that they make distinct sounds. But I have to wonder, by the law of averages would not some pairs have to be the same, thus sound the same? If one put a pair of flip flops into lab conditions and gave them fake feet with identical surface contact to each sandal and put them through their paces, would they sound the same then? Anyone ever try it? I'm guessing it would be a good high school science project for a really clever science child.

Extra points for the clip clop of horses, and even regular shoes.

A Flip that doesn't shimmy?

the_W — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 19:46:15 -0800

I'm looking for an alternative to the Flip Video that doesn't shimmy the video when I move it side to side. I just got a Flip Video and it's awesome... I love the low light and convenience factor. But when I move it side to side, or up and down, the video gets shimmy -- a straight up and down line will tilt sideways. Now, I seem to recall some article online about how with some cellphone cameras you could tilt buildings and telephone poles sideways by moving the camera sideways. Something about reading the lines one at a time from the CCD. So I know why it does it.

Problem is, I hate it. Makes me seasick. Is there any little camcorder about the same price that doesn't use that technology, but does 640x480 30fps video that does well in low light like the flip? Ideally it could record to SD or something. I don't mind if it's a little bigger as long as it fits in one hand. If there is a digital still camera in the right price range that has the right video specs I'd be interested too.

Alternatively, do you know what the technical name of the shimmy is, so I can tailor my google searches more accurately?

On preview: I read through the suggested links, and looked at some camcorder sites, and I'll give the following qualifications to my camcorder search: I'd rather not go mini-DV with tapes but will if I must, I don't give a fig about high def, or zooms, and I'm really serious about the low light quality. I mean, I took out my Canon 20D and shot a picture of my kitchen lit by a single 25 watt bulb at f2.0, ISO 1600, 1/40th of a second. I shot a video with the flip in the same lighting conditions and the video and the still picture had the same image quality! That's some serious mojo and it's the only reason I hesitate to return it. But editing action videos makes me want to barf, I get so motion sick.

flip monitor horizontally

apdato — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 15:10:11 -0800

Is there a way to flip/ mirror what my monitor displays? I'd like to flip my monitor horizontally to read text backwards. Either a program or a hardware fix with the monitor would work. People have asked this on different forums but I couldn't seem to find any solutions.

Coin flip odds?

rocket88 — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 08:47:22 -0800

Statistics question: How can I calculate the odds of flipping a coin to get x consecutive heads anywhere within a data set of y flips. (more inside) Here's the background: I was attempting to explain the phenomenon that unlikely outcomes become more likely to occur as the number of total events increases, to someone who attributes those unlikely outcomes to evidence of "unseen forces".
So my response was along the lines that if you flip a coin ten times, the odds of flipping ten heads are very slim (1023 to 1 against, I believe), but at some larger number of flips (N), the odds of having ten consecutive heads are even (1:1), and at some yet larger number of flips (M) the odds of not having ten consecutive heads is 1023 to 1 against.
1. How do I calculate N and M?, and
2. Is there a name for this phenomenon? (It's similar to the law of large numbers, but not quite)

Writing front to back then back to front

dcbarker — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 13:45:20 -0800

Is there a term for writing only on the right-hand page of notebooks then flipping the notebook over and working from back cover to front cover? I *hate* writing on the left-hand page of notebook. Maybe I have an odd pen-grip but I find the middle of the notebook seems to get in the way as a write (especially with spiral-bound notebooks!).

So I write only on the right page and once I get to the end of the notebook I close it, flip it vertically and start writing from back-cover to front-cover, again only writing on the right hand page.

Is there a term for this? Is it a popular technique and does it have any historical significance or is it actually really uncommon.

We were sold a Money Pit.

Anonymous — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 17:03:23 -0800

We got absolutely screwed by the guy who sold us our house. Can you suggest some recourse? We bought a house during the first week of August. It's a turn-of-the-century home (1911) and it's pretty. It's got some great features, like wavy windows, some enormous rooms, grand ceilings, and other old house features. The renovator put in a bunch of new stuff, mostly fixtures and lighting, but it looks nice.

As awesome as this sounds, we got screwed by the seller, and now it's time to get some recourse. We've been lied to, sold something that wasn't even nearly true, and we've run the gamut of things we can think to do. Let me fill you in on the story:

We bought this house from a guy who has a business of flipping houses and charging stupid ridiculous amounts for them. Cosmetically, his guys do pretty work - he apparently doesn't do any of it himself, and he hires crews of people who may or may not be licensed, though we were told they were. We didn't pay an exorbitant amount of money - but it was at the top of our range - and we paid this amount of money to buy a home that we thought was finished. The contract we signed was a "as is" contract, as I assume all houses are, and we are finding that not only did his guys do substandard work, but they royally screwed some things up as well. Some of the work that this guy's company did was pretty dangerous, pretty careless, and we didn't find out about it until after we'd been in the house for a few weeks.

You might ask yourself: "didn't your home inspector see this when he/she was inspecting?!" Well, much to our dismay, yes, the inspector did see it, and no, the inspector didn't tell us. I even asked the inspector, when I was having the house inspected (which the seller was present for, no less, along with myself and our real-estate agent), if he would feel comfortable me living in this house. He said, plainly, and to my face, "yes, I feel comfortable you buying this house." My wife called this inspector (who works for a small home inspection company) and asked him what the score was, as his report was inaccurate. He then proceeded to tell my wife that A) he thought the guy seemed shady just by meeting him, B) we shouldn't have bought this house, and C) he couldn't cause the seller to have to do a bunch of renovations due to a bad inspection, nor could he make the agent lose a sale. This all sounds pretty shady, especially since she was OUR agent, and we were gonna buy through her regardless. We basically paid this guy $300 for half a page of inspection report and some lies. We sold a home in Texas, and the inspection report was around 14 pages. This one was barely half a page.

This all came down when the remnants of a hurricane brought rain and wind through Oklahoma and drenched the state with over 6" of rain. Our roof essentially let several gallons of water – the entire width of our house at the addition – ruin the ceiling, walls, and other surfaces in our house. It was bad. We had a remediation expert come and give us an estimate, and it alone was over $5500 to remediate all of the wet plaster, ceiling, wall, and drywall surfaces that are damaged. This was two weeks ago – it's still raining from time to time, and the thing still leaks. We cannot unpack our stuff (we're essentially living out of the kitchen and upstairs bedroom with the majority of our stuff still filling two massive rooms on the first floor) and we can't use our furniture because when it rains, it leaks. The floor was damaged, and we've been dealing with this for a month.

The really crappy thing was that none of this damage was disclosed to us at ALL. When we looked at the house for the first time, there was a damaged part of the ceiling in the first floor addition, which, as a part of our contract was supposed to be fixed and solved as a condition of us buying the house. This obviously didn't happen. There's other cheap and dangerously-done stuff as well – for a small example, the lugs that tie our power to the city power are electrical taped instead of booted. If one of us were to grab onto one of those lugs, we'd die. This poor work and cosmetic fix stuff is present in all areas of the house.

The real bitch of this situation was that we were sold a "new" roof. The roof that this guy and his laborers put on was composition shingles over old wood shake. On one shallow part of the house, the addition, this guy put shingles on a roof with a pitch under 2 and 12 – we've since learned that no manufacturer recommends putting shingles on a surface that shallow, and the roofers have said things like "I can't believe this guy put shingles on here – only a matter of time before they either blow off or leak like a sieve." It is terrible, we were told that it was "New" and had no known problems, and roofers have estimated a new roof on all of the house between $6500 and ten grand.

We did call our home insurance agent, and we were told by the adjustor that the event that happened was a "wind event" and that the rain leakage was not directly related to wind damage. We'd only be able to get maybe a thousand bucks worth of damage fixed, which is essentially our deductible. So, we exhausted that route. We also called and met with one lawyer who told us that yes, we had a decent case, but it might take two years and $20 to 30 grand (of which we'd get most, but not all back) to get any progress. This is if he rushed.

What we want is to get this fixed. We want to get a new roof, get some of the other dangerous and damaging stuff fixed, and be done with this. How would you go about this?

We have a few ideas in mind – writing the seller a letter and giving him a week to respond, then calling the DA in our city and letting him know that someone is doing work as a company and selling it like a consumer and doing a really poor and dangerous job of such. We're also considering calling the city's permit offices and giving them a list of all of the properties this guy's company is selling (he pulled no permits on our major renovation, and he pulls no permits on any of his work). We're considering calling the local consumer advocate department of the local TV station and letting them know of this as well as protection to other buyers from this guy. My wife and I differ on some of the other post-non-communication-from-the-seller tactics, like calling INS and the city on him for hiring illegal labor (which I cannot prove, but the laborers we met do not speak English).

Can you suggest a course of action? Our ideal at this point would be to get out of this house completely, but we're pretty sure that we're not gonna get that. So we'll settle for getting the stuff that this guy's company did really poorly in the flip of this house.

Please post here, or we can take email at livinginamoneypit@gmail.com

Real estate agent for flippers?

gregoryc — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 14:29:55 -0800

Can you recommend a great real estate agent for wannabe flippers in Northern Virginia and DC? My wife and I are looking to get into the residential rehab market in Northern VA or Washington DC. Any recommendations for real estate agents specializing in NOVA and/or DC? We live in Alexandria, and would prefer to buy in there, but DC would be ok, if we can't find anything here. An agent that routinely works in both areas would be ideal. We're not too familiar w/ either area, so bonus points for suggestions on good rehab neighborhoods in either area.

Updates on tv House Flippers

Iax — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 19:43:46 -0800

Any fan sites with updates on the tv house flipping shows that are on A&E or HGTV? My mom really likes watching these shows, and she heard that there are fan sites out there that track down the MLS listings and the people involved in the house flipping, and find out what the houses really sell for, because most of the time the show doesn't even tell you if it sold.

Ive tried to find something like that, but have failed.

How do I flip my textbox?

szechuan — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 23:00:02 -0800

How can I flip text horizontally, without converting it into a picture? I've been charged with creating invites for our firm ball. I am trying to print the image and text onto transparencies, but in reverse (or mirror image), so that you will look at the shiny "non-printed" side.
Ideally, I'd like to just group my text and image, and flip horizontally. But that seems beyond the capabilities of any of the MS Office products I'm stuck using (Publisher, Powerpoint, Word...) Google seems to confirm that you need to convert the text box into an image to flip it horizontally, which results in a degradation of quality, and the inability to mailmerge the names on the invites (preferred, but not compulsory).

Anyone think of a way around this? I don't have access to Photoshop on our standard office machines, but could probably arrange it if that's easiest. Or is there some simpler way I'm missing to print in reverse?

I figure there must be t-shirt printing Mefites out there who know how!

Actionscript Problem on how to flip a movie clip

spooksie — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 02:50:35 -0800

Flash Actionscript Problem. _rotation rotates a movie clip how do flip a movie clip (as in mirror image). I have tried _flip, _mirror and looked all over but cannot find the correct syntax. Cheers if you can help

Is there a way to flip the contents of a DVD window in Windows XP to create a constantly playing mirror image?

realityblurred — Sat, 10 Jul 2004 13:11:11 -0800

Is there a way to horizontally flip the contents of a window in Windows XP (or, specifically, in PowerDVD or a program that plays DVDs) to create a mirror image of that entire window's contents? Any type of solution would be welcome, except for facing the monitor towards an actual mirror. I'm playing an instructional dance DVD, and I need to watch the mirror image.