Friday, April 13, 2012

BlueHarbor Auto Refinance Ripoff

Do not waste your time trying to refinance through BlueHarbor Auto.  You'll give them all your information and they will secure you a good rate and then tell you about all the "fees" involved in completing the loan.  $199 financing fee.  Ok, everyone charges those.  $87.50 re-titling fee.  HUH?  Oh and btw, you have to sign up for our extended service contract on the vehicle.  At this point I told them I was no longer interested in their services.  I found this company on Bankrate.com.  I really do not think that Bankrate knows that this company is trying to rip people off to save a few points on a loan.  I'm going to be contacting them.  If they don't do anything about it I'd say it's safe to assume that Bankrate has gone down the tubes.

EDIT:

I guess one good thing came out of this situation.  I discovered Pentagon Federal Credit Union.  They had better rates than the above mentioned and their customer service is incredibly helpful and courteous.  Also, the entire application for membership ($5) and the loan (free) are handled online.  After a couple days my loan (refinance) was approved and I had the pay-off check for the current lender.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

AR.Drone 2.0

I received my AR.Drone 2.0 the other day and had a chance to play around with it a bit.  The biggest problem I see with the device is the horrible battery life and they have not released AR.Free Flight 2.0 for Android devices yet.  AR.Free Flight 1.9 does work fine with the AR.Drone 2.0 but there is no video support and FF 1.9 doesn't support the 2.0 feature of using the "Absolute Control" mode.  If you use the accelerometer with 1.9 you must keep the camera pointing forward to have the drone respond intuitively.  For now I'm just using it in 2 stick mode.  Here are some pictures of the un-boxing.








Here is a video of my second flight with the device.  It isn't very long because I'd already played with it a bit and the battery was nearly dead:


If you have any questions let me know.

Additional close up photos of the battery:










Added another short video of flying the AR.Drone 2.0 with AR. Free Flight 2.0 on a borrowed iPhone.  I used Absolute Control which is awesome.