Posted by Tom Moertel
Fri, 02 Nov 2007 19:32:00 GMT
I recently got a Palm Centro smartphone, and so far I love it. Like
most modern cell phones, it has a built-in camera and takes decent
snapshots and even records short movies. It’s great for
spur-of-the-moment shots when I don’t have my real camera. The
trick – and there’s always a trick when it comes to cell phones – is getting
the photos off the camera and onto my computer.
To get at my pictures, Sprint would prefer that I sign up for their
ludicrously expensive “PictureMail” service. Leave it to weasely
telecom execs to come up with another way to squeeze money from
teenagers: charge them $5 each month for the “privilege” of sharing
their pictures with friends. This fee, of course, is in addition to the
fee for “unlimited” mobile Internet use. I guess picture bits are
somehow more expensive to move over the air than other kinds of bits.
In any case, my next goal after
getting my Centro to hotsync with my Linux
workstation was to figure out how
to download my photos and movies.
After a bit of hacking, I figured out that the Centro stores images in
a typical digital-camera-image (DCIM) hierarchy. For
example, I have a 4-GB microSD card installed in my Centro, and I
store my photos in the “Palm” album on it. This album ends up stored
in the /DCIM/Palm directory on the card.
Using the pilot-xfer program
from the pilot-link project, I was able
to find the directory and its contents. The trick was to use the
sparsely documented –D flag to work with the Centro’s virtual
filesystem. Here, for example, is how I list the contents of the Palm album:
$ pilot-xfer -p usb: -D /DCIM/Palm -l
Listening for incoming connection on usb:... connected!
Directory of /DCIM/Palm...
652 Fri Nov 2 08:17:06 2007 Album.db
292053 Fri Nov 2 09:04:20 2007 Photo_110207_001.jpg
78493 Fri Nov 2 08:17:06 2007 Video_110207_001.3g2
20 Wed Oct 31 12:09:20 2007 Thumbnail.db
Thank you for using pilot-link.
Here, you can see that I have one photo and one movie in the album.
(Movies are stored in .3g2 files that contain MPEG4 video.)
To download the files, I again turned to pilot-xfer, this time using the
–f (fetch) flag to fetch a list of files.
Here, for example, I’ll fetch the image from the listing above:
$ pilot-xfer -p usb: -D /DCIM/Palm -f Photo_110207_001.jpg
Listening for incoming connection on usb:... connected!
Fetching '/DCIM/Palm' ... (292053 bytes) 285 KiB total.
Thank you for using pilot-link.
So that’s the process. It’s kind of clunky, so I wrote a small Python
program to automate it. (I’m learning Python. If you’re a Pythonista, please
consider critiquing my code. I would be especially thankful if you
could point out any helpful idioms that I may have overlooked.)
Here’s how to use the program:
$ get-pilot-photos.py --help
Usage: get-pilot-photos.py [options]
Options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-s SRCDIR, --srcdir=SRCDIR
VFS dir on Palm device from which to fetch images
-d DESTDIR, --destdir=DESTDIR
Where to save the images on your computer
Both the —srcdir and —dstdir options are optional. If you
omit the first, the program will download photos and movies from the
/DCIM/Palm album. If you omit the second, the program will save the
downloads to a new, timestamped directory within your home directory.
That’s it. The code is below.
Read more...
Posted in hacks
Tags centro, download, hotsync, images, movies, palm, python
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Wed, 11 Jul 2007 17:49:00 GMT
Sam at rephase.net has harnessed the earth-shattering power of the IMDb movie-rating decoder ring to create a Greasmonkey script that annotates IMDb-listed movies with their percentile ranks. Now you don’t need to look up a movie’s “star rating” in the decoder ring to see where the movie ranks; the ranking appears right on the movie’s IMDb page.
Do check out the script itself to see how Sam cleverly embeds a copy of the decoder ring and plucks scores from it as needed.
For more on the IMDb movie-rating decoder ring, see:
Posted in hacks
Tags greasmonkey, imdb, statistics
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Wed, 09 Aug 2006 22:25:00 GMT
Here’s quick patch I made to my Typo 4.0
installation to add Reddit and
del.icio.us buttons to articles. Now one click
is all it takes to submit an article to either site. (These buttons
appear on my blog at the end of each article.)
If you want to apply the patch, be sure to also place copies of the
button images into public/images. You can snag the
images from my site or from the Reddit and del.icio.us sites.
Here’s the patch:
--- typo.orig/app/helpers/articles_helper.rb 2006-07-24 11:04:27.000000000 -0400
+++ typo/app/helpers/articles_helper.rb 2006-08-09 17:06:51.000000000 -0400
@@ -73,7 +74,26 @@
code << tag_links(article) unless article.tags.empty?
code << comments_link(article) if article.allow_comments?
code << trackbacks_link(article) if article.allow_pings?
- end.join(" <strong>|</strong> ")
+ code << submit_this_article_links(article)
+ end.join(" | ")
+ end
+
+ def submit_this_article_links(article)
+ u_url = u(url_of(article, false))
+ u_title = u(article.title)
+ [ # move me into a database table
+ [ "Submit to Reddit.com",
+ "http://reddit.com/submit?url=<URL>&title=<TITLE>",
+ image_tag("reddit.gif", :size => "18x18", :border => 0)
+ ],
+ [ "Save to del.icio.us",
+ "http://del.icio.us/post?v=2&url=<URL>&title=<TITLE>",
+ image_tag("delicious.gif", :size => "16x16", :border => 0)
+ ]
+ ].map do |submit_title, submit_url, image_tag|
+ submit_url = submit_url.gsub(/<URL>/, u_url).gsub(/<TITLE>/, u_title)
+ %(<a href="#{h submit_url}" title="#{h submit_title}: “#{h article.title}”">#{image_tag}</a>)
+ end.join(" ")
end
def category_links(article)
The code is begging for a little refactoring love, but I’m off for vacation
in about twenty minutes, so it will have to wait.
Posted in site news, typo, hacks
Tags delicous, reddit, typo
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Fri, 17 Feb 2006 07:23:00 GMT
Tonight while building a new workstation, I needed to update the BIOS
on the motherboard, a Tyan Tomcat
K8E. Tyan, however,
offers only floppy-based BIOS flashing software to do the job. Worse,
the software requires me to boot into DOS first, using a DOS boot
floppy that is neither provided nor lying around the office (I’m
a Linux guy).
One more thing: it turns out that my new floppy drive is junk.
Thus we arrive at tonight’s problem: If you do not have a floppy drive, how can you flash a motherboard’s BIOS when its manufacturer provides only a DOS-floppy-based BIOS flasher?
Fortunately, the problem can be solved. In case you ever need
the solution, here it is.
Disclaimer: This recipe worked fine for me, but might not for you. If you follow these instructions, you do so at your own risk and assume all responsibility for whatever happens, even if your computer catches on fire or your pants explode. You have been warned.
First, download a bootable floppy image from the FreeDOS
Project. The one you want is the 2.88-MB
ODIN image because it has
about 1.5 MB of free space, enough to hold the contents of the BIOS
flasher’s floppy.
Second, mount the floppy image so that you can edit it:
mkdir /tmp/image
mount -o loop /path/to/odin2880.img /tmp/image
Third, copy the BIOS flasher and associated files into the mounted
floppy image. I just unziped Tyan’s archive directly into
the image:
unzip /tmp/tyan_2865_301.zip -d /tmp/image
Fourth, unmount the image.
umount -d /tmp/image
Fifth, create a bootable CD-ROM from the floppy image.
cd /tmp
mkdir boot_cd
mv /path/to/odin2880.img boot_cd
mkisofs -o odin-cdrom.img -b odin2880.img -c boot.catalog boot_cd
cdrecord -v -eject odin-cdrom.img
Finally, reboot your PC using the CD-ROM and flash away! (Note: If FreeDOS asks, you don’t want to use extended memory or anything like that because BIOS flashers don’t like it. You want old 8086-style
unprotected memory.)
Posted in hardware, hacks
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Fri, 20 Feb 2004 17:00:00 GMT
I like to listen to NPR, but I often miss interesting shows. So I decided to make a VCR for radio. That way I can record shows and listen to them at my leisure.
I started by taking an old radio and connecting its headphone output to one of my server’s audio-in jacks w/ a 6-foot 1/8” Stereo plug to 1/8” Stereo plug Cord from Radio Shack. Then I installed the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture on the server because it has better support for the server’s built-in audio chip (CS4236B).
Playing around for a while, I managed to get decent recordings to WAV format. Since WAVs are rather large (about 200 MB/hr at the settings I was using) I tried re-encoding the recordings as Ogg Vorbis in various bitrates, but ultimately settled on Speex, which is much better at compressing speech. Final file sizes are about 10 MB/hr, which is fine considering my hard-drive space.
Next, I wrote a small shell script to record a show, compress it, and store it in a library:
#!/bin/bash
# Simple script to record a radio show and save as a Speex-encoded file
# Tom Moertel <tom@moertel.com>
# 20 Feb 2004
#
# Usage: record-show <show-name> <show-duration-in-seconds>
#
# Recordings are saved in the following directory structure:
#
# ~/recordings/<show-name>/2004/02/<show-name>--2004-02-19--Thu--2359.spx
#
# Directories are created as needed.
# Check arguments.
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
echo 'Usage: record-show show-name show-duration-in-seconds'
exit 1;
fi
# Set up definitions for use later
show_base="$HOME/recordings"
show="${1:-recording}"
duration="${2:-3600}"
year=$(date +%Y)
month=$(date +%m)
now="$(date +%F--%a--%H%M)"
showdir="$show_base/$show/$year/$month"
showfile="$showdir/$show--$now.spx"
# Make directory to contain the show recording (if necessary)
mkdir -p "$showdir" >&/dev/null
# Record the show and exit with the exit status of speexenc
arecord -q -d $duration -c2 -r16000 -f S16_LE |
speexenc --vbr --vad --dtx - "$showfile" >&/dev/null
exit $?
Finally, I programmed my “Radio VCR” to record any potentially interesting shows that are broadcast by my local NPR affiliate. This was simple using my script above and the following crontab:
00 06 * * 1-5 record-show morning-edition 3600
00 12 * * 1-5 record-show day-to-day 3600
00 15 * * 1-5 record-show fresh-air 3600
00 17 * * 1-5,6-7 record-show all-things-considered 3600
30 18 * * 1-5 record-show marketplace 1800
00 08 * * 6-7 record-show weekend-edition 3600
00 10 * * 6 record-show car-talk 3600
00 10 * * 7 record-show studio-360 3600
00 11 * * 6 record-show whad-ya-know 7190
00 13 * * 6 record-show wait-wait-dont-tell-me 3600
00 15 * * 7 record-show this-american-life 3600
00 16 * * 7 record-show splendid-table 3600
All in all, this has turned out to be a great hack – simple, fun, and useful.
Posted in hacks
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