Okay, so as you may already know I’m a big fan of any software solution that does what I need in a portable and platform agnostic way, particularly if it does it “in the cloud“.

What you may not know, is that I’m addicted to Twitter and I’ve been going through desktop based Twitter clients faster than my Cadillac beer bongs fuel!  My affair with desktop clients started with TweetDeck, since it’s used by a lot of my friends on Twitter and it seemed to be a front runner.  The problem is that it’s in beta, and it’s a bit buggy still.  Worse yet, it doesn’t run on my linux box.  In fact, no decent Twitter client does work on my linux box.  I’ve also tried Twhirl, and DestroyTwitter.  Both of which lack all the features TweetDeck has, and none of which work “quite right” on my linux box.

And, as if to add insult to injury the company I work for has recently been acquired by a MUCH bigger company which is imposing a lot of new restrictions to the use of our desktop computers.  Meaning I’ll likely not be able to install a Twitter desktop app on my computer in about a month.

Enter TwitterGadget, pictured above.  It’s an iGoogle gadget so it runs in my browser, on windows or linux, without installing!  And it’s quite featureful too! It has built in URL shortening which is one of the features I miss most from other desktop apps.  The one feature I hope to be included soon is TweetShrink integration, but I’ll live without it.

Hopefully I won’t have to change Twitter clients for a while now! 

Well, I’m not exactly what you’d call an early adopter, and I’ve only recently rediscovered a place in my heart for Apple based computing devices.

That said, there was a lot of internal debate an struggle when it came time for me to upgrade from my Cingular 8525 HTC/Phone/PDA device. Initially, I was convinced that I wanted the newest HTC the Fuze, since it was a logical upgrade from what I had. But there was just soooo much hype about the iPhone, I had to give it a fair shake. Fortunately, my sister and brother-in-law each got one a few weeks before my wife and I were due to upgrade. I got a real good chance to check them out. After seeing the HUGE amount of apps, and overall support that existed for them, the choice was easy. Sign me up, I’m a lemming..

I’ve had my iPhone for two and a half weeks, and I’ve made a lot of changes, tweaked a lot of configuration, and jailbroke the device. The rest of this post will serve to document that for my own sake should I ever have to recover the device, but also to hopefully shed some light on why you might jailbreak your phone, and what apps a techie like me finds useful.

Read more after the break…

Freedom for your phone.

Jailbreaking was a topic I couldn’t find a satisfying answer to when I started researching it.  I knew that it would give me a greater degree of control over the device, that it would allow me to install software that wasn’t offically endorsed by Apple, and that it would give me access to the innards of the device… Metaphorically speaking.  I also knew that I’d feel weak if I didn’t do it.  But that aside I couldn’t think of a compelling reason to do it, nor did I see any "killer app" that would persuade me to jailbreak if I hadn’t already made the choice based on my status in the geek community.

That said, I won’t presume to know why jailbreaking your phone appeals to you.  Instead I’m going to very thoroughly outline what jailbreaking my phone accomplished for me.

SSH The "killer app"

Apps from Cydia: OpenSSH & Insomnia

My primary computer at home runs Gentoo Linux.  Now I do dual boot to Vista because there is stuff that I have to run windows for (iTunes to sync the phone namely), but I rarely fire her up and choose the Vista option.  That said, the ability to connect to my iPhone, over WiFi using SSH is the killer app for me.  I can access the entire file structure, transfer files to and from the device, and all sorts of other good stuff.

I’m using this SSH connection to sync my iPhone’s music library with Amarok.  Now this isn’t a totally seamless proposal.  The first step is to mount your iPhone’s file system as a directory on your linux box.  You can see a fairly good outline of that here.  Then, you also have to tweak a file to tell your iPhone that the library Amarok uploaded uses a previous version of the iTunes database.  You can read about this in Amarok’s on Wiki under the Devices with Firmware 2.x section of Media Devices.  Still very cool.

The Insomnia app simply makes the phone not go to sleep after a period of inactivity.  It’ll still shut the screen off to save power, but it keeps the WiFi powered up, and SSHD running.  This allows me to stay connected via SSH without diddling the screen or something to keep my connection alive.

Sync your calendar and contacts

 Apps from Cydia: NemusSync

You may know that I use GooSync to keep up my contacts and appointments on my calendar.  The AppStore has a few apps from Synthesis AG that’ll use SyncML to sync your contacts, todo list, and calendar with your iPhone.  With that said, the calendar part does not sync with your iPhones built in calendar.  Instead it maintains it’s own calendar and syncs all your appointments to that.

That’s fine and all, and I still use their app to sync my contacts, but I wasn’t too keen on the limitation of syncing my calendar.  Enter NemusSync it properly communicates with the built in calendar.  There are limitations of course.  For instance, all it does is sync the calendar, though the author has plans to sync todo items, and contacts in a future version.  More vexing however is that it is a manual sync.  You have to go into the app, and click a button to sync up.  I’ve actually worked out a solution for that, but that’s for another article.

Springboard customization and organization

Apps from Cydia: BossPrefs, Categories, Five Icon Dock, iBlank, QuickGold, WeatherIcon

Once you start adding a bunch of apps to your iPhone it can get cluttered in a hurry.  The screen which contains all the icons for your apps has been dubbed the "Springboard" by Apple, and the list of apps above all contribute in one way or another to keeping it clutter free.

Five Icon Dock

This should be fairly self explanatory, but it’s pretty handy.  It allows you to squeeze 5 icons down in the dock instead of just 4.

BossPrefs

BossPrefs, aside from having a lot of great functionality has a Hide Icon functionality that’s quite handy.  It’ll make any icon on your springboard disappear!  Now this is only really useful in combination with something that allows you to still access that app.  That’s where Categories, and QuickGold come in.  Read on to see how!

Categories

Categories allows you to have folders on your springboard.  Once you’ve selected one of these folders, you’ll be presented with a whole new screen with the apps that are in that category presented.  I’ll admit that I had some trouble with this app, and I don’t use it a ton.  But it does help to de-clutter the Springboard in a major way

QuickGold

QuickGold is quite possibly the most used application on my whole phone.  It does what the Google app for iPhone does, and more.  Basically, when you’re on the first page of your springboard and you press the home button, a search function pops up.  As you type, it searches and presents all sorts of stuff that matches the search.  Applications, contacts, web bookmarks, SMS conversations, web clips, safari history, and more.  You can configure what items get searched, and it holds the last 6 recently launched apps in a queue for you to easily click on without searching.

Primarily, I use this to get to apps which I’ve hidden, or buried too deep with Categories.  Needless to say, a SUPER useful app.

iBlank

iBlank creates a transparent icon on your springboard which you can use to make a custom layout if you want.  To be honest, I thought this was cool when I loaded it, but haven’t really used it since the first couple days I had the phone, and I’ve deleted most of the blank icons I’d created.

WeatherIcon

Are you sick of seeing sunny, and 72 degrees when you look at the weather icon?  This simple app replaces that icon with your actual weather conditions, as configured in the weather app.  Extraordinarily simple little customization, and something that Apple should have done to begin with.

Utilities Apple Forgot

Apps from Cydia: Backgrounder, Clippy, Docs, iRealSMS, LockCalendar, Notifier, Safari Download Plug-In

Backgrounder is AWESOME!  Got some app you want to run in the background while you do something else?  Backgrounder does that.  The main thing I use it for is Pandora.  I get to listen to my Pandora radio station while I do other stuff on the phone, like play games or text!

Clippy is the clipboard that Apple forgot, and is purportedly working on for a future update.  There is another solution called hClipboard which is evidently quite good as well, but I found and installed clippy first and it’s met all my needs.

Docs..  Pretty simple, it allows you to open all sorts of document types including Microsoft Word and PDF’s.  Can’t live without it!

iRealSMS is one of the very few apps I’ve paid for, and I think it’s TOTALLY worth every penny.  It’s a replacement SMS app that adds several cool features, and most importantly for me a landscape keyboard.  They have a trial period, I encourage you to check it out.

LockCalendar allows you to see your upcoming appointments superimposed over the lock screen.  Very handy to be able to see your schedule at a glance this way.

Notifier shows missed calls, new emails, new SMS messages, and other useful bits up in your status bar just next to the battery.  I find it very handy.

Safari Download Plug-In.  Speaks for itself, allows you to download files with Safari.  Sweet. 

Total visual customization

Apps from Cydia: WinterBoard, WbApp

Some of the items I’ve talked about before require Winterboard.  Winterboard in short is the total UI customization tool for the iPhone.  It allows you to change your icons, fonts, wallpapers, colors…  Pretty much everything about how the UI is drawn can be tweaked with Winterboard.

There are several total customization themes you can download through Cydia, or pieces you can change.  Right now, I’ve hidden all of the labels for my apps on the spring board, made my status bar and dock transparent, and changed my lock screen slider to a can of Mt. Dew.  This is just scratching the surface of what you can do with Winterboard.

WbApp provides some configuration tools for Winterboard, quite handy for themes that support it.

Okay, I think that’s enough for now.  Obviously there is a lot you can do with a jailbroken iPhone and this isn’t an exhaustive list of even the stuff I have loaded, but it should give you a good feel for why you might want to make the leap to jailbreak your phone.  I know I’m glad I did. 

When I performed my search for the perfect photo sharing solution, I fell in love with the Picasa desktop application. I even discovered that there is a linux version. However, as you’d likely expect, it didn’t really play nice as far as uploading photos to any photo sharing site other than Google’s Picasa Web Albums.

On windows, there is a great solution called picasa2flickr which passes the desired photo’s to the windows Flickr Uploader. Again, for obvious reasons, this doesn’t work well on linux.

So, having determined that it wasn’t worth my time to pursue trying to get Flickr uploads working from Picasa on Linux, I started evaluating many of the other native options on linux, such as digikam and fspot. While these more easily uploaded to Flickr, and had open API’s, none of them worked quite the way I wanted, so I abandoned my search for a good solution.

Then, on a whim I did a Google search just a couple hours after Andy O’Neill made a blog post about a button he wrote to import photos to Flickr from the Linux version of Picasa, named picflick.

I eagerly (re)installed Picasa3 on my Gentoo box using a beta ebuild found here. Then installed his button.

After playing with it for a bit, I realized a few things didn’t quite jive for me.

1) The script automatically resizes the image before uploading it to Flickr. I prefer to upload all of my images at their original resolution, so this was a bit of a road block for me.

2) The script used a Perl module to upload to Flickr. For the life of me, I couldn’t seem to figure out how to get it authorized with my Flickr account to actually permit uploads. I’m sure if I spent a bit more time and read a few more manuals I could have gotten it right, but it didn’t quite work “out-of-the-box” for me.

3) I’d prefer to see the progress being made, rather than the beeps and tray notifications that Andy’s script provided.

So, I stole the key part of his script, the part which translates Windows paths to *nix ones, and broke down the rest to simply pass the photos on to my preferred linux Flickr uploader, KFlickr

Here’s the contents of my script, including the win2native function written by Andy.

#!/bin/bash
DEBUG=1     # debug to $LOG
LOG=/tmp/picflick.log
PICASA_WINE_DIR="$HOME/.google\/picasa\/3.0\/drive_c"  # Relative to $HOME
PICASA_WINE_DIR_NATIVE=`echo $PICASA_WINE_DIR |sed 's|\\\\||g'`
function debug() {
        if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then
                echo "$*" >> $LOG
        fi
}
# wine2native(): convert wine filename to native linux filenames
# Arguments: _name_ of variable which holds path
# Example: wine2native file  # not wine2native $file
function wine2native() {
        VAR=$1
        eval "VAL=\$$1"
        debug "Wine path: $VAL"
        # use '|' to delimit the paths
        VAL=`echo "$VAL" | \
                sed "s|C:|$PICASA_WINE_DIR|" | \
                sed 's|\\\\|/|g'`
        debug "Source file: $VAL"
        eval "$VAR=\$VAL"
}
# check we have the required dependencies
which kflickr > /dev/null || die "You need to install kflickr"
file=$1
wine2native file
DIR=`dirname "$file"`
EXT=${file##*.}
debug "START_UPLOAD"
for file in "$@"; do
        wine2native file
        KFLICKR="$KFLICKR $file"
done
debug "Launching kflickr with the following args $KFLICKR"
kflickr $KFLICKR
debug "Done"

Now when I click the “Flickr” button in Picasa, it brings up the KFlickr app with all the pictures I selected ready to upload. Thanks for the inspiration, and code bits to make this work Andy, I was too lazy to actually figure out what was necessary to pull the image paths from Picasa and use them.

Time for the second installment of my worklog for my PC Upgrade.

Well, I actually received all the bits from UPS Monday (is it Thursday already? sheesh). I actually assembled the thing Monday afternoon/evening, and have been slowly installing software and getting it up to speed.

For the curious, and so I can brag a bit heres the parts list.

• FSP Group SAGA+ 450R 450W ATX12V Power Supply
• COOLER MASTER Centurion 534 RC-534-KKN2-GP Black Aluminum & Mesh bezel / SECC Chassis ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
• Intel BOXDP35DPM LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard – Retail
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz 2 x 4MB L2 Cache LGA 775 Quad-Core Processor
• 4 x 2GB = 8GB Kingston 2GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
• EVGA 512-P3-N954-TR GeForce 9500 GT 512MB
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS 500GB 7200 RPM

Now, this isn’t quite bleeding edge stuff but it certainly brings me up to date and I’m quite happy. Because I wanted just a ROCK SOLID setup and wasn’t intending to overclock, I went with an Intel motherboard. I didn’t want to regret not getting enough memory, so I maxxed it out with 8GB. I don’t really game so the video card is nothing special, but I did want enough horsepower to drive my big monitor and take advantage of Vista’s Aero theme and some of the cool linux eye candy that’s in KDE4 etc. I am NOT disappointed!

So far I’ve gotten Gentoo linux installed on the system. The speed of compiling is admirable though not mind blowing. One of the first things I installed though was Cinelerra and I loaded up some of my HDV source material. While I should have expected as much I was able to play, edit, and render the HD in realtime! WOO HOO!

I’m quite impressed with Gentoo, no hardware headaches, everything more-or-less worked out of the box. I haven’t quite got all my favorite apps installed and running but I trust it will be uneventful.

I’m in the process of moving my drives/data over from my old system. I had a software RAID1 setup using mdadm which I’ve been able to bring back up on the new box. Going to play with a RAID5 since I now have enough disks, and maybe simulate a failure to test recovery. This should get my confidence up for building a linux software based RAID5 NAS box which is the next project.

Not long ago I shared my bash script for creating thumbnails and manageable sized “big” images for an image gallery, or other image store. Well, today I had to update an existing gallery with a pretty significant number of new images. It occurred to me that I’d like to only convert new images rather than re-converting the whole lot. Then, I’d like to simply upload the new files to my server in some automated way.

So here’s the tools to do it. It assumes you have the same layout for your pictures on your local drive as I do, which is as follows.

• RootDirectoryForGallery — This contains the full resolution pictures directly from your camera, and the following directories.
  • web — This is a sub directory of RootDirectoryForGallery which contains the “big” web version of your image, and the thumbnails directory described below.
    • thumbnails — This is a sub directory of web, and contains the thumbnail sized versions of the images.

The first step, is to copy your new pictures from the digital camera to your RootDirectoryForGallery. Then, we want to get a list of the files that are new, so we run the following from the RootDirectoryForGallery.

diff . web/ | grep 'Only in \.: d' | awk '{print $4}' | grep jpg >> 3-6-08_update.diff

This creates a file in the RootDirectoryForGallery named “3-6-08_update.diff” which contains a list of only the new pictures, one per line. Now, we want to use our image thumbnail script to convert only the new images to the “big” and thumbnail sized images. I discovered that I needed to make a change to my script in order to do this. Namely in the for loop I needed to enclose the command used to list files in “$()”. The modified script is shown below. Notice the “$($SEARCH)” where there was previously just “$SEARCH”.

#!/bin/bash
SEARCH=$1
SIZE=$2
DEST=$3
if [ $# -lt 3 ]
then
echo "You must pass three arguments 1) The search string (usually *.jpg) 2) The destination size I.E. 500x374 3) The destination directory"
exit 1
fi
for i in $($SEARCH)
do
        echo "Converting $i"
        convert -resize $SIZE $i -resize $SIZE +profile '*' $DEST$i
done

So with our edited script we convert the files.

/opt/imagethumbnail.sh "cat 3-6-08_update.diff" "800x600" "web/"
/opt/imagethumbnail.sh "cat 3-6-08_update.diff" "150×112 "web/_thb_"

Lastly, we want to upload just the changed files to our server. We’ll use rsync for this. The paths, server name, and user name have been changed to protect the innocent.

rsync -e ssh -av /path/to/local/copy/ yourusername@yourserver.com:/path/to/www/server/copy/

And there you have it, with just a few simple commands you’ve created thumbnails of all of your images, and uploaded just the new ones to your server. Easy!

I have often wished that I could easily convert several images to a smaller size simultaneously. This is useful for batch resizing images for thumbnails, galleries, or use on the web.

On a linux system with imageMagick installed, you can use the script at the end of this post to batch convert the images.

I use it to create thumbnails and scaled images for my online photo gallery using the following commands.
./imagethumbnail.sh “*.jpg” “800×600″ “web/”

./imagethumbnail.sh “*.jpg” “150×112″ “web/_thb_”

This creates a reasonable sized “large” image at 800×600 and a thumbnail at 150×112. Makes managing new images in my gallery much easier. Hopefully you’ll find it useful too.

Contents of imagethumbnail.sh

#!/bin/bash
SEARCH=$1
SIZE=$2
DEST=$3
if [ $# -lt 3 ]
then
echo "You must pass three arguments 1) The search string (usually *.jpg) 2) The destination size I.E. 500x374 3) The destination directory"
exit 1
fi
for i in $SEARCH
do
echo "Converting $i"
convert -resize $SIZE $i -resize $SIZE +profile '*' $DEST$i
done