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Bypass Sprint - Download PhoneCam Pics To Your PC

I recently had to obtain another cell phone after losing the one I had for years while on a business trip.

For a variety of reasons, like the two $150 rebates I had earned for keeping my previous phones for more than two years, and the $30 mail-in rebates, I chose Sprint's offering of the Samsung SPH-A640 camera phone.

In one fell swoop, I could replace my phone and my wife's ancient phone, basically for free, with a sleek, black flip model, that has a camera to boot.

I specifically asked the salesman if there were any charges related to using the camera, and he said no, as long as we didn't email pictures to anyone.

Once home, like any technophile worth his salt, I immediately began to mess with the phone and, in an unusual move, decided to pore through the phone's user manual.

After about a half-hour, I realized that other than emailing pictures or uploading pictures using Sprint's pay-per-month service, there was no other way to get pictures off of the phone.

Naturally I stormed back to the Sprint store to complain, and when I confronted the salesman about there being no way to download pictures to my PC, his reply was "You didn't ask about that."

"No", I said, "much the same way I don't ask if a car I'm buying comes with a steering wheel."

Anyway, I decided to keep the phone and after about an hour of searching, uncovered all the information I needed to not only download the pictures I take to my PC, but much more as well.

Here's a zip file with everything you'll need... drivers, Bitpim software, utility programs, and a link for purchasing the data cable required too. Pay particular attention to the two webpages included. They pretty much give you step-by-step instructions.

Three cheers for the internet!!!

Four thumbs down for Sprint!!!

Blosxom Plugin xautopost

O.k... I know that autoposting has gotten a lot of bad press lately... the term "splog" comes to mind, but let's face it... there usually aren't enough hours in the day for us to post to our blogs EVERY day.

So... to help time constrained Blosxom bloggers everywhere, I put together this cool little plugin.

Configure it up as per the documentation, and lo-and-behold, at least once per week you'll have a flurry of new posts that you can even add your own comments to.

Enjoy.

Amazing Perl output capturing `sniplet`

Here's a terrific little chunk of code I found while searching for a way to capture some output from a Perl script, the output of which was being used in a Server-Side-Include.

I wanted the ability to use the same script, capture the output into a variable, then "escape" the output for use as a javascript feed.

It works like a charm. All output going to STDOUT is captured into a variable without requiring any modification to your original subroutine.

You're then able to do some work on it before PRINTing it to the restored STDOUT.
Try it for yourself.

Help For The Chromatically Challenged

Here are three of my favorite color work programs.

1) Pixel Toolbox:

This gem allows you to build one of those cool "favicon.ico" icons that you see in front of the url for the site you're visiting (like this one), in the location window of your browser.

2) LittleRGB:

Pick colors (or blend your own) and get the RGB values and even the HTML hex code for pasting into your web pages.

3) ColorDetector:

This one's my favorite. Fire it up and you instantly get the RGB and HTML hex codes for any color under your mouse pointer. Works with any application, even websites currently in your browser (allowing you to copy a favorite color scheme exactly).