Category: Technology

Connor was urging me to open the front door this morning so he could look outside. What do ya know? It’s snowing. And just three days ago it was 70 degrees here. Amy was dressed first so she got Connor together and took him outside for his first walk in the snowflakes. She couldn’t find our digital camera so she got his pic with the camera on her phone. I’m pretty impressed with the quality of the images we can download off the Audiovox 8910‘s.

Camera phones are a must have with kids. It makes it so easy to collect pics that our parents missed (or never got developed). Later this afternoon I’m going to burn our entire photo directory to CD and back up the mySQL database running this blog to an excel file or something I can import later if necessary.

Alltel wants $3.95 a month plus charges against monthly minutes to “send” photos taken with my 8910 to my email account or a URL. – Ya, count on that. I downloaded this photo of Connor from my phone straight to my PC.

It came to my attention that the Audiovox 8900 is not the easiest phone to work with in terms of getting pictures off of using a USB cable. Neither BitPim or Brewsky support the firmware. Luckily I learned that the 8910 is not an upgrade from the 8900 – it’s a firmware upgrade from the Audiovox 8600 series. BitPim does work. Here’s how:

1. Acquire a USB cable for the 8910 off ebay with the Curital drivers (no need to pay more than $12.00).

2. When the cable arrives load the CDM8900 drivers contained on the driver CD BEFORE PLUGING IN THE PHONE. This process will load three different drivers and then assign your phone to Serial COM Port 4 when it’s plugged in.

3. Download and install the latest version of BitPim.

4. During the installation it will ask you to specify connection settings. First specify a download path to your local system. For “Phone Type” use LG-VX6000. For the COM Port use “COM4”.

5. Next go to “View” and “Filesystem” or click on the “Filesystem” tab. Then click under the “+” under “Name”. If you’re sucessfully connected you should see the directory structure of the phone similar to the one below. The next part is what confused me – where are the fr#@kin’ photos?!!

6. The image below shows the path to the photos in the “brew” directory. They are not in the camera directory as you might think. Just right click on one of the .jpeg files and select download.

Be careful messing around in the file system of any phone. There are very many stories on the web where people have fried their firmware for good. Your provider will give you a hard time about this if they realize what you were doing at the time the phone died. Use this information at your own risk.

…and left him all kinds of new things for us to fall over and trip on. But it’s cool because he loves his new John Deer 4-wheeler, even if he can only drive it backwards. Daddy pushes it forwards. Amy got a new camera phone on “the family plan” so it will actually save a lot of money. She also got plenty of other stuff she wasn’t expecting including a shopping trip to Aldos.

The best gift I got came from my dad (as usual). It’s my new Magellan Meridian Gold hand held GPS. More Geocaches are on the way to being discovered. I’ve got to come up with a cool theme of items to leave at the caches I find next year. I think I’ll post more about xmas later but right now I’ve got to go eat chicken wings.

Since several people have been asking I’m also going to work on the photos section of the site tonight or tomorrow so all the pics on my server can be viewed from one page.

Today I created a Livejournal page. My intention was to setup a Livejournal RSS feed for this site. I stopped when I realized it would cost me $5.00 every two months for syndication privileges. That sounds like nothing but I’m weary considering how many recurring technology fees I already pay.