PalmHeads hacking exploits

Over the last couple of years while using Linux, I've slowly become better at what could loosely be described as "hacking".

Now DON'T PANIC! - don't get me wrong - I'm not some Linux guru who can cut perl code with my toes blindfolded...just somebody who sometimes at a very low level likes taking someone else's code & modifying it for my own needs. Sometimes I might even improve on the original! *cough*.

I mainly focus on stuff that is Palm related, mainly trying to integrate some of the command line tools available for Linux->Palm connectivity with some well known Linux applications.

Here are my (meagre) hacks:

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and the famous

HHGTTG & Douglas Adams at his best! Very sage advice!

Casio Exilim EX-M20U 2MP Digital Camera and MP3 player with Linux

I'm one of those people who has never been a great picture taker. Never owned a camera of my own before. Went overseas on a contiki trip through Western Europe and borrowed a mates camera. Thats the sort of picture taker I am!

Lately though I kinda missed having one. Updating this website with piccies would be easier with one. I knew I wouldn't be a heavy user of it, so wouldn't need to be a high end digital camera.

I'm also not the greatest music listener. The last CD I brought was a Placebo one, and that was the first CD I'd brought in years! I'm an 80's/90's child, and firmly believe all modern music is crap. Dreadful bollocks for the most part.

But I do have my favourite music. And since recently deciding to get off my fat hairy spotty arse and do some exercise, I realised having an MP3 player would be quite handy while pounding the roads and sweating profusely.

Now you see my dilemma! I wanted a camera, but knew wouldn't be a heavy user of it. AND I wanted an MP3 player, but again wouldn't be a heavy user of it either. No way in hell was I gonna spend \$NZ500+ on an iPOD, or spend something similar on a camera and never use it. Yes, I am that much of a tightarse!

Some other criteria I had : Whatever I brought (either camera or MP3 player) needed to be small. Am more likely to take photos if the camera is with me all the time. And an MP3 player has to be able to fit into my pocket and take the impact of the constant movement of flabby thighs. And of course this device needed to work with Linux. And also it needed to take SD cards, as thats what my Palm Tungsten W & Palm Tungsten T2 uses.

How on earth can I find such a device!!????

Well bugger me if I didn't find EXACTLY what I was looking for all in one device!!! The Casio Exilim EX-M20U 2MP Digital Camera and MP3 player is just simply AWESOME! It meets all my needs listed above! Takes perfectly acceptable piccies, great MP3 player (I also brought a 256MB SD card), SD Card, VERY small. And only \$NZ540 on eBay!

Here is a piccie of it! (not taken by me of course - bloody hard to take a photo of a camera with the camera you want to photo...ouch!...head...hurts...).

And here are some sample piccies I've taken in the centre of Christchurch City...

Produced using gThumb - Copyright PalmHeads? Piss Off! Use freely

And here is how you get it to work in Linux through the cradle that comes with it. In your "/etc/fstab" put in a line something like this...

        /dev/sda1	/mnt/camera	vfat	rw,user,noauto	0 0

Just make sure "/mnt/camera" exits with the right permissions! At a command line just type "mount /mnt/camera" and your away laughing! Brilliant!

To add another dimension to using this camera with my Palm Tungsten W is using an app called Pixer MMS . This allows me to send images taken with it as PXT messages using the MMS standard and Vodafone NZ. It reads them off the SD card, so just take the SD card out of the camera, then put the SD card into your Palm. Launching Pixer MMS allows you to read images from the SD card! Product is shareware.

| Back |

Thats all folks at the moment! If I come up with anything else I'II post it here.