March 11, 2007
Cellphone Cleanout
For the past several months, the boys got a kick out of me taking pictures and video with the camera built into my phone. I primarily got my particular phone model because it supported Bluetooth wireless headsets. While I generally recommend headsets for driving, I particularly think that they are important when you drive a manual, aka stick shift, transmission. You don't want to try to hold a phone and shift gears at the same time! A good wireless headset is nice because you don't fumble with plugging it into your phone as you're driving. You simply clip it to your ear and you're ready to go within seconds.
As I said though, all the other creeping featurism (feeping creaturism?) like Java applications, camera phone, MP3 ringtones, etc. just became somewhat expected when you are buying a phone with Bluetooth headset capability. Nextel didn't seem to offer a basic flip phone with Bluetooth. *sigh* I guess it's like expecting a built in navigation system on a Ford Focus.
So this evening I moved all the pictures from the phone onto my computer. Rather than make my typical album, I decided to play with the latest version of an old open source favorite of mine: Imagemagick. A great tutorial exists for any command line warriors out there… Every version seems to add neater effects. For years I've used some of its basic abilities (along with a monster perl script) to create the 'film reel' albums you are used to seeing. Today I played with its compositing abilities as well as its ability to make HTML image maps to create this montage of my cellphone picture dump. Enjoy…
You can still click on the little polaroids for a larger image, but there is no page to page navigation as in my usual albums. You must simply use the browser's 'back' button for navigation. Most of the originals are pretty small and they are all camera phone quality. I think, though, that if I would make a concerted effort to clean off that "lens" every so often and bumped up the default resolution, the pictures might not be half bad for 'quick and dirty'. Nonetheless, these pictures will not go into the random pictures of the day.
Thanks for the pointer to imagemagick! I need to try that out.
Cheers -
bw
Posted by: Bill White at March 12, 2007 01:19 AMScott, I missed when you talked about getting a new phone with bluetooth. It's funny that you ended up getting one with a camera, since you'd gone with the no-frills models before. The cameras aren't the greatest, but they take decent pictures in good light, and are nice to have when you want to grab a quick snapshot and don't have a real camera with you.
BTW, I don't know if you saw it on my blog or not, but I went out and test drove and signed up for a Fit this past weekend. I got hussled a little bit by the sales guy, but the price is still decent and they're getting me the manual shift sport, in the vivid blue I wanted, so I'm pretty happy. Now I just need to wait two weeks for it to come in.
Posted by: will at March 12, 2007 01:33 PMHi Will,
Yeah, several months ago Michelle's phone suddenly died. Since we had identical models, I moved her SIM chip into my phone so that she wouldn't be bothered learning something new and there'd be continuous phone service on the "home line". The next morning I went to the Nextel store to get a replacement for me but the clamshell Bluetooth models were all pricey higher end. I bit my lip and got one nonetheless.
Congrats on the Honda Fit coming in soon! The next two weeks are going to feel like molasses, but if you want to "have it your way", you often have to wait. I'm looking forward to seeing it!
I also meant to tell you that we finally went to Chunky's last weekend (the new Nashua one). I hope to write up more about it very soon.
Posted by: Scott at March 12, 2007 01:43 PM