Too many gadgets? Never!

This is the mess I had laid out in my living room this weekend. In the picture you can see all my gizmos, save my S200 which was elsewhere having a rest...

Well... they each have their function...

Although, the really interesting ones (they're all interesting, mind) are my two new toys (please forgive the quality of the images, they are blown up from the original pic... I'll upload others soon), are my new iPhone 3G 16Gb and it's table companion, the Mac Mini (Intel Dual Core 1.83Ghz version):

These two (specially the iPhone) will give rise to a new series of entries (a suggestion by Oshita) about tricks and tips and "deep knowledge that must not get lost" (hehehehehe).

So without further ado, here is the first trick.

How to upload images directly onto memory without iTunes (and how to extract them, of course, if you so wish to). We will need a jailbroken iPhone (plenty of info out there of how to do that, but I may address it later). This is basic since we will need access to the iPhone's filesystem.

Once jailbroken, we will need Makki's iPhone Tunnel Suite. It's basically a console-based program which opens a port to communicate with a cable-connected iPhone on IP 127.0.0.1. The suite carries a version of WinSCP in Italian. WinSCP is an SFtp (or FTP over SSH) graphical manager. If you know how to do all this through console commands, you won't need it. If you can't manage with the italian version you can always go download the latest version in the most convenient language. The tunnel can be directly launched using the Launcher.exe shortcut provided in the installation folder. The user and password needed to access the iPhone is root/alpine.

The images are stored in /private/var/mobile/Media/DCI. There you will find one or more folders such as 100APLE or 999APLE (this latter one is where screenshots are stored. We will address screenshots later).

As you can see in the image, each image is stored in two files: a JPG and a THM. Obviously, the JPG is the image itself and the one you upload has to have the subsequent name in the list. The THM is the thumbnail. If you don't want to work too much, you can just copy an existing one and rename it to correspond to your image's name (obviously, the thumbnail will appear "repeated"). You always have to have the pair, otherwise you won't "see" your picture in iPhone. If you are tidy, all you have to do is maje a 75x75 version of your image and rename the extension to THM.

Naturally, if what you want is to extract the images, all you have to do is copy them over to wherever you want them.

As an "easter egg" to this entry, I'll tell you that all the music you put in your iPhone is stored as MP3's (with the filenames obviously changed) in folders within /private/var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control/Music. You can extract it using WinSCP (or whatever SFtp tool you chose to use) and rename the files, say, with
MP3Tag, for example. However, don't try to upload them like this, it will not work (I'm still figuring that one out...)