I recently updated my iPhone’s firmware to 1.1.3. Last weekend I took the boys to the park and used my phone to take a few photos (or so I thought), unfortunately when I got home there were no photos on the phone….

I searched the web and found a blog post and two Apple Support threads describing pretty much the same issue as I was seeing, unfortunately without a definitive fix….

"Topic : Camera will not save pictures to phone after snapping photo"

"Topic : My iphone will not save the photos I have taken with the phone"

"My iPhone Ran Outa Film?"

Even though I rarely use the camera, the fact that it wasn’t working pissed me off so I decided to look around in the phone and see what I could see. Luckily I’m an old-school Unix guy so the iPhone directory structures and commands are familiar to me… 

Anyway, after too much time spent poking around I found the problem… The directory that the camera saves into was missing and the parent directory was not writeable by the "mobile" user so even if the camera app can recreate the missing directory it was out of luck. I replaced the missing directory and fixed the parent directory permissions and it’s all working again….

I’ll post the details below, I also posted to the blog and Apple Support threads.

——8<——–

I recently updated to 1.1.3 (unlocked, jailbreak) and started experiencing the same problem. I rarely ever used the camera so I don’t know if it just started in 1.1.3.

Anyway it was really annoying me so I started poking around via ssh and found that if I ran the camera application manually as root then it seemed to work just fine.

/Applications/MobileSlideShow.app/MobileSlideShow –launchedFromSB –role Camera

I could take photos and look at them, they wouldn’t appear in iPhoto though. If I ran the camera as the "mobile" user which is the normal setting the problem would occur and I would see an error message each time I took a photo

/Applications/MobileSlideShow.app/MobileSlideShow –launchedFromSB –role Camera
CGImageDestinationCreate destination parameter is nil

This lead me to think that the problem is related to permissions as the behavior differed depending on the logged in user.

using the "find" command to see what files were changed today…

find / -mtime -0

I found that there were what looked to be photo files in the directory

/private/var/root/Media/DCIM/100APPLE

Now the camera preferences file has a reference to "DCFLastDirectoryNumber" and a value of "100", looking at the Media directory for the mobile user showed no "100APPLE" directory so I created the following directory

 /private/var/mobile/Media/DCIM/100APPLE

mkdir /private/var/mobile/Media/DCIM/100APPLE

and changed the ownership to the mobile user

chown mobile:wheel /private/var/mobile/Media/DCIM/100APPLE

and now the camera is working again…..

I also noticed that the parent directory

/private/var/mobile/Media/DCIM

was not writeable by the mobile user so if the directory was deleted then the problem would occur again so I made in writeable by all

chmod 777 /private/var/mobile/Media/DCIM

Yes I know this poses a security risk, but then the only users on the system are root and mobile and I want them both to be able to write to the DCIM directory.

After the fix I was able to take photos, import them into iPhoto and delete the originals with no problems.

Note: This fix is maybe 10 minutes old so no guarantees. Also you need ssh access to the phone so only people with hacked phones can use this fix….

I hope it works for some of you at least…

Cheers
Dan
——8<—–

Thanks to the magic of Salary Sacrifice and a friend on holidays in the US, I decided to buy myself a Birthday Present…

The Jesus Phone aka iPhone……

The phone arrived with firmware 1.0.2, I followed an excellent set of instructions at

http://www.winandmac.com/mobile/iphone/ultimate-guide-to-unlock-iphone-111-for-free/

to upgrade it to 1.1.1, jailbreak, activate and unlock it. I’m using it happily on Vodafone and all functions are working just fine. The only problems I have are that my custom ringtone keeps disappearing and the 24 hour time setting randomly turns off.

The phone is dangerous, once you play with it you will NEED one, it’s no wonder they sold 1.12 Million units last quarter. Not bad for a first entry into an insanely competitive market….

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I was reading an interesting post on two new Blu-ray releases.

It seems that there are issues with BD+ on existing units. And of course since Ethernet ports are optional for Blu-ray players it is non-trivial to perform a firmware update.

I can see some punters getting pretty pissed off trying to update their players, this can only serve to help the HD DVD camp.

All of this comes about because Sony were well behind HD DVD on finalising their spec and didn’t want to let the HD DVD guys enjoy the lead. So, they rushed the standard to market without finalising it and now it looks like it is going to bite them in the ass….

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As I posted earlier, we bought a new TV to replace our ageing 43" rear projection unit. It was delivered Saturday and I’ve set it up including a total rebuild of all the gear in the A/V cabinet, I can finally close the rear door again!!!!

Here’s how she looks in place

It’s funny, the "old" tv appears totally unwatchable now, the image is blury and washed out, the new machine is bright, crisp and clean.

Viv is well impressed and ranks it as one of our best purchases, she even watched Australian Idol in real time the other night so she could watch it in High Def…

Despite what my most A/V obsessed friend thought, the new TV hasn’t convinced me to stop watching "Channel BT" content ( in all its low res, compressed glory ) in favor of HD…

Maybe one day I’ll get an HD PVR and we’ll see what happens then, but for now I like to keep up to date with my shows

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There are times when I really wish I was living on one of the "First Class" continents….

In an article I read on Smarthouse News this morning we find out that Sony have left Australia off the list of countries getting the PVR plugin for the PS3 at launch time. This doesn’t affect me as I don’t own a PS3 but a couple of friends of mine were really looking forward to trying it out (you know who you are)…

Things we are still waiting for here in Oz

iPhone
PS3 "PlayTV" plugin
Microsoft "Media Room" (good luck with that as it needs fibre to the home)
TiVo (although we should have this next year only 9 years after the US)
iTunes TV & Movies

I’m sure there are plenty of others, the silly thing is that Australia is a really good testbed for gadgets, we tend to adopt new technologies faster than most countries (including the US) and the population is large enough to be a good sample but small enough to be manageable…

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Definition

I finally relented and bought a new TV to replace my aging but still loved 43" rear projection beast.

The new hotness is the Panasonic Viera TH-50PX700A bask in its HD (ish) glory and weep….

• 50" (127cm)

• 1366 x 768 resolution 10th generation plasma panel

• 3 x HDMI inputs, 2 x S-Video, 2 x Component

I was pleasantly surprised by the picture quality as my previous experiences with plasma TVs has been quite disappointing .
  
We expect delivery in the next week….

We are planning in the not too distant future to mount the sucker on the wall, that will be one big-ass job as the set weighs 50kg

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So, not only was the PS3 a way to give Blu-ray a leg up over rival HD DVD, it appears that it is also set to take a bite out of the PVR market.

Smarthouse News are running a story about an upcoming add-on that will turn your PS3 into a TiVo-like video recorder….

Let’s hope Sony don’t do their usual trick of taking a good idea and making it painful and locking it down to stop users having any fun with it…

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Arstechnica have a piece on the upcoming Wireless A/V connection standards…

In a nutshell we have in one corner

Philips, TZero Technologies and Radiospire Networks with “Wireless HDMI” running over UWB (which is the brainchild of the WiMedia Alliance consisting of over 200 international corporations and is promoted by HP, Microsoft, Nokia, Texas Intruments, Samsung and Sony).

This system will deliver 300+Mbps (theoretical max for the underlying UWB is 480Mbps) and will support up to 1080i using lossy JPEG 2000 compression.

and in the other corner

Samsung, Sony, NEC Corp, SiBeam, LG, Toshiba and Panasonic with WirelessHD, they formed the WirelessHD Consortium in 2005. Instead of UWB they use 7GHz of continuous bandwidth around the 60GHz band.

WiHD will transmit at 5Gbps and so will be able work without compression.

NOTE: It looks like Sony and Samsung have an each-way bet going

Unfortunately WiHD won’t be available until sometime in 2008 while Wireless HDMI is exected to ship in September 2007….

Let the games begin…

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Not content with my first Mac, the 20" iMac (G5), I decided to take advantage of "Salary Sacrifice" and buy a nice shiny new MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo)…

Specs

2.33GHz Core 2 Duo
2GB RAM
160GB HDD
ATI Radeon X1600 256MB

I also picked up a Wireless Mighty Mouse and an Apple Keyboard…

To house the whole shebang I picked up a Targus XL Notebook Backpack and Booq Vyper XL2 protective case from rushfaster….

The service from Rushfaster and The Apple Store was awesome, each item arrived at my house within 24 hours of placing the order.

As with all Apple purchases I have taken a series of unboxing photos

So far I’ve been using it as my work and home machine for 3 days and I’m totally wrapped…..

It "seems" much quicker than my G5 iMac and the portability is unbeatable..

Technorati Tags: macbook pro, apple

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I read a couple of articles today, here and here detailing plans by four of the major studios to pressure Apple to tighten the restrictions in Apples "FairPlay" DRM as it applies to movie content.

Currently, as with music, you can authorize five computers to play content purchased by you and also download it to an unlimited number of iPods.

It is worth noting at this point that for music you can burn the content to a CD for playback in a standard cd player, you cannot however burn video content in any form other than as protected files on a data DVD for backup purposes.

Now, with the "unlimited iPods" scenario you have to basically wipe the iPod and sync it with your collection, so you can copy the files to a friends iPod but at the expensive of wiping their collection off. When they next sync their iPod with their own collection, your content will be removed and replaced with theirs. I believe they can copy the video into their collection, but, without your authorizing their machine ( and using up one of your five slots ), they will not be able to play it on their computer.

Now, to me, this seems to afford a sufficient level of control over distribution of video content, the studios disagree and want Apple to limit the number of iPods that can have the content downloaded to 5!!!

For the consumer this isn’t really going to be a problem, I mean, who has 5 iPods anyway??

What shits me about this is that the additional restriction is likely to do bugger all in the grand scheme of things but could have the potential to make the iPod/iTunes experience less pleasant and more complex for the consumer. Apple would have to include some way to deauthorize iPods, including deauthorizing lost/broken devices, as well so you don’t have problems with dud or old iPods using up your five slots. This means valuable engineering time at Apple wasted on adding complexity to a system that already works well and affords reasonable control over content that could otherwise be spent on new products or features…..

How long until we have mandatory MPAA/RIAA approved implants in our heads that make sure we pay for every use of every piece of their content…..

You may laugh, but I’m sure they would jump at the chance if the technology existed….

Technorati Tags: Apple, DRM, Movie, Piracy

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