Download iPhone Contacts to Linux
Motivation: My Macbook Pro from 2006/2007 quit working and I needed to get all the contacts off my iPhone and onto my new HTC G2. You can’t just plug the phone into a windows machine and use iTunes to do a backup because the phone was formatted for OSX. Ubuntu One can sync the contacts but that costs money, as do most of the other contact synchronization apps in the iPhone market.
Requirements:
Steps:
Install the required libraries
sudo apt-get install git python-imobiledevice python-plist
Download the python-idevicesync script
git clone http://cgit.sukimashita.com/python-idevicesync.git/
cd python-idevicesync
Connect your phone via USB: Ubuntu should auto-mount the device
Download the contacts to a vCard file
./iphonesync.py -o Data.vCard com.apple.Contacts
Data.vCard now contains all the contacts from your phone. You can then upload that file to Google Contacts and edit it to your liking. Now that I have my full address book on Google Contacts I can just use that to synchronize to my new phone.
Conclusion:
Exactly what I wanted. More information about interfacing iDevices to Linux can be found here: http://www.libimobiledevice.org
Interestingly enough, after the fact I realized that my friend’s brother runs the site… small world.
October 12, 2010 at 12:24pm
0 notes
Damn You Facebook!
Ever since bryceboe’s contributions, PhotoGrabber has looked more and more like a way to preserve your Facebook life offline. There have been requests to make it download wallposts and other information but I never got around to implementing those ideas. And it’s a good thing I didn’t bother because Facebook recently released a new feature which allows you to download all of your information:
http://lifehacker.com/5657317/how-to-download-your-information-from-facebook
It works, and it works well. It has my wall back to 2006, ever picture I’m tagged in, all my photo albums, everything. PhotoGrabber’s internet-money worth plummited to a record 52-week low. At least I’m in no danger of losing real-world monies like these guys: SocialSafe.
And this highlights a problem writing Facebook apps. Whatever you can do, Facebook can do better. Facebook doesn’t have to worry about ill defined privacy settings or a crappy, undocumented, broken, ever changing API. They have all the power. The #1 complaint people report about PhotoGrabber is “My profile says I have 700 photos but PG only downloads 320 pics!!!”. This is because the privacy settings of the person who uploads the photo dictates whether or not a person using PG has access to it. There is nothing I can do to fix it. So thats how Facebook has tried to make my app obsolete.
But hey, as long as PG keeps the ability to download photos of friends I’ll remain strong in the ever coveted stalkers market…
August 16, 2010 at 2:01pm
Notes
Problem: 600 lines of vertical resolution (common on netbooks) is not enough to display some windows. This is not a problem on Linux because the window managers let you ‘alt+click’ anywhere on a window to drag it around. Windows users have a more difficult time because a window can only be dragged around by the bar at the top.
Solution: AltDrag adds linux style window dragging to windows, and it works, and is open source! Rejoice!
July 19, 2010 at 12:52pm
Notes
Django OpenID
I’m a big fan of using a website without having to register. I’ve been playing around with Django looking for a good way to do OpenID authentication. There are a ton of apps out there to help with this and I’ve found two that look to be good options.
Both are forked from this (http://github.com/simonw/django-openid) original project. The first is a bare bones OpenID authentication with no real integration. It provides a workflow for users to authenticate with an OpenID provider and adds the credentials to the user’s session variable. I’ve made myself useful by submitting two patches!
The second project integrates with Django’s auth and user frameworks. I found this after I spent hours essentially recreating that functionality on top of django-openid-consumer. This project seems to have the most backing and active development.
Depending on the level of control you want to have I would recommend one of these apps. Next I’ll need to recreate that slick login form from stackoverflow…
July 1, 2010 at 5:07am
Notes
PhotoGrabber r74
I hate finding bugs right in the middle of publishing a new release. Well it’s fixed now and the new PhotoGrabber is available for download! The previous version was downloaded over 22 thousand times. Hopefully this release will be even more popular! Some new features and improvements to check out:
- Download all albums uploaded by a user
- Download the full albums that a user is tagged in
- Download comment and tagging information
- Album data dumped to JSON files
- An HTML album viewer
- Better photo organization
- Concurrent downloads
Get it here. Now it’s time for me to go to bed…
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