Apple iPhone camera and Linux Mint / gThumb 2.10.6

I have been on the road for a week or so, and I have been using my MacBook for most of the trip. Today I decided to use my Dell D620 running Mint 4.0 at the office instead, since it is better at accessing my MS Exchange calendar via Evolution 2.12. When on the Mac, I have to use Webmail to read my calendar. It works, but not as nicely as Evolution on Mint does.

My office here in Sunnyvale appears to have Faraday cages around it. I have at most one bar of signal on the iPhone, and often I'll walk out to get a drink and suddenly the iPhone will tell me I have missed calls.

Every cell phone I have ever owned uses way more power when it can not reach its cell tower. It appears that the transmitter in the phone cranks up to 700 milliWatt full power to try and find someone... anyone... it can talk to. Out in West Texas, where I get zero cell phone signal, my iPhone will go to zero power in a day. So did my Samsung and Sony before it.

For this reason, I keep the iPhone plugged in to a USB port on the computer de jour when I am in the office. I jacked it into the Linux laptop today for the first time ever, with the expectation that all I would see / hear is the iPhone chirping to let me know it was seeing 5V DC and was happy with the "drink".

I was surprised to see the Linux desktop ask me if I wanted to import the pictures on the "new" digital camera it just found. I said yes, and gThumb 2.10.6 was engaged, and it drained the iPhone in short order. There they were. All the pictures I had taken on the trip so far! Cool beans. Drained is probably not the right word: Copied. The pictures are still on the iPhone too.

Side note: gThumb is not installed on Mint by default, but I had loaded it with Synaptics. 3:2.10.6-0ubuntu1 is the package number, so it is something that Mint inherits from Ubuntu.

I would of course like it better if iPhones were better supported on Linux, but I did not think they would work at all, so this was a pleasant surprise. At least the iPhone pays attention to one standard out there. It sure made it easy to get a picture off the iPhone to use as my new desktop wallpaper! Rogue Ale Public House menu, now on tap... err... screen.