Quick Update: I just found out that my reCAPTCHA wasn’t displaying for comments, preventing people from commenting; it’s been fixed, so you shouldn’t have any problems anymore. Thanks for letting me know!

Lately I wanted to backup some of my text messages from my iPhone 3GS onto my desktop, but couldn’t figure out how to do that. After some quick research and some poking around, I was able to figure out how to view them quickly and easily.

Disclaimer

I am not responsible if you screw something up on your computer. It’s not my problem if something breaks. Do this at your own risk (which should be pretty low, unless you’re one of those people that shouldn’t be allowed near a computer).

What you’ll need

• SQLite Database Browser (available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/sqlitebrowser/files/)

Let’s Get Started

In a nutshell, the SMS system on the iPhone is just a carefully hidden SQLite database. All we have to do is find the file and open it up in the SQLite Browser.

1. First, we need to locate the file that contains the SMS messages, which will be either:
   • 3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.mdbackup
   • 3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.mddata

   This will be in one of the following locations:

   • Windows Vista/7: C:\Users\[Your User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\[iPhone ID]\
   • Windows XP or lower: C:\Documents and Settings\[Your User Name\Application Data\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\[iPhone ID]\
   • Mac OS X: User > Library > Application Support > MobileSync > Backup >[iPhone ID]
2. Copy this file to a new location to protect the file in case you accidentally screw something up (your Desktop, for example).
3. Open up the new copy of the file in SQlite Browser, then select the “Browse Data” tab. Finally, select the “message” table from the “Table:” dropdown box

And that’s all it takes! From here, you can export this as a CSV via File -> Export -> Table as CSV so you can import it into Excel, or manipulate it however else you wish. If I get the time, I’m going to write a quick tool to nicely export the messages to PDF so that they look good instead of being in a table. But, it’s a nice fix for wanting to go through them on a computer, or do fulltext searches with the content.

I know I said I was going to write a post about backing up your iPhone SMS messages, but that’ll have to wait until later today (it’ll be out in the afternoon: I promise!).

Every once in a while, I stumble upon a great artist. I mean, really great. Yes, there are talented artists out there, many of which are mainstream in today’s society. That isn’t what makes this artist great, however. Yes, he’s talented. Very talented, as I hope you’ll find out when you listen to some of his music. What makes this artist great is that he distributes all of his music for free.

Yes. Free.

If you are even remotely interested in electronic music, you’ll love Professor Kliq (Mike Else). Making music since 1996, he has been making music for almost fifteen years, experimenting with many different forms of electronic music, taking both grassroots and modern styles into his experimentation. He has put out six albums, one EP, and one set of remixes. Do yourself a favor and give this a listen; if you appreciated electronic music half as much as I do, you’ll love this.

Secondly, if you love music, chances are you’ve heard of SXSW, or South By Southwest. SXSW Conferences & Festivals offer the unique convergence of original music, independent films, and emerging technologies. Even if you don’t attend the events, many artists give out a free MP3 of their music to be distributed by SXSW on their website. The latest batch of 2010 entries was recently put up on BitTorrent, boasting a grand total of 1083 songs, and 5.43GB of disk space across two torrents. If you want the opportunity to be exposed to some amazing new music by independent artists who are freely (and legally!) giving away their music for you to listen to, check out the link below for more information.

http://sites.google.com/site/sxswtorrent/

So I haven’t put up any photos in a while. I’ve been on a bit of a dry spell, but I went through my archives and pulled out some that I think were better. Comments, as always, are welcome and encouraged.

Next Monday, I have an interesting post for all of you with iPhones. One thing I really like about the iPhone is that I don’t have to delete text messages. I have a quick and free way for you to back up all of your text messages to read later on. There’s a lot of paid services out there to do it, but you don’t have to pay anyone for this quick-and-easy trick!

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Well, in an attempt to get back on my ‘writing horse’, I figured I’d start with some of the things that are rattling around my brain right now in terms of what I want to get accomplished in the short term. Some are computer-related, others are not. Nevertheless, I have some goals for things that I want to get done or accomplish in the next 6 months. Here are five of them.

1. Buy a new car

With the potential of a great new job headed my way (possibly more on that later), I should have some disposable income in the near future. To celebrate this, I think it’s time to get a new car; my current car, although it holds 5 people, is hardly what you consider sporty, is developing a bad case of rust, guzzles gas like nobody’s business, and isn’t fun to drive at all. I plan on buying a 2003 Hyundai Tiburon with a 5-speed manual transmission. They come in around $9000 before taxes, so on a financing plan I’ll be able to buy that no problem.

2. Build a customized car trunk sound system enclosure

I’d love to put my DIY skills to the test and create a proper molded sound system enclosure for my new car. It’s a lot of work, but it’ll be a lot of fun. This will also be very useful to work on some woodworking skills and some custom fabrication work.

3. Start my development website

For about two years, I ran a security-based site, but eventually shut it down because my interests simply did not coincide with my interests and life aspirations. As such, I’ve decided to start a development-based website. I can do the security-aspect within the programming and development, but I can also get into graphics design. It fits into my interests much more at this point in time, and I think it will be more beneficial to the internet as well.

4. Develop Thimbleberry

I have a new site in the works with a friend. That’s about all I’ll tell you for now. Either way, should be a fun time.

5. Start actively contributing to the open source community

The open source community is amazing. Those of you that have heard of a little operating system called Linux may know that it’s open source. That’s right: it’s free to use, free to modify, and free to redistribute. There are tons of open source projects available online, and I’d like to start contributing to one or start a new one that people will actually use. I’ve been using open source software for a long time, and it’s about time that I gave back to the community that has helped me out in so many ways.

Well, it may be feeble, but it’s a start at getting back in the writing groove. Soon I’ll start doing a bit more technology writing again, and will hopefully do some stuff on interface design. Thanks for sticking with me through my creative drought, and we will hopefully see you Monday.

After two weeks of dying to actually pick through these photos, I finally found the time this past weekend. My schedule has been ridiculously busy, and as such my blog updates have suffered; that precious buffer I had going: gone!

Anyway, this batch of photos is from my first photo shoot, which I did at Level 3 Studios with a bunch of friends. This was a great first experience in a photo shoot scenario, but also very daunting and intimidating. I’d love to do it again, but I might need some more ideas before I go into that.

Because I was rushed, I never had the chance to do any major photo manipulation with these, and I think a fair number of these will look better after some simple changes, such as a grey scale or sepia tone added to them. I’d love to do that to a selection of them and upload them later.

As per usual, I really appreciate your comments. Post a comment below; I read all of them, I promise!

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Well, more photos! I have had people breathing down my neck for me to put these up, and I’ve finally given in. Because this week’s update spans almost two weeks, I’ve got almost 50 photos here (48, to be exact), ranging from the hoar frost we had a while back, to the Black & White Swing Thing, to Oldies Night at the Legion.

As per usual, I really appreciate your comments. Post a comment below; I read all of them, I promise!

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The latest batch of photos is in. This time, all are from this past week’s Legion, where we got a great turnout. I was able to try out using my flash in slave mode, where it gets controller by a 580EX II which is mounted on my camera. Overall, I think I got some great shots this week, including one or two I’m considering getting prints made of (such as #11, the one of Sylvia & Kiral).

I also did a bit of shooting last night in my room with my macro lens of a plant I have. I love some of the colors that came out of the shots, and I included two at the end of the gallery.

Hope you enjoy, and feel free as always to comment below.

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Over the past week, UMSwing has had a recruitment table up in an attempt to get new members interested in the club. During that time, we do a lot of dancing (a couple hours a day), hoping that some people will be impressed by it. We think it’s working, but we’ll have to wait until the open house to see.

As always, I welcome your comments. Add a comment below!

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My Cactus V2 Flash Triggers

Recently, I bought a set of Cactus V2 remote flash triggers off of a friend for my camera. These allow me to use a flash off-camera, which can give me a number of different lighting effects based upon position and intensity. I’ve been trying them out a lot so I can get a grasp on how to use them, and it’s been an interesting experience. Below I’ve got a few sample photos, as well as some of my learning experiences.

The first photo I ever took with an off-camera flash was of my living room. Needless to say, my first shot was not impressive. It wasn’t even good. Hell, it’s barely worth posting, but it was a step forward. I was learning, and also testing the triggers to make sure they actually worked. If nothing else, I was really interesting at this point with some of the potential effects that I’d be able to do with it.

My first off-camera flash shot. Hardly anything good.

As with anything, practice makes perfect, and despite the rather bland first photo, I stuck with it, trying a number of different effects. I looked around my house for things to photograph that might make for some interesting photos, particularly with some different lighting. An improvement came when I took a photo of a decorative house and Christmas scene that my mom had set up on an antique radio. A bunch of random adjustments and a dozen-or-so photos later, I came up with something that looked decent. Again, definitely not a masterpiece, but a step forward in the right direction.

A small Christmas scene that was set up in our living room.

Eager to try out my new toy at a swing lesson, I decided to try my hand at photographing moving targets. Looking back at the photos, very few of them turned out well at all. Some turned out okay, and two of them are below. A few turned out well, and ended up in this week’s gallery entry, which I hope you’ll check out. I think jumping into the deep end was a little too hard for me; there were far too many variables to juggle, including the flash position, flash power, camera focus and zoom settings, and the position and orientation of the people I was photographing. It was simply too much to handle all in one shot when I’m still learning the basics when it comes to the lighting, and I’m still learning things about my camera. In retrospect, I should have waited a while before bringing them along.

Tiffany at the swing lesson. I think the lighting is much too hard in this.

This I'm a little happier with. It turned out better, and the light isn't as harsh.

But, some of my stuff did turn out well, and they’re in this week’s gallery. Some of those are shot with an off-camera flash; others are not. As far as cost-worth purchases go for aspiring photographers, these flash triggers are the best purchase I’ve made (just surpassing the 50mm EF 1.8/f lens). If you have an external flash, pick yourself up a set of these and a cheap camera tripod; you won’t regret it.

If you’d care to see some of my better photos (ie. this week’s gallery), you can take a look at the Jan. 8/10 gallery here.

Just for the heck of it, I decided that I would post a screenshot of my desktop right before I start programming (ie. before too many windows get opened and clutter my workspace). Those of you that are sharp might notice that it looks a little…wide. That’s because I have three monitors on my desktop — two 19″ and one 22″ LCD monitors. That gives me a total resolution of 4560×1050: far bigger than a single monitor could reasonably give me.

Extra brownie points go to those who can answer the following questions about the screenshot:

• How many cores does my desktop have?
• What music player am I using?
• What scripting language server is running in the command line?
• What is the symbol on my desktop, what is it’s significance, and who came up with the idea to use this symbol for this purpose?

Anyways, I have some new photos that will be going up tomorrow, as well as some of my experiences with using an off-camera flash. Stay tuned for that!