HowTo : Flickr from your Nokia N70 phone

You have to know about Flickr by now : it is one of the most successful online photo management and sharing applications (others include shutterfly, snapfish, photobucket or Kodak EasyShare Gallery). They recently partnered with Nokia so that you can upload your photos to Flickr straight from your phone, provided it is a supported device and you have a web access. Check it out !

Thanks to a recent promotional offer from my network operator, I have been able to play a lot with my new N70 for the last few months : 39€ for this device was a good deal I think. And, as I already have a Flickr account, I was thrilled to try this new feature. Alas, only the N70 Music Edition is supported. End of the game.

But wait, are these two editions so different that this (seemingly) small application can run on one an not on the other ? I could not believe it, and I was right. So here is the (yet) undocumented way to set up your N70 :

1. Get the "Online share software". That is the piece of software that comes bundled with the Music Edition of the phone. As it is quite tricky to find, here are two links : Nokia Europe or Nokia Asia.
2. Install it on your phone.
3. Follow the instructions for the N70 Music Edition. The only difference here lies in step 1 : instead of "Options" → "Open Online Service", read "Options" → "Send" → "Web upload".

Well, this one was easy, right ? Enjoy !

HowTo : Scrobble from your Creative device on Windows XP

I started to scrobble yesterday. There are some interesting feelings attached to it ;-)

Allright. For those who are as ignorant as I was two days ago, let Last.fm explain :

Scrobbling a song means that when you listen to it, the name of the song is sent to Last.fm and added to your music profile.

So I thought I would really enjoy scrobbling. The bad news is : my MP3 player is a Creative. And as far as I am concerned, there is a general rule about Creative devices : the hardware is usually quite alright, the firmware is somewhat average and the software environment (OS integration, standard media players integration) is poor at the best. And who needs yet another custom media player like the Creative Media Source, with its poor user interface and its only remarkable feature, being that it natively supports Creative devices ?

I don't. But then, I really wanted to be able to listen to FM radio on my MP3 player, so an iPod was not an option (or that is what I thought at the time). So here I am today, stuck with my unscrobbable Creative device. Only Winamp today is able to read my songs directly from the device thanks to a plugin. But thanks to Jurel, I was able to cook up a recipe that will allow the most willing of you to achive your dreams.

Ok, so here are the required piece of software :

1. You need a Winamp.
2. If your device is a playsforsure (my Zen Micro Photo is), you should be alright with the default plugins. If not, try the plugin attached to this post. The thing is : make sure to be able to access your portable device from Winamp.
3. Now you need iTunes.
4. Then install the Last.fm software with (at least) the bundled iTunes plugin.

That is all (!). Now you can start scrobbling :

1. Start the Last.fm software, and enable scrobbling.
2. Start Winamp, and create a playlist for the songs you want to listen to. Save this playlist as a file (*.m3u) somewhere on your hard drive.
3. Open the playlist file with iTunes (do NOT close Winamp !). There you can listen to your files : iTunes will read them through the Winamp plugin, and the scrobbler will detect the songs played by iTunes ! There are a few annoying things to note though. First of all, it seems that iTunes loses the natural order of the playlist, and some of the information on the tracks are lost (like the artist name) until you play them once. And the playlist files do not seem to handle Unicode characters very well (I happen to listen to some non-english music...).

And no, I do not speak spanish ;-)