Category Archives: FrameChannel

The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

First, to answer a few questions that I’m sure have been plaguing you since last I wrote…

  • No, I didn’t succumb to the a Icy Fingers Of Death after leaving my drift covered home in search of food and water.
  • Yes, I am still running two companies (Frontier Digital – technology consulting and Receptive Audio – audio messaging for retail & hospitality).  Both are thriving.
  • No, I haven’t given up on FrameAlbum.
  • and Yes, I’m still shooting photos.

Truth be told, my ‘jobs’ have occupied an large amount of my life leaving little time for fun projects, like FrameAlbum.  The service is still running, and feeding frames all over the world.  But alas I have not been able to give it the attention it deserves.

Hope springs infernal, or something…

Along with the much anticipated arrival of spring in my hemisphere comes a large project to my desk.  I’ve accumulated several servers over the years, spread around a few hosting providers, with no real rhyme or reason to it.  Most of them are getting rather long in the tooth and are becoming difficult to update because of all the ‘fixes’ I’ve put in place over the years. The time has come to clean things up.

I’ve started work to consolidate all my various internet projects onto a single set of servers running on Amazon’s EC2 service.  This affords my the opportunity to update all the system and supporting software up to current releases and to reduce my overall costs.  Most of my smaller projects have already been moved and this site will have moved by the time you read this.

Included in this project is the FrameAlbum service.  As I move it to it’s new home I’ll be cleaning up the worst of the problem cases (such as the password issue) and giving it a performance boost along the way.

Don’t give up on me yet folks — I ain’t dead yet.

D-Link Progress Report

D-Link DSM-210 image
D-Link DSM-210

I’ve ran squarely into a brick wall with the D-Link DSM-210 frame.  I can get it to display the info page with the activation code with no problem however after activation all I can manage to get is a ‘no items’ message on the screen.  I’ve scoured all the notes/emails I have on this frame and I’m very stuck.  I’m sad to report that I’m going to back-burner support for this (and the related D-Link DIR-685) frame until I can get further info. on these frames.

I’m going to return to work on Facebook integration; please hold your applause until I deliver it. 😉

Happy New Year!

Work begins on the D-Link frame and the infamous ‘blank activation key’ issue

I’ve finally managed to get my hands on a D-Link DSM-210 frame. I set it up today and after going through the amazingly fast WiFi setup process (less than a minute from power-up to on the WiFi network — a new record I think) I was presented with this:

D-Link 'blank frameID' panel
D-Link ‘blank frameID’ panel

Well, hurray that it returned the standard unregistered frame info. panel with such little fuss…  but boo that it is missing the really important bits of info necessary to actually register the thing.

It’s off to the code I go!

D-Link DSM-210? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

D-link DSM-210 image
D-link DSM-210
Through a bit of reverse-engineering and a bit of luck FrameAlbum now supports many of the original FrameChannel devices. However, the D-Link DSM-210 frame uses a very different protocol and I’ve not yet been able to crack it.

If you, or someone you know, may have some knowledge of how these things ‘talk’ to the old FrameChannel service I am VERY interested in chatting with you. I’m particularly interested in the folks who developed the software that runs on the DSM-210 frame, or, anyone from FrameChannel who may have access to the old protocol specs.

Thanks in advance.

Viewsonic VFP-838-11 support on FrameAlbum

Viewsonic VFP-838-11
Viewsonic VFP-838-11
So I managed to pick up one of these on eBay for cheap. It supports FrameChannel, Flickr and Picasa so I thought I’d give a go to supporting it on FrameAlbum.

Geek-speak alert!
I will be digging into the technical issues of adding support for this frame to the FrameAlbum service. I’ll be using terms such as ‘DNS server’, ‘XML’, ‘packet capture’ and ‘negatively charged penguin bladders’ so if these are unknown/offensive to you read on at your peril.
Continue reading Viewsonic VFP-838-11 support on FrameAlbum