My blogging methodology is that I 1) open an Emacs Message buffer, write stuff, and then 2) take pictures of stuff (mostly comics), wanting to have those images appear right where I’m typing. This is a solved issued with Flashair, PyFlashAero and watch-directory.el, but I thought that it sucked that there were so many moving parts.
And besides, PyFlashAero didn’t always do the right thing, and you have to specify so much stuff…
So I wanted to bring it all into Emacs for less fuss. You know this makes sense.
I had a third generation Toshiba Flashair card (W-03), and the problem is that it’s just too slow for my approach, which is basically to look into all directories on the card. It’s s-l-o-w. So I gave up in the project. PyFlashAero was written that way for a reason.
Half a year passed, and then I somehow was made aware that Toshiba had launched a new generation of their product, and it promised 3x faster WIFI speeds and a brand new and faster CPU.
So I got a card:
And I would like to say that it was an immediate success, but it definitely wasn’t. I could download the directory indices nice and fast, but whenever I tried to download an image, it stopped after 0 (zero) bytes. So it seemed like that card had a problem reading itself, basically, and would just hang whenever I tried requesting some data from the (exfat) file system on the card.
But! There was a new firmware W4.00.02, and I had W4.00.00. I installed the new firmware, and presto! It is teh work!
Look, I can snap pics of myself here I’m typing this stuff on the couch:
And it appears in the buffer within a second or two after I snap it! It’s a new paradigm! And it’s untouched by filthy unclean Pythonic hands; it’s all pure Emacs.
The range of the Flashair W-04 also seems improved… the old one had to be within a few meters of my laptop for the laptop and the Flashair to be able to communicate whereas the W-04 seems to be able to communicate over, er, more meters. Here, I went out into the hall and snapped a pic and this image was here in this buffer when I got back:
It’s magic!
But when I went to the kitchen and snapped a pic there, nothing showed up here, so it’s not that magical.
Anyway, here’s the Emacs source code. You probably need a newish Emacs version for it to work.