I Spy with my Eye-Fi

I scored at the conference I went to earlier this month.  There were some great giveaways... PureSend gave away these great little notebooks and really solid stainless steel water bottles... ExactTarget did "room drops" of $10 iTunes gift cards and Subscribers Rule! pins and hats.  (Had never heard of a "room drop" - where they pay the hotel to leave gifts in our room for us when we're not there.)  e-Dialog hosted a small intimate dinner and I was one of the people they invited.  One session on SMS had a contest where we texted them the answer to a question and they gave away a $50 gift card which I ended up winning.  (I used it to get gifts for the family and pay for some of the incidentals meaning less to have to ask for reimbursing on.)  And then they also had a "vendor tour" - I didn't do it last year, but I figured I could act like a grownup, I could go talk to salespeople without accidentally agreeing to buy anything.  Anyhow, you visit vendor booths and they stamp a little card.  After you've gotten all your stamps you turn it in.  Pretty much all of the vendors were giving away iPod Touches.  Except PureSend which was giving away a tiny 8mp digital camera and an Eye-Fi card, which I also won. 

I've played around a little with the camera, but I didn't get to play with the Eye-Fi card until today.  It's really pretty slick. The box contains a small card reader and a tiny 2GB SD card.  You plug it into the computer and it's supposed to bring up the installer program.  (Mine didn't, I had to go onto the card and start the setup program.)  Then it installed some software, and then it updated the software.  It tried to connect, got stopped by the computer's firewall.  I gave it permission, it tried again, and succeeded.  And then it didn't do anything.  And if I tried to get it to do anything, it just kept opening new tabs in Firefox asking me to sign-in to my account, even though I hadn't yet created an account.   I had to look through their forums, and finally found a link to register, but it said it couldn't find the card and so it wouldn't let me.  So I saw someone else that said to just remove and reinsert the card.  I did that and it indicated that it recognized a new card and proceeded to let me register it.

It needed to access the wireless network in the house, so I entered in the non-broadcast SSID and the WEP key, but then I ran into another roadblock.  My router only allows authorized devices to connect.  I couldn't figure out how to find out the Eye-Fi card's MAC address, so I had to go into my router settings and let all devices connect to it.  Then restart the connect process, which it did just fine.  (And then go back into the router, find out the MAC address of the newly connected device, authorize it and then re-lock-down the router.)

After that, it was smooth sailing.  It's a very cool little device.  You insert it into a camera (It worked perfectly in both of our computers) and as you take pictures, they are uploaded, via the wireless network, to your computer.  You can also simultaneously upload them to a photosharing site if you want, which is pretty slick.  If the camera turns off or you go out of range of your wireless connection, it will just resume as soon as you go back in range, even mid-photo.   (You can pay $15 a year and then be able to do the same magic from any AT&T/Wayport WiFi connection which is most McDonalds and Starbucks.)