The usb socket on my phone is dead.  One day it worked, one day it didn’t.  I have tried multiple leads and PCs but all combinations work with Tamsin’s phone and none with mine.

Hmmm.

I said to Tamsin that this would not affect me much but she said

“what about photos?”

Argh.

But I then realised that the solution was right in front of me.  I’d downgraded from ICS betas to CyanogenMod 7.1 and in the process reinstalled dropbox.  Dropbox had said I could upload photos automatically if I wanted.  I ticked that option and these are now synched to my PC as soon as I log in.  Ages ago I wrote a vb script that sorts my pictures in to folders by date.  I quickly copied it to the dropbox folder, made a few changes and set it to run on login.  I changed the script to wait a couple of minutes to give dropbox time to sync and robertsyourfathersbrother.

Seems to work.  Now I don’t have to ever copy them manually.  I will have to set up Tamsin’s to do the same.

Other things I lose are plugging the phone in as a hard drive (not so bad as I can always take out the SD card or FTP to it) and ADB (though ADB over WiFi appears to work).  Not sure what else.

Follow up: It started working again a few tries later.  Then I destroyed the phone falling off a ladder.  The new phone works fine too.