Online Photo sites

I have a lot of digital pictures (17,297 as of today). I like to share a lot of them with family but there's no clear winner in free photo sharing sites. I was a huge fan of Tabblo but after it got bought by HP i'm not sure how things will work out long term and it seems most development has stopped over there (and Safari crashes at times now during their file upload piece). Flickr has serious limits on the free version. They claim no space limits but since they limit photostreams to the most recent 200 pictures they may as well have a very low storage limit on the free version. Picasa Web albums gives you up to 1GB of storage but has a lot less functionality. Kodak Gallery has some nice features and no limits but has a very dated interface and dog slow Ofoto Express software to upload pictures. Apple's Web Galleries are not as diverse in sharing, have a decent space limit of 20GB that comes with all the other semi-functional MobileMe stuff, but the lack of sharing options/permissions makes them near useless.

Like I said, no clear choice.

Cayman

Finally got around to putting my Cayman pictures online from earlier this year

TripIt info into iPhone 2.0

My solution for this problem was to subscribe to the feed in the Mac's iCal app, then export it as a .ics file, then import it as a new calendar. That converts the dynamic feed into a static calendar. You'll have to do that every time you update your TripIt trips but at least you now have your trips on the road with you and have all the nice 2.0 push stuff going on.

iPhone 3G woes

Some issues that bothered me recently with my new iPhone 3G:

1) Doesnt fit in the old iPhone dock. I have a couple, one that I had before the bluetooth earbud and one I got for the earbud. Some time with a knife shaving some plastic after some online inspiration solved that problem. I'm now using my old docks with no additional cost. I'm no handy man but a sharp knife and some repetitive motion and you're in business. Be careful!

2) My iPhone 3G will not charge on my Acura Music Link. This is yet another blow to a poor solution. It never let me really choose what was playing or see any status on my huge NAV screen, but if I selected a book tape and paused it then plugged it in it would play and charge and do nice things like pause when I shut off the car or got a call etc. Now I lost one more feature, charging. Seems that others on the net have experienced the same. After some reading it appears many of these connections used in the car used the Firewire charging pins in the doc connector and that was dropped in iPhone 3G thus breaking many accessories. Seems like there are some possible solutions for the charging issue that allow doc connector pass through to the radio while adding charging capabilities. If the car people would just add aux inputs on the dash or in the console this wouldnt be so big a problem.

In researching #2 above I found I could actually get screen control back on the iPhone by adding a female dock connector to 3.5mm plug adapter. That fixed some of the brokenness of music link. I'm still looking for a good charging solution. 

Lost & Recovered iPhone notes

Somewhere along the way I lost the Notes on my iPhone when I moved from my old iPhone to my new one. After some research I found iTunes saves your iPhone backups at:

/Users/<user>/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup 

In that location I had 3 backups, I found one before I got the new iPhone 3G and made a copy of the directory to work on.

Then I found a tool on the net that converts these binary plist files into the normal file format. The tool crashed on me and the fix was just commenting out the "sys.exit(2)" around line 33. After that was complete I had a series of normal .plist files and some .sqlite files. 

Running the tool created a new directory, "MobileSyncExport"

Under there you will see Library/Notes/notes.db

Using a sqllite browser you can browse that database file. Go to the "note_bodies" table and there are all your full notes from the iPhone backed up.

I then copied these into Notes in Apple mail which sync to MobileMe and appear in the MobileMe Notes IMAP folder. Not exactly the same place they were on the other iPhone but at least they're restored and back in my pocket.

Apple, when will you be sync'ing iPhone notes? Allowing me to create a note from an email body? Doing anything useful with them?

As a side note, if you want to make an app that saves call history, sms history or other things you could easily watch/extract all that from these databases. Combine that with TimeMachine and you have a not-so-secret paper trail of SMS messages, call logs etc... 

Winmail.dat

Anyone who's had a mac for a while will probably have received a "winmail.dat" attachment in their email. While there are free tools like TNEF's enough its a bit painful to use. There are commerical plug ins for Apple mail but they cost money. Another interesting point is neither of these apps worked under Leopard for me. Since all my mail goes through google, I went to the gmail interface and found a mail item with a winmail.dat attachment and sure enough gmail handles these the correct way and shows me the attachments. If Google's gmail can do it why can't Apple fix this in mail?

Anyway the free and easy fix if you pipe your mail through gmail and get a winmail.dat attachment is go to the gmail interface and get the attachments that way.

iPhone 2.0/Calendar update

A friend at work showed me that you can indeed have both both Exchange and MobileMe enabled for push at the same time and the phone will do the right thing. The thing you can't do is have push Exchange calendar but do a manual sync of your other calendars. Its all push or nothing for each type. That helped with me avoiding double entries for the Exchange calendar, but since you can't push subscriptions i've lost my TripIt calendar feed :(

Anyone with any bright ideas how to fix that one?

MobileMe

Probably one of the best examples of how not to roll out a new service.

Other than the horrible stability/connection issues, there are some big gaps in usage. To me the largest which is well documented on the net is that you can't do the push updates of subscribed calendars. I have a few subscribed calendars, some I can live without like US Holidays but the one I can't live without is my TripIt calendar feed that tells me where I am and when. I love TripIt to manage my travel and they've cut me off.

The fix? For now go back to normal wired sync of calendars.

Oh, and another atrocity? I can't sync Exchange (Work) calendars at the same time as Personal ones.

I hope someone is listening.

Old Phone

There were some temporary heartaches in updating the old iPhones to the newer firmware. It seems that after it loaded/verified the new flash it needed to re-activate before restoring all your settings. The servers were overloaded so several people like me spent an hour or two without a phone. Not that big a deal, I kept trying and it eventually took and did the right thing.

Oh, and apple, it would be nice if you came out with the accessories when you came out with the device. Lack of a dock at launch just isn't cool (especially when my investment in my old one is now wasted). 

iPhone 3G

Yup, I had to get one. There were 3 motivating factors for me, if any one of the 3 was missing i'd have probably waited:

1) Memory - I know before the 3G there was a 16GB model but not when I bought mine. The extra memory was needed especially with the new apps

2) 3G - I do a lot on the road, the extra speed (when i'm in a reasonable location) helps a lot. 

3) GPS - i'm hoping at some point the GPS is useful. Right now I still need my Garmin Nuvi 250. I'm hoping the rumors that TomTom is making a real GPS app are true.

Did I wait forever in line? No, I went out at lunch time and the line was 4 hours so I ate lunch and went back to work. Then after dinner I went back and the line was still at least 2 hours at 9:30pm so I went to a movie. After the movie at 11:15pm I was the last customer to walk in and there was no wait. They rang me up and I was on the road.

The only slight hitch was my AT&T plan had the corporate discount (of $0 !) applied and they had to have it removed. Fortunately some nice person in CA was still working at AT&T and did the quick work. Apple and AT&T really should have warned people about the $0 discount virus that could be on their account (or have had plans to ignore it).

As to the software update and apps. Wonderful. The best thing for me though is Active Sync. Don't believe the garbage about having to pay for the enterprise pricing, it works fine on the normal plan.

One UGLY issue that i've seen is that you can't have your work contacts/calendar pushed to the phone at the same time as your home ones:

"Our biggest gripe with Exchange isn't small, though: the system is unable to let enterprise contacts and calendars coexist on the same device with personal contacts and calendars. (Personal and corp email get along just fine, though.) When you turn on Exchange-synced contacts and calendars, you're notified that it's a one or the other kind of a situation, and your personal data will be removed from the phone. Though that data isn't purged from your host machine, of course, you do immediately lose the ability to change contact or calendar sync settings. This effectively means that your device can only serve as an enterprise device OR a personal device, but not both at once."

Seems like my calendar pain will continue.

Feeds of interest

Added a link off on the right of my blog page tracking things I find interesting in my intermittent polling of various RSS feeds I subscribe to. If you want to see what catches my eye or use me as a RSS filter subscribe to or look at the feed.

GPS Cameras

This is a great idea and the whole geo tagging concept will help
people better manage their large photo libraries. Apples got some good
event collection approaches in iPhoto now, but with geo tagging we
should soon be able to group photos by location. Imagine a series of
smart location albums that group events that land within some
configurable distance. I.e. all photos within 50 miles of each other
etc. Or better yet use it to tag them to countries, states etc. Its
all about the metadata, and the more metadata you can add without
adding any inconvenience to the users the more you can get and then
the more you can give back to them in functionality.

Now, how do I find a good excuse to convince my wife to let me get a
new GPS enabled camera?

(yes, I know the iPhone 2 has GPS and a Camera, but the iPhone camera
is really crappy as its very sensitive to movement, guess its too much
to ask apple for image stabilization in there?)

DotMacSync doesn't work

Beyond my calendar woes, dotmacsync is doing another crazy thing to
me. I sync my keychains between my 2 macs, when I do that each time it
warns me of updated/changed items >5% for the keychains. I accept the
changes and it carries on and then does it again on the next sync. I
could turn off the warning and just let it ping pong on these changes
but then it would probably decide to wipe my calendar, address book
etc without warning. Its amazing to me that syncing things like
calendars, keychains and addresses as individual line items that could
each be versioned, hashed etc is so broken in this day and age.

I think Apple's move with .Me in moving everything to a central place
is the right one. Its one I attempted with Google only to fail due to
some horrible calendar bug of theirs.

I love the iPhone and Leopard and my nice MacBook Air. But take some
of these geniuses and replace the people on the sync services and fix
it as its making our lives miserable.

Google Calendar

I wrote a while back about using Google Calendar as my main calendar
source and then BusySync to sync it to my home and work Macs. Well
that worked pretty well until I got a strange email one day from an
admin at our office. "I got this calendar reminder from Google and I
think its related to you, can you please stop sending me emails from
outside the company network?"

Strange. I looked into it. It seems Entourage sync'd to iCal. Google
subscribed to that calendar (I didn't want more than a 2 way sync for
this flakey Entourage stuff) and then Google has taken it upon
themselves to send notices to all meeting attendees about upcoming
meetings. It was an option I had no control over at all. I tried
turning off all the settings and thought I had it licked, and then I
got another email from a colleague saying the same thing.

Ok I thought, this is ugly, I deleted the Entourage calendar from
Google, now only my personal calendars were on there.

Another week or two goes by, and then an email (from my boss's admin)
asking me to cease and desist.

Google, your calendar app is sending emails about calendar events in
deleted calendars to my co-workers. This is unacceptable.

My only fallback was to disable Google Calendars for my domain.
Fortunately i'm the only one in my domain using them. It seems that I
will never be able to re-enable the calendar service on this domain as
Google somehow is caching deleted calendars and events and sending
unwanted messages to people.

I only hope that now with the Calendars disabled it no longer sends
the messages, if it does I have to nuke the domain and hope that
works...

Meanwhile i'm back to iSync for my calendars which is marginal at best
and since Entourage doesn't work its now hard to get a consistent view
of all my calendars in one place. Im hoping that the new iPhone and
Snow leopard release fix this disaster.

Office 2008

The normal office 2008 apps, Word, Excel etc are reasonable for me. I
felt no loss with VBA going away and they've been reasonably stable
and compatible in the otherwise Windows dominated office. What
continues to shock me is how bad Entourage 2008 is. It is the worst
piece of software i've used in a long time. Here are a few MAJOR flaws:

1) Database corruption - seems to happen about once a week requiring
you to rebuild its entire (proprietary) database (hold option key at
launch, get coffee)

2) Calendar/contact sync - this is a great way to lose your data, more
specifically when things go wrong it wipes data off your Exchange
server. Yes thats right, it doesnt just have sync issues, at times it
clears your entire calendar on Exchange. Microsoft, take a note from
apple on the "warn my if more than x% of my data changes" type notices
from iSync (not that iSync doesnt have horrible problems too).
Currently Entourage 2008 is the only way to push your Exchange
Calendar to an iPhone compatible iCal destination. Unfortunately its
so bad that you may as well throw it out and wait for the native
Exchange support in iPhone 2 and Snow Leopard.

3) Microsoft Sync services - this is the best way to heat your lap and
drain your battery. Runs forever, drains your battery, and doesnt do
anything useful. "Force quit" is your solution.

4) If you read an reply to a lot of emails like I do with Entourage
you will eventually see what appears to be a duplicate reply from
someone in your mail box. If you read my blog you'd know that I file
mail after I read it and my inbox is always near empty. So I read a
message, reply, then file. Some time later a new message turns up and
seems to be the one I just filed. Odd. I go on Exchange via OWA and I
see the new message is actually a new reply but for some crazy reason
Entourage is showing me the old one. Cache coherency problems? Don't
know but again, this makes entourage unusable.

5) Calendar time shifts - Although not as quite as disastrous as a
total calendar loss mentioned above Entourage has the habit of
shifting my calendar events by many hours on the Exchange server
itself - yes, it took my existing events and then updated their times
to its liking. I then had meetings scheduled at 2am etc. Again this
makes Entourage unusable.

I read a review of Entourage 2008 recently in MacWorld, they gave it
4/5 stars, same as Apple Mail as a Mail client. I don't think the
reviewers know what they're talking about and I think the entire
Entourage 2008 team should be banned from the software industry forever.

Bento

Ok, so I don't get it. Bento, the "personal database" from the makers
of File Maker has huge support form the reviewers and rates highly.
Its also pushed at Apple stores and on their web site. I tried it and
I just don't understand its value. I have to ask, so what? Perhaps i'm
not the right demographic but frankly I don't see the need for its
existence. Sure it seemed like a nice app but a nice app with no value
to people doesn't warrant high marks.

Where have I been?

Sorry folks, life caught up on me. Currently im 30,000+ feet in the
air fighting a nasty stomach bug on my way home from CA again on my
MacBook Air. For the record, the battery life is fine for me for these
trips. Even in the office yesterday, I never charged it or plugged it
in and used it for notes, spreadsheets etc all day long (but not
constantly).

Just finished a book recommended by a friend, The Daemon by Leinad
Zeraus (an assumed name chosen for its hit raking in Google from what
i've heard). It was a great book and a good fit for my interests and
background (although a little more violent than I expected). If you're
a hacker type, computer gamer or just into the whole digital age, I
recommend it.

Anyway I have a backlog of a few things I want to comment on so
they'll be coming shortly.

p.s. for the record, crossing the country and back in 3 days with a
stomach bug that requires you to find a restroom every 2 hours is not
a pleasant experience. Someday i'll eat again.

Gmail

I love Gmail. Google has made a completely free mail system that supports IMAP and has a great web UI and has the best spam filter on the planet. But even Google makes mistakes. This link is a good summary.

GCal has more issues and has a lot of growing up to do.

And the docs, well they're cool and its amazing what they've managed within a web browser, but they don't come close MicroSoft Office.

Calendar woes & evil birthdays

So despite Apple's mostly broken .Mac sync for calendars I had a fairly decent system going until recently. I kept my calendar in Google Apps  and subscribed to it in iCal then sync'd my calendar to my iPhone the normal way. That way I had my calendar on the road and I could see it from my work or home macs by subscribing. It was a pain that I had to use the google web pages to add/edit events but having my calendar on the road is priceless and I needed to be able to reliably see my calendar at home and work. The .Mac sync you think would have done it, but at least for calendar events i've found it to be terrible.

Anyway so I was ok with the solution, then, for more than a week my calendar sync setup stopped working. I had no new events on the iPhone and I no longer knew what was going on. What happened? From the Mac's point of view it was a simple setup, a few calendars subscribed from Google Apps and then pushed to the iPhone. I couldnt even edit them on the iPhone. So why couldn't it sync? Then I noticed the list of calendars in iTunes for the phone was messed up. I tried all sorts of stuff from resetting my sync history to following various cookbooks to unregister computers, delete sync files etc. None of these worked. I kept searching and eventually ran into something that told me to turn off the "Show birthdays Calendar" in iCal. I clicked that little checkbox and all my calendar sync woes went away. This is a pretty obvious bug and one that others have run into. Sometimes I wonder about Apple.

Anyway, the place I ran into the final solution, BusyMac, has a product called BusySync  which has a new beta version out that allows bidirectional sync with Google Calendars (even Google Apps ones). This fixed the last complaint I had with my system before it broke, that I had to use the Google web pages to manage my calendars. It worked out of the box and now I have the perfect setup.

My personal calendars sync from Google Apps to both my work and home iCal calendars. I can edit in any of the locations (work, home or on the web) and the events turn up everywhere.

My work calendar on Exchange gets pushed to iCal at work by Entourage (I use entourage ONLY for this feature as it has some nasty duplicate email and crashing bugs that may be fixed with the recent update). That iCal calendar gets pushed from the work machine up to Google Apps by BusySync and then back down again to my home computer by BusySync. As with my personal calendars I can edit in iCal at home or work, or on Google Apps or in Exchange (OWA, Outlook or Entourage). The Entourage sync to iCal seems shaky and isn't 100%. It would be nice if the BusyMac people supported OWA sync directly or if Google supported all this sort of stuff themselves (they do have an Outlook->Google Apps sync tool but not for the Mac).

Anyway so now I can use the tools I want and see my calendars everywhere. Welcome to the 20th century.

Apple/Google, buy this technology and either upgrade or add it to your inventory. And then make it free for everyone.

It will be interesting to see how the iPhone 2.0 updates with Exchange support etc change all this in June and if my crazy IT departments rules will even allow this approach to work.

The Paper Free Office

Well, I'm not paper free but I'm well on my way. Its bothered me for a long time that my drawers fill up with paperwork, they're not very secure (we have a lot of animals so there are always people with access to the house) and I have no easy way of finding the papers and even with a reasonable paper filing system its a pain to manage. So I looked around for a while and eventually found the answer -- the Fujitsu ScanSnap 510M  Mac version, there's one for the PC too).

The 510M is fast, scans double sided, and does it in color. It can save to PDF (my preferred approach), do OCR (turn scans into text and does surprisingly well at it), print, email etc. So now when papers come in I drop them in the scanner (by the way its small and you can fill it with papers to scan) it scans them and I shred them. My family makes fun of my shredding. And now, with the scanner/shredder combination, I find my high power cross-cut shredder (yes I drool over the confetti ones, nut that I am) can't keep up -- thats right, I scan faster than I can shred.

So all paperwork with any potential value gets scanned (anything from business cards to tax returns) and then into the shredder it goes. If I need it back I print and it comes back in the full color glory it originally had. My drawers no longer fill and I have a nice tidy filing approach on my mac (in an encrypted disk image). 

So I no longer have to deal with the paper once I initially process it, its much more secure, and I can even get at my paperwork when i'm on the road (via ssh etc).

Now I think about the backlog. I must resist. Too much scanning/shredding. I must resist...