Mac

iSync Perfection or One Big Mess?

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I switched from using Entourage to iCal/Address Book for syncing my data to/from my Treo 650 on the Mac. I want the slick UI and terrific integration of Address Book & iCal, but I am concerned about some issues. Firstly I rely on Palm/outlook categories on my Treo. Primarily I use them for distinctive rings on the phone. if work calls I get a specific ring. if people I don’t want to call my cell are in a specific category they goto voice mail and don’t ring, etc. Looks like iSync does not keep the categories intact if I make changes to the categories. This sucks. If I create new contacts on my Mac I need to manually assign them categories when the contact goes onto my Palm.

It also looks like some fields don’t carry over either. I don’t see birthday’s that I entered into Outlook now that the contacts are in Address book. I think IM names are also not carried over.

Don’t get me started about my iCal invites not working in Outlook. There is some hackish fix out there but I don’t want to mess around with it.

Why then do I move/try to move to this? The integration between Address Book, iCal, iChat, Mail, etc is fantastic. That I can add a contact to address book and associate that contact to my AIM contact list in iChat is fantastic. The same goes for my jabber contacts. Linking every contact to email in Mail is also great. I can also sync everything using .Mac to my min and powerbook! Top it off with using spotlight to search everything, and I am a happy person. It makes for easy day to day use. The problem is when I want to get that information out into my Treo I run into issues. I don’t even care that I have problems when I import everything from the Treo to Outlook. I don’t want to use outlook anymore. I have had so many problems with it recently that I could live with using it just for an email archive. But at least work in the Treo!!! I am continuing my search of the internet for solutions or work around’s to my little issues. So far, no luck.

Travel Essentials

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As I said the other day, I don’t travel anywhere near as much as I used to. Just because I don’t go out of the office that much doesn’t mean that when I do I want to be any less connected. I did a quick overnight trip Monday-Tuesday. I (bored on the train) now write about what I relied on during the trek.

While in transit nothing says keeping in contact with the world like a Blackberry. When you can’t or don’t want to bring out a laptop it is essential. I hate it for everything else, including the stupid direct connect. I find that if I want to hold a conversation I might as well call the person than have a 20 minute conversation on DC. For email nothing beats the Blackberry, yet.

My powerbook was the laptop of choice this trip. My thinkpad is acting funky, and I don’t want to wipe it since I am getting a new one next week. So the powerbook stepped in and performed flawlessly (so far). I used it to watch some tv shows I recorded last week. Checked mail, did work, blogged, etc. All over Wifi!

Without the iPod I would not be sane. It makes train trips, and quiet hotel rooms that much more tolerable. It also is a great portable hard drive to store said TV shows that I watched on my powerbook. I say YES to plug and play!

My Treo is great (always carry it), but this trip it was used as it normally is. Still great, and a must for travel. What I used instead was Extension Mobility on Cisco Call Manager. It is the ability to log into any CCM phone and your extension moves with you. That coupled with the Cisco WIFI cordless phone make working in a different office just like I was in NYC, even when I was running around between 2 floors.

My new Omega X-33 watch was also a must this trip. I use my watch as an alarm wherever I go. I took my timex (broken band and all) along just in case the Omega didn’t do its job. It worked fine. I almost fell out of bed with the loudness of the alarm this morning. First impressions is this watch and I hopefully will have a long friendship!

Lastly I loved my Broadvoice VOIP phone, & Skype. I didn’t use broadvoice this trip, but I used its voice mail. I got all my VM emailed to me so I stayed in touch with everyone. I would never have checked my NYC VM without it. Skype is great since I can use it on my powerbook with my Sony Ericsson HBH-65 bluetooth headset from anywhere I have an internet connection. For this trip it was free calls from the hotel. I didn’t even need my cell phone for it. If I had broadvoice soft-phone I wouldn’t even need skype.

I have talked (praised) most of these items before, but when you use them all together you have a very smooth travel experience. I will most likely be using most if not all of this gear on my next extended trip. Now if only Amtrak could accommodate a nice ON TIME trip and travel would be painless.

The train is approaching Penn now. About an hour and 15 minutes late. So I will wrap this up so I can put the powerbook away. More mobile reviews when I use the stuff and have time to write about them! This post was written on Tuesday afternoon 5-17-05…

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Mac Spotlight

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When google came out with Gmail I said so what. I don’t need a free email address with tons of space, I have my own domain. When people said you can use it to search for mail contents, I said I didn’t need that, and I didn’t want google “seeing” everything I got in email. When Microsoft and google both came out with desktop search tools I was skeptical. When Apple came out with spotlight I was just as skeptical.

I tried spotlight out last week when I installed 10.4 on my mini. It seemed cool, but I didn’t think of much use for it right away. The other day I configured Apples mail client to see if it was better than entourage. It has its advantages, and so does entourage. Then I realized that all mail located in my Apple mail client is indexed into spotlight. I was still skeptical until I did my first search. I was looking for a piece of mail in my inbox (1 of 500 messages currently there). I typed the first name of the person sending the mail, and a word I knew was in the subject or body of the message. Spotlight spit back 3 possible answers and sure enough 1 of them was exactly what I was looking for. No need to create folders and sort through my inbox every week or so. All I need to do now is just dump my mail into an offline folder (i use IMAP for online storage) and just run a search when I need something.

Because of the spotlight searching ability I may start using Mail over Entourage. Apparently Entourage is not indexed in spotlight, but they (Microsoft) claim there will be a plug in for the Entourage database at some point that will allow indexing. I for one eagerly await the release of that. Until then you may find me using Mail for mail, and entourage for contacts and calendar. I just wish Mark/space, Apple & Palmone would get sync’ing perfected so I can use iCal and Address book with categories on my mac and have the categories carry over to my palm and then over to my PC when I am at work on Outlook.

Mac Dev Lessons

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I have been playing with Apache, PHP, MySQL & Surgemail on of all machines my Macmini. I was still having issues with the new linux box so I messed around with these programs on the mac. Man most of it was easier than the linux setup, but it was still hard. I found several prebuilt install packages for most of the programs I was playing with.

I learned a few valuable lessons today. First never install anything you don’t know how to uninstall. Doing technology for as long as I have, I should know that by now, but I guess not! Second, I need a setup for testing and messing around and a separate environment where I keep working things like my current website, email, etc.

Right now I actually have my website running on my mini. I don’t want to keep it there, but for now until I sort out my linux issues it will remain. Tomorrow I am going to do mothers day stuff so I probably wont have time to mess with this stuff. Hopefully I will get to some more during the week.

iChat Plus Jabber = Cool

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I never really warmed up to Apples iChat program until this week. I liked AIM. I never really used MSN. So I stuck with AIM. I like AIM (the service, NOT the program) only because I could not find a better program that will get me on AIM (the service not the program). GAIM, Trillian, etc didn’t do it for me.

On the flip side I use Jabber at work. I love it. It is another fantastic tool that Gus turned me onto years ago (wow, it has been years). Well my love of jabber and my use of my Mac had issues since there was no good jabber client for the mac. I have been using PSI for a while now. it is a good tool, but it had some serious quirks that I didn’t like. Actually they drove me crazy, but I had no other tool that came close to it on the Mac. Then came Tiger. I was pleasantly surprised when I found that iChat now supports jabber. After a few minutes of tinkering I figured out how to get my jabber server up on my iChat software. A few customizations with iChat (that I didn’t know I could do before) and now I am thinking differently about iChat.

Now I have another windows program that works as good or better on my Mac! Dare I dream to work completely off the mac without dealing with my Thinkpad crashing all the time? I have to stop myself from getting excited!

Lazy Saturday

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I hung out at home yesterday. I watched a bunch of TV off my Tivo, and finished installing Mac OS 10.4 on my mini’s. I am almost done on that front. I moved my iTunes music collection to my work mini before I went to bed.

I didn’t do as much cleaning of my apartment as I would have hopped. Maybe tomorrow.

Today I am planning on going to John’s for some Halo on the Xbox. Not sure what time I am leaving. I should probably get showered and dressed now just to be sure I am ready. More later.

Police Disturbance

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After picking up my copy of Mac OS 10.4 (see last post) I was off to my office to pic up my Mini there so I could install the new OS over the weekend. As I got out of the subway at union square I was greeted with more crazyness. Some sort of bike protest was planned (i think) and the cops were out in force to deter the people from doing it. It was the second time in 2 months that I saw that many Police bikes in one place.

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I got my mini from work and then met up with Cari, Jack, & Rajive for drinks around the corner from work. Jay & Gretchen meet up with us and J, G, Cari, & I went to dinner. It was a nice end to a very interesting day.

OS Tiger (10.4)

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I told myself I would wait, or I didn’t need it. But when Apple finally released tiger, I decided I wanted to go get it. I didn’t realize that it wasn’t available until 6pm Friday. I thought it would be available Friday. Turns out it was available just around the time I was done dropping the rental car off and able to go down to SOHO to the Apple store.

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I got to the store and I told myself I should flee right now. The place was mobbed. There was a line around the corner and halfway down the block to get in. This was probably like 6:30PM. I figured I would get on line and see how long it would take. I could always leave.

I am glad I stayed. it was weird. There were tons of people. A guy in a tiger suit (sorry no photo’s). People with video camera’s. It was an interesting spectacle. People kept walking by going I wonder what is going on at the apple store that had such a line. By waiting on line I think I may have become one of “those” Mac people.

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Thankfully I didn’t listen to myself and I stayed on line. After less than 15 minutes I was in the store, grabbed my copy of Tiger and was on my way to the line. A store employee “suggested” I go upstairs because of less of a line as he moved me towards the stairs. I am glad I listened. it was crowded upstairs but I got on line and only 1 other person was in front of me. With less than 30 minutes passed from the time I got on line, I was on my way out of the store. Not bad. I didn’t linger to look at the warez since it was crowded.

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Missed Appointments

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I was going to meet up with Gus last night for dinner. Then I wasn’t. Then I was, but I ended up canceling. I started getting a migraine (very common recently) around 1 or 2PM Friday so I decided to go home and head off the problem. I left G a VM saying I was out of it and canceling. I feel bad since I never see him anymore. Except of course for going to the Apple store with him on Thursday and then to lunch. That was sudden and unexpected. He finally got a MacMini. I got a Bluetooth USB adapter for my Mini at home. Miguel got an Airport Express for his apartment. Jay and Danny just came along for the trip.

Since we never see Gus much we went to lunch down in SOHO. We found a little italian resteraunt. it was good and cheap, until we all digested it. Then it was not so good:(

I will try to reschedule with the G man sometime next week or so. Seeing him I realize how much things have changed at work recently. It really is a different place to be for me without him. In some ways more stress full, and in others less.

Mac Mini Twins

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Being single + impulse buyer + tax return = new mac mini for Scott. I was at the apple store Monday. Gus may refer to it as his Mecca! I was looking for a bluetooth USB adapter for my Mini. I happened to ask if the Mini’s were in stock. I wanted another one, but I haven’t wanted to wait for it to show up so I haven’t ordered it yet. Stupid logic, but it works for me. The guy at the store said they had the high end one in stock. In a moment of weakness I said I will take it.

Now I use my mini at home almost excessively. I sometimes use my Thinkpad or my HP desktop, but very rarely. The Thinkpad is only for work emergencies. that happens enough to warrant me taking it home every night. The HP is my DVR and not much else these days. I live off of my Mini. That is why I wanted another one. I spend 10 hours a day at work and allot of it is on a computer. hey I am in the Technology field. So I figured dropping a Mini at my desk would be great. I can do allot (but not all) of my work on a mac. And the mini is portable so I can throw it in my bag and take it with me when I need to. The logic worked for me. As I said I had tax return money. So now I have more computer than I can count. Well that is not true. I have 1 PC desktop, 2 mac desktops, and 1 mac laptop. The rest of the computers I discuss are not technically mine. The Thinkpad is the works. But it makes sense if you look at it a certain way. I need a PC at home, and I need a Mac. Another mac for work, and the powerbook for when I travel. Well in my head the logic worked. I know I am crazy. you don’t need to tell me.

So far I am happy with both Mini’s. I should get my 512 meg ram upgrade for the new mini in a day or so. I didn’t want to shell out the outrageous price for the 1gig chip again. With my new camera phone I can take better pictures of the inside of the unit compared to the bad ones I took when we opened my first mini.

Update, I got the 512 Meg ram upgrade. Jayson had the handy putty knives from the last time we did this and had the memory upgraded on this new mini in 20 minutes. I have it sitting on my desk at work. I was able to use it for more than like 80% of the day Friday. I need to find a good open source SSH client for OS X. I am starting to make a list of business software that I could use on the Mac.

I got the new mini to bluetooth sync with my Treo 650 after about 2 minutes of trying. It worked like a charm. So much simpler than my horror with the 3com PCMCIA card with my Thinkpad, and the Xircom bluetooth card that I never really got to work right.