Technology

I store all phone numbers and email addresses in the Address Book or Contacts app of the devices I use.

• On Apple Mac OS X it’s the Address Book app
• On IOS it’s the Contacts app
• On Android it’s Contacts
• On my webmail it’s Google’s Contacts

I also add spouse and child names where I know them. For members of my extended family, I have cards for the spouses, parents, and children. That way I get birthday reminders automatically in my calendar.

None of these apps have the smarts to make it easy to link a spouse card with a contact without a lot of repeat data entry. Well, the IOS app lets me select another card, but that’s it.

Tags: Android, Cross-platform software, Gmail, Google Contacts, IOS, Web 2.0, Webmail

My main workhorse is an eMachines eM250 10.1″ netbook. All my email, calendar and important software works via the cloud so I can use any machine with a web-browser. I learned that lesson in the Great London Laptop Crash of 2008.

However there are some items I use local storage for:

• genealogy research
• music, video, podcasts and other media
• ebooks, PDF’s, and reference material
• film and TV project producer files (budgets, head shots, contracts)
• software development and scripting (especially for iPad apps)
• GPG signing and encryption keys

Maybe the NBN will give me the speed to store all that stuff on the cloud, but for now it is a lot of data that represents a significant part of my work and home life.

Tags: Apple, Netbook, Technology/Internet

Unsupported Apple ID: iCloud requires an Apple ID that is an email address (including @me.com addresses)

I have had an Apple ID that predated iTunes. It wasn’t in the form of an email address, it was just “funpaul”.

Now that I have an iPhone 4S and am developing apps for  iOS I thought I should start using iCloud. But I was getting this error

Unsupported Apple ID:
iCloud requires an Apple ID that is an email address (including @me.com addresses).

Unfortunately the Learn More button is worse than useless

Tags: App Store, Apple I, IPhone, itunes, MobileMe

I received this email – up front warning it’s a scam:

(If you are not in charge of this please transfer this email to your President or appropriate person, thanks)

Dear President,

We are the department of Asian Domain registration service in china, have something to confirm with you. We formally received an application on April 18, 2012. One company which self-styled “Daess Investment, Inc” were applying to register “zagz” as Network Brand and following domain names:

zagz.asia
zagz.cn
zagz.com.cn
zagz.com.tw
zagz.hk
zagz.in
zagz.net.cn
zagz.org.cn
zagz.tw

After our initial checking, we found the name were similar to your company’s, so we need to check with you whether your company has authorized that company to register these names. If you authorized this, we will finish the registration at once. If you did not authorize, please let us know within 7 workdays, so that we will handle this issue better. Out of the time limit we will unconditionally finish the registration for “Daess Investment, Inc”.

Best Regards,

Tags: domain name, scam, Spam

Broken Screen by John Julian Hansen Denmark / sxc.hu

My main workhorse is a eMachines m250 netbook. Last night it decided to crash. Now it only boots under XP safe mode or Linux from a USB.

Most of my apps are on the cloud in some way or other, so I am not actually missing anything. But it is inconvenient, there are some local files I’ve moved to a USB stick to keep working.

In the past, a system crash like this would have shut me down for at least a few days. I’ve wasted this morning trying to recover the machine. But now I give up, time for some sort of netbook distro of Linux and move on. Working that out will waste a few more hours later tonight.

Tags: Cloud clients, Computing, Linux, Netbook, Tweetdeck Inc., XP

The Bad Behavior plugin for WordPress is great, it denies spambots even seeing your blog before they try to spam you. But there are four specific issues to be aware of with Bad Behavior 2.0.43.

4 conflicts when using the Bad Behavior plugin

1) On WordPress with WP-Super Cache plugin

Bad Behavior must be enabled in WP-Super Cache’s configuration in order to protect PHP Cached or Legacy Cached pages. Bad Behavior cannot protect mod_rewrite cached (Super Cached) pages.

mod-rewrite is the fastest and most efficient way to cache the pages. So if you Super Cache your pages make sure you’ve configured everything correctly or don’t bother using BB. Alternatively if you want both WPSC and BB you must select Advanced options to use PHP or Legacy caching. Then you must configure the WP Super Cache plugins options too.

Tags: plugin, wordpress

I’ve migrated the server this site runs on. Let me know if anything has broken in the move either in a comment or by email to paulz at this domain.

Here is a top level checklist for managing such a move. I’ll expand it as the post migration testing continues.

1. Check dependencies for your application and site
   1. PHP version & modules
   2. Database versions
   3. Apache modules
   4. Application hard coded file system paths
2. Copy file system files
   1. You can use SCP/FTP tools or rsync
3. Copy databases
   1. If files are small (<50MB gzip’ed) you can use phpMyAdmin to export then import to your new host.
   2. Larger sites will need to use FTP and command line tools.

Tags: checklist, host, hosting, isp, migrate

Years ago I moved to an email server accessible from my iPhone, laptop, netbook, notepad or desktop computer. Initially this was achieved by using the IMAP protocol which was supported by MS Outlook, Thunderbird, Mail.app and many other email clients on my various machines. I had configured each client to bcc: myself in order to ensure my sent mail was always available (not every client handled sent-mail correctly).

For the last 3 years I’ve used an entirely hosted solution, currently gmail. My email is always available on whatever machine I’m using. I am aware of privacy and security risks (a topic for a future post).

Tags: email, gtd, productivity

My wife’s phone is a Nokia 6085, it’s old but tiny and very reliable. It was also locked to the Telstra network in Australia.

Get your IMIE code first by typing *#06# on your keypad. Do this on either the main screen or in the dialing screen. You’ll need that IMEI shortly.

To unlock any GSM phone always first call your phone carrier’s customer service line while you have their SIM in the phone. It is the fastest and easiest way to unlock any phone. Most carriers will give you an unlock code once the phone is 3 to 6 months old. If you’ve had the phone for 2 years the unlock code should be free.

Tags: how to unlock nokia, imei, nokia, unlock

I lost the playcount in iTunes for Windows for some of my tracks.

Tonight I wanted to fix that without editing the Library.xml file – that’s too extreme. I envy Mac owners as they have wonderful Applescript collections to manage iTunes.

I found the awesome Liquid Parallax scripts but didn’t like manually editing the javascript file to set the new play count. So I hacked it together with some Windows Script Hosting magic to invoke a input dialog box in javascript. So the script now asks you to input the new play count.

Installation instructions for Adjust Play Count in iTunes for Windows:

1. Download AdjustPlayCount.zip and unzip the contents somewhere on your hard-drive. This will give you a 3KB file called AdjustPlayCount.wsf

Tags: ipod, itunes for windows, windows, windows script