How-To: Truly reset your .Mac sync data [Ars Technica]

I never have trouble finding company when it comes to whining about the reliability of .Mac syncing. It’s surely not fair to lay all of this at the feet of the .Mac developers — sync is, we are often reminded, “hard.” But if you want to rely on syncing your Calendars, Contacts, Preferences, snippets, Yojimbo, and what have you via .Mac in a battlefield environment, you’re going to need a strong stomach, a lot of patience, and reliable backups. Plus, friends, you will regularly have to reset frickin’ everything.

Entirely overfamiliar with that particular reality, I was pleased to get pointed toward David Chartier’s tutorial on saving your .Mac’s village by burning it to the ground. It’s a handy, illustrated companion piece to Apple’s own advice on scorching earth. Very handy, and, yeah, you will eventually need it. So print it out. Maybe even have it laminated.

Apple’s .Mac syncing features are sometimes no exception to these problems, and even though Apple provides a number of decent solutions in its .Mac sync support pages, they don’t always work. Fortunately, a brief adventure using .Mac sync chat support (found at the bottom of that aforelinked page) cleared up a repeating “merge/overwrite” sync dialog problem for me, and we felt the procedure was worth sharing.

FWIW, here’s a few other things I do (as a raving .Mac paranoiac):  read more »

Hi all, I've long been a reader and follow the site, but I've recently just got a simple idea for an app that I think could be really useful to people. My hope is that if it's good, that someone would like to code it. I'm not sure if this is the right place/site, but I figure you guys would have some good ideas/feedback.

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On the mac there are plenty of apps for time management and keeping track of what you need to do in the day. Being a terrible procrastinator I've probably tried them all.

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It has now been two months since I sold my laptop and started working with just a Mac Mini in my office and an iPhone, and I’ve more or less survived. I never expected it to be permanent, but unless my life changes drastically and I have to start traveling full-time, I could probably go on like this indefinitely. My real work hasn’t suffered, because I was doing all of that on the desktop anyway, and with Google Reader’s killer mobile version, I’ve been able to satisfy any web surfing urges away from the computer.  read more »

Safari AutoFill for iPhone and iPod Touch (Switchers’ Blog)

Babies, iPhones and very-high-security passwords can be a bitter cocktail; it’s really hard to enter a 28-character/mixed-case/special character password on the iPhone while you’re holding 15 lbs. of undulating infant. Trust me.

So, if you caught video of my recent interview with Agile Web Solutions’ Dave Teare, you could see how excited I was to learn about a then-upcoming beta which would support autofill name- and password-entering via secure bookmarklets on your iPhone. Well, the day has arrived, and, brother, am I ever loving this.

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From Dave’s post on the company’s blog:  read more »

Aha! Embeddable video for a third MacBreak interview at Macworld ‘08 has turned up — this one’s with Dave Teare at Agile Web Solutions, makers of 1Password.

As we discuss in the video, I’m really looking forward to seeing 1Password’s secure password bookmarklet for iPhone.

MacBreak: Macworld 2008/Agile Web Solutions

 MacBreak (iPod video) - MacBreak 122: Macworld 2008: 1Password  read more »

For quite a while now, Tasks Jr has been my task management tool of choice. I switched to it from my own Tinderbox-based system after I decided that having access to my list from any ‘net-connected system was important to me. But now I’ve switched again.

Over time, the aesthetics of Tasks Jr’s design, its limitations (which are resolved by the more advanced versions, I must admit), and the fact that a recent MySQL/PHP update at my web host caused problems made me think about finding another solution.  read more »

TUAW Interviews Merlin Mann

My tall, new friend Scott McNulty interviewed me yesterday for TUAW’s Macworld coverage — unintentionally providing me a fine bully pulpit from which to perpetuate my baseless theories and half-baked forecasts abut how Apple might eat the lunches of about three different industries over the next couple years.

If they can pull it off, if they can fix .Mac, and if they have the vision to re-imagine themselves as the company who makes your entire digital world safe, fun, ubiquitous, and flawlessly integrated.

Anyhow, on with the motley, but stay tuned after the jump for value-added hand-waving.

So, exactly what the hell nonsense am I talking about here?  read more »

When the iPhone came out this summer, I was locked into a contract with another cell phone carrier, one that I couldn’t escape on pain of a $200 surcharge. So I waited it out, and dreamed my little iPhone dreams all alone with my Plain Jane cell phone and suddenly archaic-looking iPod Video.

To be honest, I didn’t really need an iPhone. I work from home, rarely more than a few yards from a computer (we had two laptops and a Mini in our house at the time). I don’t travel for work, and when we go on vacation, I never bring work with me anyway. When I do leave the house for extended periods of time during the day, running errands, taking appointments, etc, it doesn’t matter because I’d trained myself to plan ahead for that situation. Besides, I never get any messages that can’t wait a couple hours until I get back to a computer anyway.

I was amazingly good at rationalizing away my need for an iPhone, but I still wanted one ever so badly. So last week I created a way out.  read more »

In the few weeks since I wrote my first plea to trim the fat from your iTunes library, I’ve continued purging my own collection. On the first pass, I simply deleted the clearly objectionable stuff, things that I couldn’t understand what made me want to keep them in the first place. It was rather easy, and like I said, it slimmed my corpulent media collection by a third.

Now though, it’s getting down to brass tacks, and I’m making some hard decisions about what to keep. I don’t need to do this for disk space, mind you, but as I’ve been trying to do a better job of organizing all my music and video with smarter lists and ratings, I’ve come to a simple conclusion: even if I still think it’s good, I just have too much.  read more »