Tasks and calendar items - what I'd like

I really do spend too much time thinking about tasks, calendars, projects and the like. It recently occurred to me that I would like to see support for something that's a hybrid between a task and an appointment.

You could think of it as a task that has a date, time and span. Or you could think of it as an appointment that shows up on a task list and has a priority/urgency attribute.

The idea is that I'd schedule it as an appointment and it would show up in my task list. If I deleted the appointment I'd have the option of deleting the task, or just editing the task. If I deleted the task then I'd delete the appointment. Completing the task would leave the appointment untouched.

If I see anything like that I'll attach a note here.

Google Video Chat – suddenly unstable

Ahh, the perils of life on the cutting edge. I gave Google Video Chat a grade of B- a week or so ago, but now it’s as unstable on XP as it’s always been on OS X. Sessions dropping at 10-20 minutes, problems starting up, etc.

I am very fond of my Logitech Vision Pro webcam though. It’s marketed for OS X, but it’s the best thing going on XP. There are no thrice-damned drivers to load, so it’s easier on the CPU and I don’t have to live with the horrible quality of modern device drivers (which are routinely outsourced to the lowest bidder).

Nothing to do to wait for a fix from Google. There are SO many things that can go wrong with these solutions …

Corporate iPhone: WLAN connection and Outlook web

The iPhone is a lousy business phone. Of course the BlackBerry ain’t so great either – the key difference is that the BB usually comes with a pass to the corporate exchange server. That’s a big deal though.

On the other hand, I’ve made some progress.

Briefly:

1. The iPhone’s support for WPA Enterprise let me connect quickly to our corporate LAN. It was a lot easier than connecting my XP laptop, but I’m not sure I have all privileges the laptop has – even though I’m authenticating the same way.
2. With the iPhone I can use the web interface to Exchange server. It’s hardlyl mobile friendly, but it runs on Safari/iPhone.

Connecting directly to Exchange server is another matter.

Even if it were officially supported, an Exchange connection would wipe my personal iPhone calendaring and contact information. The only way I know of to have both corporate and personal data on an iPhone is to sync corporate data with Exchange and Personal data with MobileMe. The latter, of course, is remarkably inadequate.

For now the Exchange connection isn’t available, but if it were it would be exquisitely painful to give up the power of Google Calendar in favor of MobileMe Calendar. I really do need a miraculous improvement in MobileMe …

iTunes iPhone Applications menu grayed out?

One of our iPhones had a grayed out iTunes Applications menu.

It would update existing apps during a sync when something else was going to the phone (like music or videos), but if no other sync was occurring apps wouldn't update.

I couldn't tweak any of the settings that limit which apps went to that iPhone.

Our other iPhone was fine.

The answer was here: Apple - Support - Discussions - "Sync Applications" grayed out in iTunes ...

I'd enabled 'Restrictions' on this particular phone, which is now used as an iTouch. I was trying to keep the kids out of trouble. I bet I'd restricted application installation.

Removing restrictions fixed the problem.

This may not be so much a bug as a usability problem. I think iTunes should display a message in addition to graying out the Applications tab.

Update 5/16/09: This really is a usability issue. It happened again, and it puzzled me again. OK, so it's a dementia issue too. Fortunately I have my external memory to search (my blogs).

Update 8/3/09: I just installed iPhone 3.01 and noticed the Disable Restrictions menu has an "installing apps" control. I think that's new in 3.0, maybe even new in 3.01. Glad to see this problem taken care of!

Reading netbook news - translated from German

I'm interested in ultra-cheap no-name netbooks (just wait 'till Linux/Chromestellation comes out!). So when Scoble mentioned the German Netbook news blog, I decided to try Google Reader's machine translation.

The Feed wasn't hard to find, in part because German is relatively close to English. I added it to Google Reader, then chose the Feed Setting option to "translate into my own language".

Here's an example of the result:

Netbooks with VIA Nano CPU finally come and not too tight! Tim Brown explains you in this short video, what we should see how the strategy of VIA looks and there ever been a rudimentary preview on ARM / VIA systems, and easily so sauklein ne animal and battery life are:

It's not exactly lyrical, but it's not bad either.

Ahh, but but most of the posts don't include the full content.

Here's where Google struts its stuff.

When I click on the link from Google Reader, Google sends me to a feedburner hosted translated page version!

Translated version of http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/AsusEeePcNews/~3/509222929/

Reason*, but we live in interesting times.

So now I'm following my first foreign language blog.

Now I'm looking for a Korean blog on netbooks ...

*God just doesn't work for me.

Update 1/14/09: There are a few rough edges ...

1. Because the link out from the foreign language post goes to a proxy translator corporate webwasher blocks access.
2. The auto-translation feature only works when you view the blog in isolation, if you click on Google Groups folder and view it in the company of other posts you get the original language.
3. A link from a translated post always uses the proxy translator -- even when it's a link to an English source.
   

Palm Pre is Exchange sync based

Microsoft now has monopoly control over the standard for corporate data synchronization:

Ars talks to Palm at CES, gets under the hood with the pre

... The device supports over-the-air Exchange ActiveSync for contacts, email, calendar, and tasks. 'We use EAS at Palm, so we live and breath and eat it.'...

This has more than a few implications. See my Gordon's Notes rant on the big problem.

It means, among other things, that a huge amount of the value of a smartphone is whether or not it will be granted access to the corporate Exchange server. It also means that it's rather hard to image anything but Exchange server at the heart of any modern corporation ...

But now I digress into Gordon's Notes opinion territory.

Incidentally, does anyone know of a vendor preparing a utility that would be installed on a PC and would

1. Read/write Outlook data.
   Publish Post
2. Provide a local Exchange ActiveSync service so one could connect to the machine via TCP/IP and sync that way?

Update 6/10/09: See comments for some useful definitions. For example, old ActiveSync is now called "Outlook Anywhere" and it's implemented as Outlook-style RPC over HTTPS. This page provides Outlook-centric implementation details and links to Microsoft references.

Google alerts will now deliver to a feed

I missed this one.

I haven't been that interested in Google Alerts because I'm trying to decrease email inflow, not increase it. By contrast Yahoo! and Live Search both have feed options associated with search creation. (So does the NLM's PubMed academic search engine, but that's a bit esoteric.)

I just realized today that there's a "Deliver to" option on the Google Alerts page called "Feed".

I had to select it twice to make it work (user error?) but my search on "godson netbook chrome google" [1] now has a feed which I've added to my Google Reader feeds.

PS. Google Reader now has a "translate to my language" option in feed settings. Anyone else notice that Google's on some kind of new exponential growth track?

[1] Why this search? Godson is the english version of a code name for China's internal chip development, designed to fuel a new generation of ultra-low cost laptops for the Chinese world. For the rest, see (Gordon's Notes where my deluded ravings live):

• Laptop, batteries not included
• Squeezed: Microsoft, Chromestellation, netbooks and the price trajectory of calculators
• Chromestellation
  

Copilot vs. LogMeIn for supporting your parent's Mac

I hope this is what I asked for some time ago -- a version of Copilot that will let me control my mother's machine whenever I want, without her having to do anything or even know about it ...

Copilot OneClick for Macintosh - Joel on Software

... The new Copilot OneClick feature lets you preinstall the software on all the computers you connect to frequently, so every time your dad calls up needing help with the accounting software running his Ponzi scheme, you just click one link and you’re logged onto his computer.

As usual, it works through all kinds of firewalls, proxies, and NATs without any configuration, it’s protected by 128-bit SSL, and there’s never anything to configure.

Today, the Copilot team released the Macintosh version of the OneClick feature, so all the Copilot goodness is available on Windows or Mac, or both (you can control Windows computers from Macs and vice versa). And it’s cheap, by which I mean, inexpensive—I don’t mean that you can just buy it two drinks and take it back to your apartment and expect to be taking a bubble bath with it—most people get the $19.95 unlimited plan; it’s even free on weekends when we have lots of unused bandwidth.

Copilot uses VNC, so it's very slow. Nowhere near as useful as Citrix or Windows Remote Desktop. Alas, for OS X VNC is about as good as it gets. It's enough for troubleshooting if you're patient and if the screen sizes are reasonably similar.

Update 1/8/09: See also - Computer support for persons with special needs.

Update 4/25/09: As advised in a comment on this post, I ended up using the free LogMeIn instead. I installed the LogMeIn client on my mother's dual core Mac Mini running 10.4. I then installed the (theoretically optional but actually essential) controller client on my MacBook running 10.5. It's quite slow, but I'm able to control her computer with no action required on her part other than turning on the machine. Copilot wasn't price competitive, and it required my mother to do too much. With LogMeIn she has only to turn on the computer.

Update 6/7/10: LogMeIn stopped working. When I upgraded the Safari plugin on my MacBook running 10.5 it crashed Safari. There's still no 64bit support for Safari on OS X 10.6. I think LogMeIn has given up; I uninstalled them. I reviewed CoPilot again, but there prices for what I want have gone up a lot. I don't have any working solution at this time.

Turn a 1st generation iPhone into an iTouch

A friend has an abandoned flaky first generation iPhone she donated to our kids (it visited water at one time).

We're using it as an iTouch. It works reasonably well despite some odd bugs. The trick is:

1. Use Data Reset to wipe completely.
2. Sync with iTunes Library.
   
3. Put in Airplane mode.
4. Re-enable WiFi. The 2.2 software has this capability since some airplanes have WiFi service.

I turned off location services and push though the first should be irrelevant in airplane mode.

Now it's a somewhat slow and memory poor iTouch -- but free. I sync it with our iTunes Library so it inherits the games and media from my iPhone. (You can sync DRMd music to an unlimited number of iPod/iPhone devices from one Library, but I think you can only sync apps to five iPhone/iTouch devices.)

Blogger in draft: much better with Safari

After a hiatus of a few months I've again begun using Safari with "Blogger in draft " (I don't recommend trying Safari with regular blogger). I figured since Chrome uses WebKit that Google might have fixed some Blogger problems.

It's much improved, though there are obvious quirks especially with "BlogThis!". The pseudo-HTML view is now clean, without the carriage return/span/paragraph tag mess of months past. I love the ability to resize the editing panel beyond Google's mail slot standard. This is a feature available only to Safari (and Chrome?).

It's probably worth a cautious look. I'll report back here if/when I run into problems.

Update 1/7/09: Nope, not quite. Too many odd problems. For example, when I quote a series of paragraphs extra line spaces are introduced that I have to manually remove.  Not to mention that the creaky old BlogThis! blogger bookmarklet works quite poorly with Safari.

It's back to Camino/Firefox again.

Enabling spotlight search of OS X mail.app with Gmail IMAP

I've been using various flavors of OS X Mail (mail.app) with Gmail for years. The setup, particularly mapping to local folders, has had its quirks, but it's worked well for Emily. For my part I usually use Gmail directly, and, for reasons of inertia, I use an old copy of eudora/xp to archive my email on a home machine.

Recently, I tried doing a search of my Gmail respository from OS X Mail. I got almost no results. Gmail, by contrast, returned hundreds of hits.

It wasn't hard to figure out the cause of this discrepancy. The default mail.app IMAP setup doesn't actually store messages locally. It only creates a local store for messages that have been read locally, and only those may be indexed by Spotlight.

To create a searchable IMAP repository, you need to change an advanced setting ...

Mail.app Proper Set up on MaxOSX for IMAP

... Next go to Advanced, and the defaults for Enable this Account [checked], Include when automatically checking for new mail [checked], Compact mailboxes automtically [checked and greyed out], the location of the account directory, and Keep Copies of Messages for Offline Viewing [drop down menu with All messages and their attachments selected] should be fine...

I had to restart Mail.app to activate this setting. Then I let it run overnight, pulling in and indexing 45K messages. My Spotlight searches now work against this email archive.

There's still a problem with Mail.app search of Gmail files -- the Gmail tag/IMAP folder mapping means messages may be replicated between folders. (Because a Gmail message may have many tags, but an IMAP message can belong to only one folder.)

A workaround for image uploading to Microsoft’s Sharepoint Wiki.

There are some good things to say about Microsoft’s Sharepoint based Wiki.

There’s also, sadly, one very bad thing. The approach to image embedding is lousy.

Happily I have found a convoluted workaround that uses one of my favorite apps – Windows Live Writer …

1. Create a SP blog that will hold the images that will be referenced in the wiki.
2. Use Windows Live Writer to post to the wiki-image-blog. Drop your image into WLW, resize it as needed, etc. If you like, use WLW to write your image associated wiki text first draft as well.
3. After you post to the Wiki, copy and paste image and text into the Wiki editor rich text field.

This takes surprisingly little time, far less than any other option I've read of. I admit, it is convoluted!

Update 1/11/09: I've been doing this for a while now. It's bloody brilliant, even if I have to say so myself. You can take advantage of the wiki-image-blog to attach a bit of metadata, including labels, to help with image reuse. If you read this and know anyone using Sharepoint 2007, I suggest send this on to them. They'll be forever grateful.

iPhone apps - visit the best ever contest

The rankings here are much less important than the selection:

2008 Best App Ever awards voting is underway - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

There are very important niche products, like ePocrates, that don't show up -- but the contest has most of the apps I like. They really don't, however, have a games category for the 6-12 yo group.

Visit it to find new apps you might like.

Unfortunately nobody is doing anything important with calendars -- because there's no iPhone API for calendars.

Update 1/2/09: Probably my most valuable app is GrandDialer -- an app that speeds use of Google's GrandCentral on the iPhone. Only of use to those with GrandCentral accounts -- but a superb value.

Ed Eubanks articles on OS X task, project and data management

Ed Eubanks is one of a handful of writers who tackles the very interesting but challenging intersection of personal information management, calendaring, task and project management and "getting things done".

His most recent column for About This Particular Macintosh outlines his plans for 2009: ATPM 15.01 - Next Actions: Article Line-up and updates his long, long lists of OS X "next action" apps. His complete archive is here.

Tidbits, and especially Matt Neuberg, cover the same domain -- such as Adam's latest column on Notebook 3.0. Matt's more or less moved on to work on FaceSpan, but you can read his past columns here or via a search on Tidbits.

I'm glad Eubanks is still working this domain. The killer problem for all these apps is proprietary file formats and data lock, I'm going to ask Ed to focus more on those topics.

Blu-ray and HDTV DRM - fighting back

DRM is not entirely evil. If not for DRM, there wouldn't be computer games.

Ok, so maybe that's a bad example.

If not for DRM, we probably wouldn't have much of a movie industry left.

Unfortunately, DRM, lends itself to nasty practices that, in the end, benefit no-one. So it's one of many technologies that has a chaotic sweet spot -- a dynamic balance point that requires that no participant have overwhelming power. In other words, a bit like international affairs.

So, in the defense of the balance, an update on the anti-DRM forces (Dan's Data, emphases mine)...

Atomic I/O letters column #89

Blu-Ray movies aren't meant to be viewable in high definition without an HDCP Copy Control Crap chain all the way from the player to the display device...

... "HDCP strippers" are hardware devices that take a DRM-ed DVI or HDMI signal and turn it into an unencrypted one. As with the old "signal enhancers" that were actually bought by people who wanted to copy VHS tapes, the stripper boxes are sold as "DVI amplifiers" ...

Strippers work by using decryption keys that the content companies can just "revoke", though. If they do that, all movies released ... [jg: after] ... key revocation will become un-decryptable by that particular model of stripper. [jf: so how do DRMd players get the new keys?]

So, as with DVDs in days of yore, software anti-DRM measures are a better solution. The Blu-Ray and HD-DVD encryption scheme was completely cracked in early 2007; that made it possible to extract the device keys from any high-def disc player, and use them in some other piece of software, which can then output the decrypted data in any way it likes, including to any old computer monitor...

... SlySoft's commercial package AnyDVD HD was the first to let you play or rip Blu-Ray movies without DRM (and, eight months after the people who made the more advanced "BD+" anti-copying system declared it'd be unbreakable for the next ten years, SlySoft cracked that too...), but now there are various others...

In this battle we don't want the pirates to win, but we don't want the DRM owners to win either. Let us raise a toast to stalemate.