Travel tool: Mini Surge Protector with USB Charger

I carry one USB charger and a simple extension cord in my bag. This Belkin product is a sure thing for my carry-on bag:

Belkin Mini Surge Protector with USB Charger - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

....stylish surge protector power strip looks like it would be right at home in any mobile Mac user's bag. It includes two powered USB ports for charging iPhones, iPods, and the like, as well as three AC outlets...

...The Belkin Mini Surge Protector is "coming soon" for $24.99.

The Belkin site mentions a "360-degree rotating plug with 4 locking positions". I assume the plug fully retracts.

This is a great boon when fighting for an airport outlet; most travelers will gladly relinquish an outlet in favor of the protector. My only change is that I'd like to see it ship with a 6 inch extension cord, I'll look for one that would fit.

Calendar sharing bugs and limitations in Google Apps vs Google Standard

In honor of Google's Outlook synchronization I've been synchronizing my personal Outlook/Palm calendar to my calendar on our family site. (Corporate Outlook sync to Google Calendar is, regrettably, an unfair bending of corporate rules.)

So far, not too bad. I've done multiple personal Outlook/gCal syncs and one Palm/Outlook sync without duplicate events. So far.

Unfortunately, I have multiple Google identities. So I need to be able share a calendar between my primary (older) Gmail identity, which binds all my personal email and my primary blogs, and my family domain identity.

That's where I'm running into design limitations and bugs with Google Calendar and Google Apps Calendars. At the moment they include:

• A Google Calendar has both a "Private Address" and a "Calendar Address". The Private Address enables sharing with a single individual. A Google Apps Calendar has a "Google App Domain Address" and a "Calendar Address". It's likely that Google re-purposed the "Private Address" function to enable "Domain sharing", but that means you can't privately share a Google Apps Calendar outside of a Google App domain.
• There's an bug in Google Apps Calendar. Under certain operations it gets stuck in a mode where it will only share busy/free information -- even if you enable public sharing at both the domain and calendar level.

So I can't meet my primary goal -- of keeping my sync'd Family Domain Calendar private while enabling read-write access to it from my personal Gmail account (outside the family domain).

Even the private address functionality of the standard Gmail Calendar has a pretty limited set of functionality:

Note: the private address was designed for your use only, so be sure not to share this address with others. If you want to let others view your calendar, we recommend that you share your calendar's public address (or "Calendar Address") with them. If you accidentally share your calendar's private address, click on the "Reset Private URLs" link to regenerate your calendar's private address.

Google does have certain cultural limitations -- there's such an institutional bias to openness that they can't seem to get their heads around access controls.

I may experiment with flipping things around. Maybe I can sync my personal Outlook account to my Google Standard Calendar, and then share that Calendar within the family domain.

3/15/2008: I tried again today and from my Google Apps account I can now share the calendar with full privileges to my Gmail identity. From my Gmail identity I can now edit the calendar. Is someone from Google reading this blog?! (I presume the fix is coincidental, but ...)

4/24/2009: I've just run into the same od bug again. My Google Apps account was set to allow sharing only in the domain. I created a calendar in my owner/admin account. I then changed sharing to allow non-domain shares. I couldn't then make the calendar accessible. I tried various tricks as described in comments such as trying to make the calendar universally editable, etc. After a half hour or so of playing around I found I could create another calendar in the same account and that one was shareable. I then returned to the primary calendar and ... that one was shareable too.

I don't know if anything I did made a difference. Maybe it just takes an hour or so for sharing changes to really take effect. Clearly Google hasn't fixed this problem in the past year.

I'm back to Camino

I used Camino years ago -- it still runs on an ancient 10.3.9 iBook of ours and it's highlighted from days of old on my legacy web pages.

Eventually I switched to Firefox for OS X. I use it on XP, and for a while it was the best choice for working with Google's products and the general web alike.

Lately, however, Firefox has been pretty lousy on OS X. So I tried Safari, it seemed at first to work with Google stuff.

Alas, no way Safari. I got tired of pasting text into a rich-text field and having it appear in outside of the field borders. It's a mess. Safari (beta) is doing things that it shouldn't ever do - no matter how buggy the JavaScript.

OmniWeb is based on WebKit, so I didn't bother trying it (that was my original OS X browser, before Safari came out). That left Camino; it's been very recently updated (Feb 2008).

I've been using Camino again for a week. It feels much faster than Firefox or even Safari, it seems to work better than Firefox with Google stuff, and, merciful Minerva, the damned keyboard shortcuts mostly work (cmd-I brings up "page info" rather than italicizing in the rich text editor, but cmd-c and cmd-v work).

So far Camino has been extremely well behaved. I've used it with Google Blogger, Documents, Spreadsheets, Calendar and Sites and it's worked with all of them.

Definitely worth a look.

Thanks Camino team. If you supported Amazon donations or Google checkout I'd send you some money! (Sorry, I don't do PayPal.)

Update 3/17/2008: Camino is giving me a few problems. It seems to miss clicks on occasion -- so I have to click twice for some items. Google expects Ctrl commands so the Cmd shortcuts aren't as useful as expected. Most of all I've been getting odd hangs using Google Calendar. Of course I can't say any other browser is better!

The iPhone is more like Palm OS than OS X?

Two interesting points from recent Daring Fireball posts about TouchOS (formerly known as iPhone OS X):

1. No multitasking. iPhone OS switches apps, exiting on switch.
2. Apps only have access to their own data (sandbox). (I think they may have access to some common pooled data though.)

Both of these limitations were part of the original US Robotics PalmPilot OS (PalmOS), and years ago conventional wisdom said Palm desperately needed a multitasking OS. (I would have had a different set of priorities myself; I thought the memory management issues were much more important than the multitasking problems.)

Jobs, during yesterday's presentation, said something like iPhone OS "draws heavily from OS X". DF has hinted the same thing over the past six months -- "inspired by OS X, but not OS X".

We need a name for this OS, maybe TouchOS. There's obviously a lot in common with Tiger 10.4, but the iPhone team did some radical surgery to build the TouchOS. Only they know the basis for these decisions -- hardware limitations, memory limits, security issues, stability, desperation ...

The lack of multitasking suggests TouchOS can't do Spotlight, or any indexing tool -- that requires multitasking. I wonder how many odd functional omissions are related to underlying OS issues. (The lack of task management, I'm convinced, must come from Jobs himself. I suspect he simply hates To Do lists.)

I'm not worried about the multitasking limitations. There's obviously enough available to enable enough functionality to succeed, the similarities to PalmOS 1.0 are really more curious than important.

Limitations of iPhone iCal synchronization

From a Tidbits discussion post (emphasis mine): 

TidBITS - Why would Apple not fully enable iCal on the iPhone?

My wife and I wrote a few weeks ago about our frustration with Apple's iCal features on the iTouch and iPhone. We have 6 calendars that work fantastically on our home and work iMacs, but we are confused looking at the amazing limited version of iCal for iPhone. Can anyone explain to us the limitations Apple was facing that forced them to opt for a version of iCal where you can't make appointments on your different iCal calendars (or view them, for that matter) on the go? Why would anyone using Mac syncing of their iCal calendars even consider the iPhone and iTouch??? We won't be able to get either until this is fixed...

A man after my own heart. I know I'll feel the same pain. This why we need the SDK, so small vendors can provide solutions for power users. Apple can't justify the cost of supporting folks like us.

In a related note I've a post pending on Google's gCal sharing and notification services, and the issues (design and bugs) related to multiple Google Apps and Google Standard identities.

Google's official Outlook calendar sync has arrived

I've been waiting for this almost exactly one year.

Official Google Blog: Google Calendar Sync:

...This was my life for a whole year before we started working on Google Calendar Sync, a 2-way synching application between Google Calendar and the calendar in Microsoft Outlook. I was probably the most excited person on the team when we started developing it, because now I can access my calendar at home or on my laptop, on Google Calendar or in Outlook. When I add an event to the Outlook calendar on my laptop, Google Calendar Sync syncs it to my Google Calendar -- and since I also have Google Calendar Sync running on my desktop, the event then syncs from Google Calendar to Outlook calendar on my desktop. All of my calendar views are always up to date, and I can choose whichever one I want to use....

Hallelujah. Bad news for gSyncIt and SyncMyCal but this was really something only Google can make work.

I'll have a report on my experience soon -- I sync my aging Palm to Outlook at home. In particular I'll be curious to see if it works with Google Apps.

Update: I had events on my Google Apps calendar from prior experiments, so I cleaned them out prior to my first sync (reset calendar to new state). I also backed up my Outlook Calendar by copying it to a PST file, so if it gets messed up I'll just delete and restore. (Takes only a few seconds. This doesn't work on an Exchange account btw, but I don't use Exchange at home.)

Update: It does work with Google Apps. As of today it will only sync with the primary calendar for the account. So if you want to sync work and home and view them together, you need to sync work to one Google account and home to another. You could, for example, set up a Team Edition calendar for work, and a Gmail calendar for home. You can then share the two to provide an integrated view -- something I've wanted for years. Then you can see how well this maps to the iPhone calendar! Exchange/Outlook Calendar work is much trickier than at home, so I won't be messing with Exchange any time soon.

I ended up syncing over 1100 events in Outlook to the newly emptied Google Calendar.

Update 3/8/2008: There's a bit of trickiness in the configuration.

Update 5/8/2008: It mostly works, but there's some problem with all day events between Google Calendar, Outlook and my Palm. They end up turning from an "all day event" into a "24 hour event" then time-shifting an hour. The fix is probably to get rid of my all day events -- until my iPhone arrives.

Another problem is that the default install launches Google Calendar Sync for every user. The fix is simple. Find Google Calendar Sync in something like: 'C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup'. Move it to something like 'C:\Documents and Settings\jfaughnan\Start Menu\Programs\Startup'.

Gmail address features: + and .

Wow. So if your email address is fredflintstone@bedrock.info you can start using fred.flintstone@bedrock.info any time you want. Gmail will treat the two identically:

Official Gmail Blog: 2 hidden ways to get more from your Gmail address:

...Append a plus (' ') sign and any combination of words or numbers after your email address. For example, if your name was hikingfan@gmail.com, you could send mail to hikingfan friends@gmail.com or hikingfan mailinglists@gmail.com.

Insert one or several dots ('.') anywhere in your email address. Gmail doesn't recognize periods as characters in addresses -- we just ignore them. For example, you could tell people your address was hikingfan@gmail.com, hiking.fan@gmail.com or hi.kin.g.fan@gmail.com. (We understand that there has been some confusion about this in the past, but to settle it once and for all, you can indeed receive mail at all the variations with dots.)...

The trick with the + suffix is very old, I think it might be a unix thing. It's neat to see it work in Gmail.

Personally, I prefer to use disposable Bloglines email addresses for the sorts of things the + suffixes are used for.