According to an email I just received from Apple, an ‘iPad2 makes an ideal gift for fathers day’
I suspect if I gave one to my father, he would stare at it with a confused look and eventually use it to prop up something around the house !
Nice try Apple, but no sell on that front I’m afraid.
Last month I noticed that the calendar on my iPhone had a few duplicates. Worse, some of them were clearly wrong (x2 ‘Dad’s birthday’ items, one a day late !??).
The issue would seem to be something to do with the fact that I use Windows and Outlook to sync my calendar and contacts, and when I switched from my old iPhone 3 to my new iPhone 4, it seems it created a new calendar item in the .pst rather than just continuing with the existing one. Fair enough. My bad.
Issue now was, how to tidy the mess up? Solution, do it in Outlook.
First step was to get all appointments (even the incorrect ones) into a single calendar. To do this:-
In the Outlook open the Calendar section in the left hand nav. Note how it is possible to have multiple calendars with the same name (in the screenshot below circled in red).
Click the view drop down and select ‘All Appointments’. This will give you a table list view of all appointments in the chosen calendar.
Select the other calendar in the list and change it’s view to ‘All Appointments’. Now you can flick back and forth between the lists and compare them to see which calendar contains what.
In order to work out which one iTunes is using to sync with, create a dummy appointment on your iPhone in the calendar and then sync. The appointment will appear in only one of the calendars. Use the ‘All Appointments’ lists view to find which one this is. This is the calendar we want to keep.
Select the calendar that did not get the new appointment after syncing. Select all appointments with ‘CTRL+A’.
Now drag and drop all the appointments onto the calendar that you are going to keep going forward.
Now delete the superfluous calendar.
In the calendar we are keeping, in the ‘All Appointments’ view you can now edit/prune/delete the list of appointments until they are all correct. You can sort them by name to find duplicates and then correct/delete them as neccessary.
Now resync your iPhone, but this time, on the ‘Info’ tab, at the bottom in the ‘Advanced’ section, under the ‘Replace information on this iPhone’, tick the appointments checkbox.
The sync should remove the currently held appointments on your phone and replace them with the corrected ones from Outlook. You should also see the number of calendars drop down to x2, ‘From My PC’ calendar and ‘Other’ birthdays (the birthdays one is built into the iPhone, you cannot remove it, it obtains it’s data from the ‘Birthday’ field of the ‘Contacts’ app on the phone !
Eh voila :oD
I’ve recently been helping a friend with some web site stuff. Nothing too complex, just some php that results in some html and css.
Continually ftp’ing the files back and forth to my ISP hosted account was becoming labour intensive, so I figured I would just use the apache web server built into OS X on my Mac Mini.
Some notes:
The main apache config file is located at:
/etc/apache2/httpd.conf
Each user has a personal apache config file that specifies the location of their personal web folder location. This file is located at:
/etc/apache2/users/<username>.conf
Each user/logon gets a folder called ‘Sites’ in their home location (so /Users/<user>/Sites/). This folder is the root folder of your personal web folder name space.
When you access the site, the url to use is:
http://servername/~username
If you don’t like the tilde character (~) being part of the url, you can get around it by editing the users personal apache config file. Add the following to the top of the file:
/etc/apache/user/<username>.conf
Restart apache (either from the Preferences panel, or with ‘apachectl restart’ and you should be good to go.
So my logon on my Mac Mini is Scott. The file I need to edit is:
/etc/apache2/users/Scott.conf
And I need to add the line:
Alias /Scott “/Users/Scott/Sites/”
I also add:
Alias /scott “/Users/Scott/Sites/”
So I don’t have to worry about case sensitivity. So now instead of using:
http://mymacmini/~Scott
you should be able to use:
http://mymacmini/scott
Had to laugh at this one, possibly it will get a few parents off the hook having to have *that* akward conversation with their kids :o)
So, it’s almost here, but, do I actually want/need an iPad ?
This guy has created a handy little flow chart to aid in the decision, and while I guess it was intended as a stab at a bit of humour, for me it actually comes down to ‘do you have so much money you don’t care if it works particularly well or not ?’
While I have a lot of technology and gadgets, I purchase them because they perform some function that I deem I cannot be without. My PC, I simply can’t live without it. My laptop, well it’s my PC when I’m on the move. My iPhone, it’s so much more than a phone with the variety of apps available to me, but it also happens to be a phone too. And the list goes on.
But an iPad ? For my money, I have to agree with those of the opinion that the iPad is essentially a big iPhone that has no phone and no camera. It has also been described as a slightly smaller version of a laptop/netbook that cannot multitask and has no USB ports, again I can identify with that.
I also do not want to have to get the pocket of all my pants upgraded to loook like this
I swear I am not Apple bashing, I love Apple. I have a MacBook Pro and an Mac Mini in the home and they both serve essential functions. The problem for me with the iPad is, it doesn’t do anything I would consider essential that my laptop cannot already do……better.
I sure Apple are going to sell loads of them and no doubt I will look upon any I see with a degree of curiosity, but it will end at curiosity. Sorry Apple, but on this one I think I’m going to have to let this one pass.
Writing this on my iPhone using wordpress 2 that I just downloaded from the Apple Appstore. Now has landscape entry which takes some of the pain out of inputting copy (just wish there was a way to stop iPhone dictionary keep trying to predict and auto complete as I type !)
So the title of this post should be something like ‘iphone will not sync with itunes on vista with roaming profile folders’, but I couldn’t resist, ibroken sums it up so well :o)
Yep, my iphone won’t work with my office PC. Well, mine does obviously as I am an administrator with god like powers on our office network. But for my poorer cousins, the standard user, they have their environment subtley controlled for them via the use of microsoft group policies.
The policies in place are not restrictive in nature. They are simply there to help make certain things transparent to them or make my life easier as an admin and give me some peace of mind about my users data.
The one causing the breakage of the iphone sync is the roaming user profile folder(s). We use roaming profiles to allow people in the office to be able to login to any desktop and have their personal settings follow them around. We also redirect the ‘documents’ folder to a network location so that all their files are in one place and backed up for security.
Under Windows Vista, the user profile folder(s) structure changed a bit. in Windows XP, user profiles were stored in”C:\Documents and Settings”, but in Windows Vista they are now stored in “C:\Users\”. in order to maintain backwards compatibilty with earlier windows software, Windows Vista has a junction point for ‘C:\Documents and Settings” that points it to “C:\Users” (a junction point is a bit like a shortcut but it will also work in DOS). The junction point makes sure that any application trying to access “C:\Documents and Settings” gets directed to “C:\Users”
Microsoft also changed the structure of the folders that make up the user profile under Windows Vista
\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data
now points to
\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming
and
\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local Settings\Application Data
now points to
\Users\<user>\AppData\Local
And I *think* this may be where the problem is. NTFS juntion points can only point to another location on the local file system, not a netwok location. itunes will be trying to access “C:\Documents and Settings\scottb\Local Settings\Application Data”, and will be hitting the junction point that redirects it to “C:\Users\scottb\AppData\Romaing”. With folder redirection turned off the story ends here, the location is still on the local filesystem, itunes simply follows the new file path and backups up the iphone in the correct location.
But we have this folder redirected to a network share using a group policy, the “C:\Users\scottb\AppData\Romaing” gets further redirected to a network share file path……and it all just fails.
At this time however, this is only a theory as I cannot understand why only itunes is affected like this and not any other apps (who must also be getting the network redirect for the AppData folder !).
More on this [as|when|if] I figure it out………
ibroken
