iPhone Calendar Alerts and Synching

Ok some weird behavior has come up in reference to round-robin syncing between Google, Outlook, and the iPhone (Outlook <-> Google over gSyncIt and Google <-> iPhone over Nuevasync). The problem is that calender event reminders (also called alerts) are lost. Even the parts I can get working have hard caveats - for instance the iPhone 3G has an upper limit of two days, whereas I prefer two weeks for Birthdays.

What I have decided to do after testing out many scenarios, is to leave all calendar event reminders blank by default. This is because it turns out that empty alerts cause Google calendar to use the default alerting mechanism (set in properties) - which I have set to an email one week beforehand. The nice thing about the email is I tend to miss the iPhone alerts because they are so minimal, and the Outlook alerts just pile up and bug me. This is a nice middleground - emails I can respond to when I feel like it, but am unlikely to miss.

Now, for any events I create less than one week before their appointment date/time, I will put in a reminder of two days (or less). I think more testing will be required to get this working reliably - but I think we are on the way to a workable solution.

Latest Iphone Apps

Here is a screenshot from iTunes of my latest app status:



I also wanted to share something nice. If you move your iPhone from the machine where you usually sync in terms of apps, it seems definite that you will lose all your data in those apps. It seems that way until the very last second. First you see that you can't sync apps from the iPhone to the new pc. Then you see that you will have to download all the apps again (which is a pain but you don't have to pay anything additional). Then there is a scary warning message when you go to sync to the effect that everything is about to be deleted. However in my experience it turns out you lose nothing as long as do download all the apps from the iTunes store into your iTunes library first, and you don't uninstall the apps from the iPhone before you sync. Phew!

iPhone and Jungledisk

http://forum.jungledisk.com/viewtopic.php?t=18715
http://forum.jungledisk.com/viewtopic.php?p=38542&sid=eef7cca5febf50f270cfaf25e3650e37
http://readdle.com/products/onedisk

Turns out there is no native Jungledisk client for the iPhone, nor are they actively considering it that I could find. It sounds like the web interface works for at least some people, but only for general reading, no writing, and no functionality like attaching files to email etc.

However there does appear to be a hack/workaround. There is an iPhone webdav client (OneDisk) that some people in the forums were able to get working. Unclear to me whether this exposes your encryption keys (expose is too strong a word - I mean in the way the Jungledisk web client does)..

iPhone smtp issue - won't send mail

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8709794

My manual gmail smtp settings had been working fine. All of a sudden I couldn't send mail. The error was: "Cannot send mail. The sender address was invalid."

The apple forum url above contains a buch of possible fixes and workarounds. The one that worked for me was to explicitely add username and password to the gmail smtp server settings. I don't know if it was using defaults before and that broke, or if the username/pass was in there and got lost.

ubntu on netbook

http://m.mobilitybeat.com/view/35/

Here is an actual example of the Ubuntu netbook version set up for a particular piece of hardware.

Iphone Apps

I haven't had time yet to do a full post-iphone write-up, however here is a quick list of the apps (free and paid) (in no particular order) that I have downloaded from the app store so far, much thanks to Bob for the beta-testing!

evernote
ewallet
facebook
fourtrack
google earth
google mobile app
guitarist
i.tv
last.fm
midomi
minipiano
multicam albany
pandora radio
recorder
shazam
simcity
toodledo
the weather channel
what's on tv?

Merry Christmas to All

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

Skype to go

http://www.skype.com/landing/skypetogo/en_US/2008_q4_a/

If I understand this correctly, Skype is now positioning itself as a long-distance and international phone company. You call from any phone (cell or land) and you get a package of some sort that allows you to call up to 10,000 minutes to a group of countries. Some groups the call-to can be a land or cell, in others it is just land. It will be interesting to see if this takes off. Cool to see Skype working with regular phones. I haven't done the math yet, but I have to guess that this could be big savings for frequent callers of a certain profile, and not so much for people who don't use the phone every day to talk for a good amount of time to remote friends or relatives.

Free Microsoft Software

Paul Thurrott mentioned this a week or so ago on his podcast ( http://www.winsupersite.com/paul/podcast.asp , http://twit.tv/ww ). Free Microsoft software, serious stuff like Windows Server, Sql Server, Visual Studio, and Expression Studio - free for college students: https://www.dreamspark.com/ .

Verizon was serious

A year ago I wrote about how Verizon had promised to open their mobile network to other hardware ( http://iponderus.com/2007/11/verizon-to-open-their-network-to-any.html ). Sounds like they may just deliver on that, despite my doubts - http://internetcommunications.tmcnet.com/topics/broadband-mobile/articles/43611-verizon-wireless-approves-intertek-as-testing-lab-open.htm .