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Thanks to the following links, I was able to get my new Nokia 6300 to successfully sync with my Mac’s Address Book via iSync:

• http://klauskjeldsen.dk/2007/06/08/free-nokia-6300-isync-plugin/
• http://nokia6300.net/8/new-version-of-the-nokia-6300-isync-plugin
• http://brent.kearneys.ca/technology/2007/how-to-sync-a-nokia-6300-on-osx/
• http://kaspers.freeflux.net/blog/archive/2007/04/13/how-to-isync-a-nokia-6300.html

Unfortunately, two things didn’t sync up: Birthdays and Contact Photos. After politely asking people if there was any way to get these to work (especially photos, as it’s nice to see someone’s picture pop up on the phone for faster recognition before you unceremoniously reject them) I tried to tackle this one on my own. I was able to dig around in the plist files of the Nokia N93 and glean the few lines that make both of these details available to the Nokia 6300 plugin.

Before we begin however, I’ve noticed some problems that can occur with Photo syncing. PLEASE READ THIS THOROUGHLY before continuing: it’ll save some head-banging and frustration later.

Failing to follow the following guidelines will result in a completely failed sync. Should this happen, I simply deleted all of my contacts on the phone (phone memory, not SIM card), tried to determine the problem, and tried again.

Also, note that if you do end up deleting all of the contacts on your phone, you’ll also lose your 1-touch dialing and the entries in your caller groups (but not the groups themselves).

Here we go:

1. Do not use .GIF files — JPG only! (I didn’t test PNG)
2. You cannot drag-and-drop from a web-page directly onto a contact. Although this works for Address Book in that you’ll see the ‘image edit’ window pop-open, and you can save your contact, when it comes to iSync your entire sync will fail. If you want to use someone’s image (from Facebook, for example) simply drag the photo you want from the web-page onto your desktop, and then drag the photo from your desktop onto the Address Book entry’s ‘contact photo’ area. You’re then free to delete the image from your desktop.
3. You cannot sync with a ’smart group’ that you created within Address Book. This has more to do with iSync than the new plugin, but it’s a pain nonetheless. Physical groups only!
4. When a sync fails, you are not told what failed, or why it failed. iSync detailed logs are useless too, stating only:

   5:28:24 PM Error [Nokia 6300] An unexpected error occured.
5:28:24 PM Error Device "Nokia 6300" synchronization failed

   Fun! What I did was create a ‘temp’ group, set iSync to sync with that folder only for contacts, and then slowly add contacts into that temp group until a failure occurred so that I knew what the offending entry was.

The plugin that I’ve created is essentially just the one from the site listed above, but with some additional properties put into the PhoneContuit.plist and SyncEngine.plist files.

As with everyone else, I take no responsibility if this completely fcks up your phone or Address Book, but please do backup both your Address Book (File -> Back Up Address Book…) and your phone’s contacts (I typically just copy everything to SIM). I can say that this has worked fine for me for a day now, with a fair bit of testing. After I cleaned up my offending image-entries, it’s been great.

To install: Quit iSync, download the following zip file, and drag-and-drop the plugin into your system using the shortcut, and sync away.

Nokia 6300 iSync Plugin With Photos

Good luck, let me know how it goes in the comments!

Rummy.

Here’s a quick recap of my MacBook saga last week for you all to use as an anecdote as to why you should backup your data daily.

Wednesday evening, Sept 06, I’m playing around on the MacBook and it freezes. Completely unresponsive. I think it’d had only crashed like that once before so it was odd, but no big deal so I hold the power button down to shut down. Press power button again and after a few minutes, I get nothing but a folder icon with an question mark. Huh?

Long story short, after a bunch of diagnostics running Drive Utility off of the OSX install disc, I determine the hard drive had crashed. Kaput.

Next morning, I call Apple support, and we run through a bunch of tests (memory, reset the PRAM, etc.) and same conclusion. I’d spent about 45 minutes on the phone with the lady and finally she said that I had to drop it off at a local repair centre to get the drive replaced and here was my case number.

I decide to go to MyMacDealer, a relative newcomer in Edmonton’s Apple market especially compared to WestWorld, but they’re nice and close by — just a 5 minute drive to Whyte.

A 20 minute drive through lunch-time rush hour traffic later, I explain the problem, told them of all the tests I’d run, gave them the case number, and handed the MacBook over. They said that depending on how long it would take to order the drive in from Apple, it would take only a few days. Slight chance for Friday, but likely Monday afternoon my machine would be ready.

As I was out of town for the weekend, Monday would be fine. Monday afternoon I call, to find out the status of the machine, and they hadn’t even tested it yet. “Tested the machine? It’s a bad hard drive!” “Yes, but our techs need to check first.”

Tuesday rolls around, and the Tech finally started to look at it, to run some diagnostics.

Wednesday, the drive was ordered.

Friday, the drive arrived, and Friday afternoon it was installed and the trophy wife picked up the machine for me. I was lucky it wasn’t Monday as they rushed the drive in.

It’s frustrating. If you know it’s going to take a week-and-a-half, don’t bullshit me and tell me it’ll be done in 2 days. After the 3rd phone call I was about *this* close to grabbing the MacBook and going to WestWorld after talking to their techs, but resisted. The people at MyMacDealer were friendly enough, but I don’t appreciate false repair estimates. Whether WestWorld would be any different will remain to be seen in the future.

ANYHOW, I have an Ubuntu server with a 300gb drive in it that acts as my backup server. Before The Big Trip, I was fairly diligent in doing network backups on both laptops via the great SuperDuper! software. Upon return however, I never did said complete system backup due to sheer laziness of clicking a few buttons.

Luckily we had our trip photos on the iBook, and even mailed backup cd’s of our photos home from Prague, but I did manage to lose photos from a friend’s wedding, and some other things. I was able to do a data recovery on some of the camera memory cards using the wonderful EXIF Untrasher, but it doesn’t recover RAW images so some of the original shots are gone for good. There are backups on this site under the photo gallery, but they’re compressed and not of the greatest JPEG quality.

E-mails are all backed up in GMail, so those were fine.

The photos aren’t the problem though. It’s all of the system tweaks, scrips I write, and software I install on an almost daily basis. It was going to be a pain in the ass to get that set up again. Even my Ubuntu Parallels VM had to be recreated from scratch. Fun.

After the crash, I went out and bought a 320 GB external backup drive for a paltry $120. After partitioning the drive, I copied over the 50 GB .sparseimage MacBook backup from June to a new bootable partition. Pop in the OSX CD, go to drive utilities, click on restore, and nothing.

Turns out there’s a bug in the Intel OSX GUI that Apple just won’t fix with the resotre function in Drive Utilities. Bastards. So, I cracked open Terminal, typed the “asr” command and restored via the command line as per some instructions I Googled.

1 hour later, my machine was back up and running perfectly, albeit with software and settings dating back to June 2. However, no need to set up e-mail accounts, reimport old photos, documents, WPA wireless keys, bookmarks, etc., etc.

I now backup both laptops to the external drive every night. Takes 5 minutes. Much less effort than the hours I’m going to have to put in to get the MacBook back to where I want it.

No more excuses. The most frustrating aspect is that being in IT I should have known better, but at least now I’m going to pester everyone I know in to backing up their stuff as well.

For the amount of money I spent on the external drive compared to the time spent on data recovery, it factors down a couple bucks an hour. Your time is worth more than that, right?

After a long delay, posts will start appearing here again. For starters, take a look at how the next version of OS X (called Leopard, due in January) will do windows management.

I’d expect this groundbreaking vision to be ‘discovered’ by Microsoft in Vista 2, about 5 years from now. ;-)

I don’t want to write about the Oilers. I shut the game off halfway through the third and my wife had to take me for a walk outside before I smooshed the TV. I will let this quote from Covered In Oil say it for me, though:

“I don’t even think there’s a word I could scream right now that would convey the anger and frustration I am feeling at this particular moment. It would be the verbal equivalent of stabbing a puppy in the eye with a Hepatitis needle while his six-year-old owner looks on. Then kicking the six-year-old in the teeth.”

Ahem…now onto a happier topic. 2 weeks ago I purchased a new MacBook. Apple white, pristine, and shiny, I figured it was a great time to upgrade from the 14″ iBook G4 I’d been using for the past year.

Here are some thoughts on it:

The Good

1. Screen - glossy and gorgeous. Very sharp, and not glossy like the crappy Dell or HP implentations I’d seen in the past. Some of those machines almost have a ‘warp’ to their screens, as if they were made of Saran-wrap. This thing is flat, bright, and the colours just pop. It’s considerably brighter than the 14″ iBook G4’s screen, even at its darkest setting.
2. Screen Again - the added resolution is fantastic, as well as the widescreen ratio. I’m glad Apple finally caught up with the times and updated the ratios of their budget line.
3. Keyboard - Odd at first, but really nice. Not mushy, but firm. Neat looking initially, but the novelty has worn off and now it’s just a good keyboard. It’s full-size, so no odd placements of keys which drives me crazy
4. Wireless - Much better wireless signal than both previous iBooks; in fact, I can now see twice as many networks than I could before. Bluetooth works as advertised, and it paired with my cell and headset in about 1 minute with no problems
5. Magnets Everywhere! - The MagSafe plug is great. It doesn’t fall out easily at all like others have mentioned, and requires a good tug. Also, the lack of latches anywhere to keep the lid closed is brilliant. The magnet that holds the laptop closed is firm and there’s no risk of it flying open
6. Sound - The speakers have been moved to the back of the laptop, completely out of sight. The sound is pushed back, and reflected to your ears off of the screen. It’s not as loud as I’d like, but they do sound a lot better than the G4 implementation. There’s actually some stereo-seperation for a change, not just muddled together.
7. iSight - Works as advertised. I had an external iSight before (still have one for the other iBook 12″), and this works just the same. Quality is great, and it’s just tiny. I haven’t tried hosting any iChats but I should be able to have a four-way video chat now with the new processor
8. Intel Cure Duo - This thing is screaming fast. iPhoto hums along, songs import quicker, everything just seems to happen at a faster pace. I have 2 gigs of RAM on order which should arrive soon, which will be the icing on the cake
9. Wider Trackpad - The trackpad looks to be about 30% wider. No discernable difference in functionality, as I was fine with the smaller one before
10. Battery Life - Very, very good. Considering how fast it runs as well as the power drains of wireless, the iSight, and bright screen, the thing just seems to run for hours and hours.
11. Feel - Nice and solid. all lines are clean, and no misalignment of parts (like the way the battery lip protuded on the iBook G4). Very tight fit and finish.

The Bad:

1. Wireless - Not sure what’s going on here, but whenever the machine goes to sleep it has problems reestablishing itself to a previous network. I’ve never had this problem before, so I’m not sure what’s happening. Still researching with no resolution in sight. The current solution is to pick another network, get a new IP, and then switch back to my home one. Very odd
2. RAM - Woely under-allocated memory. When will Apple learn to just make the 1GB a minimum? They’re hurting themselves by not doing so. People who switch over will buy a machine like this and think that’s it’s slow. The problem is that the default configuration comes with only 512 MB of RAM, and OSX really, really needs 1 GB to shine. I understand the point of keeping costs low, but not at the expense of the experience of OSX
3. Heat - Wooo boy, this thing runs hot like a mother fckr. That core-duo gets really, really hot to the touch on the left side after running for a bit.
4. Weird Sound - This is a common problem reported by many people, but the MacBook seems to emit a high-pitched whine when plugged into AC. The whine goes away when you start an app like PhotoBooth, but returns once the app is closed. I expect a firmware fix very soon, as this also affected the MacBook Pros and the problem was resolved in their last firmware fix.
5. Lack of Compact Flash / SD slot - C’mon Apple. You expect this to be the epicentre of the Photo / Blogging / Surfing / Entertainment, and no slots to put phot cards into? Perhaps Jonathan Ive didn’t like the thought of ’slots’ ruining the clean lines but c’mon! Get with the program!
6. Not All Programs are Universal Binary - I can’t really fault Apple for this; it’s to be expected that when you do something as drastic as changing chipsets and processors that applications need to be rewritten. Most of my favourites have been rewritten to Universal Binary, but not all. Adobe is really dragging their heels on this one, and Photoshop is downright painful to use until the next release. Apple did do a brilliant thing with developing Rosetta, which is a slick transparent dynamic emulation piece of software that converts PowerPC compiled applications to Intel ones. The problem is that it’s sloooooooow. To test it out, simply do this: Right click on an application that you know is a Universal Binary, for example, Safari. Be sure to quit all instances of it first. Then, choose ‘Get Info’ (or Apple-command-I) and click the checkbox that says ‘Open Using Rosetta’. Now relaunch Safari. Wait. And wait. And wait. Finally, it’ll load, but nothing like the instant start-up when it’s running natively. Anyway, take-up of companies recompiling and releasing Universal Binaries has been really impressive, so I don’t think this will be an issue for much longer.

Overall, very very nice machine. Slick. Great value. Lotsa goodies. I’m quite happy with the purchase, and can’t wait until the RAM gets in so I can start running Parallels Desktop. Windows people of the world, you ain’t got nothing that can compare to this laptop at this price.

In about a week or so (or whenever FedEx decides to deliver), the trusty-and-reliable 14″ iBook G4 will be in someone else’s hands and I will be the happy owner of a 2 Ghz Apple MacBook. As such, I’ll document the entire setup of the machine as I see fit for my needs, which will hopefully allow me to post everything up here once-and-for-all to help out anyone else who dedices to succumb to my influences and switch (that’s right, NS)

Anyway, the new MacBook is pretty basic. Other than opting for the 2 GHz instead of the 1.83, it’s all standard and in the requisite white. I’ll be putting in 2 gigs of RAM as soon as I order it, that should be good to go for a few years.

Or, at least until Apple releases something new.

In three weeks.

CURSE YOU APPLE!

When I mentioned that I’d be running a blog now, a friend said “Oh good. You need a place to spread your propaganda.” So, not wanting to disappoint and without further ado:

I’m sure I’m the millionth person to write about this, but Apple has (finally) released the final piece to the Macbook family, the simply named MacBook (sucessor to the iBook)

My thoughts:

The Good:

1. 13.3″ Widescreen
2. All features of the current family of Macs, including:

• Intel Duo-Core! (they didn’t cheap out and go single core)
• Bluetooth 2.0 & wireless built-in
• iSight built-in

• MagSafe
• Wide scrolling trackpad
• Apple Remote control and Front Row software & infrared port

3. New keyboard — I hope it’s less mushy than the iBooks we have now. On the plus side, it looks like the keys from my old Casio calculator.
4. Even more of a minimalist design — They’ve removed the mechanical latch which was flush to begin with, and even pushed the speakers to the back so that they fire backwards and the sound reflects off of the bezel of the screen and to your ears — much like how the current iMac model speakers fire down and bounce off of the desk.
5. Rumour has it the hard-drive is just under the battery under a simple sheild which should make upgrading quite easy (as opposed to the iBook G4’s which required a complete disassembly)
6. 6+ hour battery life
7. Thinner and lighter than before!

The Bad

1. Glossy screen — I love the matte anti-reflective finish on the iBooks and I’ve made fun of people’s shiny glossy screens on their Dells for a while now. However, Apple has put glossy screens on the new Macbooks so I’ll have to erase history and claim that glossy screens were always surperior to matte, and that Dell / Sony / HP / etc. had it wrong and Apple will get it right because they’re Apple and the best and no I’m not a fanboy. F-off.
2. Black. I don’t like the black at all. I think it looks way too IBM-ishy, although the white apple logo on the black matte finish is a nice touch.
3. I still don’t like that ‘MacBook’ name. Bah.
4. Ummm…that’s about it. C’mon, it’s a Mac! How much wrong could they possibly do?

The Ugly

1. I’m in the process of pricing out what we can get for either of our iBooks + iSight to try and spring for one of these. DAMN YOU APPLE!

I’m looking foward to the duo-core processor. I don’t plan on running BootCamp to boot into WinXP, but Parallels Workstation looks very promising so that I can play with other OS’s, for example.

Also, over the next couple of days, I plan on putting together a list of programs that I find useful and helpful, as I know of a few switchers that will certainly need it. Stay tuned.

On another note: GO OIL! Big game 6 against the Sharks tonight — let’s hope we win and not trash Whyte Ave toooooo badly afterwards.