Let me know if you like it, or prefer reading the full version.

After firing up Address Book I got it all in sync, and as expected, had a few duplicates which I sorted out.

Unfortunately, as the title suggests, I received a text from my girlfriend but it didn’t come up with a name, just her number. So after a visit to the contacts I noticed that ALL her details were gone, except her work email. I had a look at other people and there were more missing people.

So now I have lost faith in the contact syncing. I made no changes at all but somehow lost everyone. I did of course make a backup, but that doesn’t seem to import back into Address Book. Thank GOD for my second backup at Mozy.

Right now I’m downloading a backup from a few days ago and will give this stuff another shot. Glad I have my backup in hand in case Google poops on me again.

Meet Flargle. He’s my brand new Moshi Monster. Moshi Monsters is a new social networking website, thats really more about making cool monsters and playing games. So what is he like? Well his favourite food is Mr Tea, he likes the colour Cyan, R&B music, and dislikes lemurs. And he’s only 1 years old.

So far we’ve played some cool games, and been shopping. How do you like his windows? He’s also got some more fun stuff at home. Why not pop over and visit him for a bit. You can even be his friend so he has some company when I’m at work.

If you can find one, pick up a beta code from a few lucky people online, or go to Firebox.com and pickup a MoPod for your own special invite code. Moshi Monsters should be open to the public in a few weeks hopefully, so keep checking back.

Special Thanks to Michael at Mind Candy for hooking me up with a beta code, and congrats on the lovely website!

Update: I have a few beta codes thanks to Michael to give out. If you’re interested, leave me a comment. Working on first come, first served.

Via Daring Fireball (via John.C.Welch)

Now the biggest problem is connectivity. And it explains why I’m in Starbucks doing this. We got out BT line connected last tuesday. Then I called Virgin to get Broadband ordered. And then it stopped, cos they didn’t have our new number on they’re system. So I called back the next day, and tried again, with no luck. So I tried a third time on Friday and had success. So our broadband will be active next thursday. THURSDAY! Thats a year away when there is an Apple Event between (New ipods, lots of them, and a cheaper iPhone YAY!).

But the real problem is the router. I had to switch back off my Linksys WRT54G using DD-WRT to my old Netgear DG834G as its phoneline broadband, not cable/dsl. And the problem is my Macbook Pro seems to struggle staying on or even finding the wireless network. And I don’t know why. Its plain as day there. Only one other Wifi box nearby, which is on channel 11 and I’m on 1 or 2. But I can’t get it to connect.

I can’t figure out why. It doesn’t matter too much now since there is no interweb connection but when that bad boy starts, I will wanna use it.
So if anyone else has an idea, or a similar problem with their DG834G, let me know. Where is my SSID!!!!

 Update: Turns out the problem seems to be with the channel my DG834G was broadcasting on. I had it running on 1, which didn’t work well. After some browsing the Console and trying it out again, I noticed the problem. I’ve switched up to 6 and it works perfectly now.

Firstly, you need to install SIMBL which is a plugin manager. Go to here and follow the instructions.

For all these, you need to download the plugin, and copy the *.bundle file to ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins

SafariSource – Adds colour marking to the View Source windows to make reading the source much easier.
SafariStand – Adds massive support for a preview sidebar of tabs open, quick search key commands, flash/plugin blocking, Bookmark Shelf so you can bookmark a whole workspace of websites and launch easily later
TabStop – Asks you if you want to close all tabs when more than one is open (nice save for those keyboard happy people)

In addition to those, i have also:

Sogudi – adds abbreviation use for specific website search, so ‘gg chris pirillo’ searches Google, ‘am long winters’ searches Amazon.co.uk, ‘wk lost’ searches Wikipedia for Lost. Completely customizable, add your own websites, just remember the short codes.
Inquisitor – Fantastic plugin for the search bar. Adds spotlight style functionality, giving you search results as you type, and search suggestions. Also will tell you the sites you visited directly from the search box (nice if you forget which one you looked at)
SafariBlock – Allows you to block website content (ads for instance). Worth checking out this page for a good starting list of sites to block, or add your own.
PithHelmet – Useful program for blocking plugins for ads on websites

Well thats it. I haven’t really tried the Safari Beta yet cos I’m happy with my setup. My only one complaint of Safari is that some of the Google apps don’t work properly (alignment in Calendar, no Docs support, no chat from gmail.)

Tags: safari, sogudi, safaristand, inquisitor, safariblock, simbl, safarisource

Windows XP operating system *
Minimum 500Mb (RAM) memory
Internet Explorer 6 browser (or later)
Windows Media Player 10 (or later)
A video and sound card capable of playing high quality streamed or downloaded programmes
JavaScript, ActiveX and Cookies are all enabled
A high speed broadband internet connection

The first problems. XP – What about all those new PC owners with Vista? How exactly can’t it Vista support it when it should be backwards compatible?
IE6 – Firefox is a much better browser, and a large amount of people are using it nowadays.

Then there’s the Mac and Linux users. No supported way of running it. Why? The main reason is probably because it runs on Peer-to-peer networking (much like Limewire or Kazaa). So that means a desktop client, which means background services, which would need to be written from the ground up. There are a number of problems with this. Firstly, the lack of cross platform support. Surely if I’m a License payer I should be able to access these services without having to spend money on either a) a new windows PC (or should I say old as I need XP), or b) some sort of vitualisation method like Parallels, VMWare, or Virtual PC for non-intel Macs. Thats awful.

My question is this. Why, if they couldn’t do cross playform at beta launch, couldn’t they do a non-OS specific method? ABC.com offer all of their TV shows (well most) online, the next day, via the website, on most browsers, supplied using Flash. This means any OS, any time, no background services using up your bandwidth to transfer or receive files. Its just there to watch. I don’t see whats so bad about that?
Or even better, like Azureus, a Java application that will run on most systems?

I don’t see why they didn’t choose a better system for delivery really. If they’re only offering on-demand TV rental (don’t think they have shows for purchase yet. see later) why can’t it just be flash based?

Now of course this isn’t just the BBC. Channel 4′s 4oD service which seems to run the same P2P framework, is also single platform. They all use the same network, WMP encoded video files, which I’m not a fan of (having tried the 4oD service a bit)

The other problems is the lack of shows anyway. You can’t get the latest hot thing on the BBC, Heroes (already shown on Sci-Fi on Sky/Cable and in the USA) at all. You ca get the Heroes behind-the-scenes show, but not the real thing. They need to offer the best stuff to get it to be popular and work better (since its P2P).

The last point to make. There is a way to get around some of these problems, at least the half the platform specific stuff.
iTunes.
They offer TV in the US to purchase, the day after they’ve aired, they’re yours to keep, no background download services taking up your bandwidth, and they’re then at least available to a larger share of the population.

So thats my thoughts. Of course, rumors are that there are iTunes TV announcements Coming Soon so maybe we’ll see the Beeb and CH4 get on board then.

Now, alternatives. I’ve had a quick look at the BBC iPlayer forums and some points made about alternatives. There are obviously less than legal methods, the most popular being BitTorrents. Now, with this, you’ll probably get better quality, its still P2P in a sort, although it only runs when your applicaiton is running (be it BitTorret, BitComet, Azureus, or Transmisson or xTorrent for Mac) so keeps your bandwidth usage down. Its also better quality usually. Someone also complained about the horrible torrent sites, and banners and popups. Well, this isn’t 1999. It’s not like Jennifer Saunders on that Barclaycard advert. I use www.torrentz.com as a search engine, to find the file, then click one link to the torrent site, like Mininova, BTmon, or snarf-it, then one click to download. And if adverts are REALLY that difficult to stand, try something like TVShows for Mac OS X, or TED for Windows. Both of these will easily download torrents for your new TV shows regularly, without you seeing much, and start them downloading easily.

Its really not difficult to fund alternatives to some of this stuff. So please, BBC and Channel 4, wake up.

Tags: bbc, iplayer, torrents, ted, tvshows, macosx, bbctv, ondemand

Growl - Its less of an application and more of a system preference and a hook. Growl allows other applications to display onscreen notices. For example, our previously mentioned app Transmission can show notices when it adds new torrents and when they are done downloading. Adium shows notices when you get an IM, when someone comes online. Other great apps like Cyberduck, Burn, Skype, iStumbler, Twitterific, Superduper and many more. It give you the chance to choose styles of notifications, change transparency of the notices, and many other settings. Give it a go and see how it can change your day?

Flip4Mac – Millions of years ago, a small software company in Seattle created a video codec. That codec was called Windows Media Video (WMV). And given the large use of Windows in the corporate environment, it became quite widely used. But that hinders us wisened Mac users. Luckily Microsoft made a video player, and God said “It’ll do” Lucky for us, someone else wouldn’t settle for it, so made Flip4Mac. Its a quicktime plugin that allows you to view WMV files through Quicktime, rather than the horrid Windows Media Player for Mac (ugh ugh ugh and a few more). It lets you decide if you want to display them in the browser, or load them in Quicktime, which personally I think is better as it gives you the chance to make the window larger. So go and download it, install, then hop into the System Preferences and set it up. Its free, and is now available from Microsoft, who deemed it good enough to remove the one hampster they were employing to keep WMP for Mac up to date.

MenuMeters – You might wonder after a while, how much is my processor being hammered? Or why is my computer going slow. Well install MenuMeters and you can find out at a glance. It allows you to add extra menubar items to your desktop. You can add them for processor speed, RAM usage, network traffic, disk usage. Its recently been updated to a Universal Binary and so it displays the CPU usage for each core on your Core Duo or Quad core Intel chip.

Sidetrack – Remember thosePowerbook, the pre-January 2005 ones before they added the scrolling trackpad? Well I have one, and some others do. Well this lets you scroll! Great! It converts the side of your trackpad to a scrolling section. Great!

MAMP – If you are looking to start your own blog, and have more control over it, you might want to give it a test run before you commit to a domain name and a host, you may want to download MAMP and try things out. It is a self-contained setup with Apache, MySQL, and PHP for Mac. So you can install WordPress, or Typepad, or anything you want to and run it in a test environment. Or even to test updates and changes. Great! I use it to run a local version of WordPress for when I actually bother to get my own domain. It gives you much more functionality than wordpress.com. And remember, its not just for WordPress.

Be sure to check out the original list, Part 1 and Part 2

Hopefully Part 4 will come sooner than this!

Alas, it did not work. Three handsets blocked this sort of action to limit the bandwidth on the network, and also charge you for a proper package.

But behold, the solution.

1. Set up your handset as a bluetooth modem using the Bluetooth Setup Wizard. The key here is the handset. I think its the phone itself that blocks the access. So I used an unlocked non-Three handset from eBay, my new(to me) Nokia N70

2. Download the Nokia GPRS/3G scripts from http://www.taniwha.org.uk – Use the Nokia 3G Scrripts. Download and copy the scripts to ~/Library/Modem Scripts (this should be the one at the root of the hard drive, not in your user folder.

3. Load up System Preferences, go to Network, Bluetooth, Bluetooth Modem. Check settings are as follows
a) PPP Tab – Telephone number is Three.co.uk
b) Bluetooth Modem tab – Modem is Nokia 3G CID1

4. Go back to the PPP tab, and click Dial Now. This will open Internet Connect. Tick the box to add a Menu bar icon if you want, if not click Connect.

As long as your bluetooth is on your phone, and its paired (which it should be) then it should connect to the 3G network and give you 3G speeds up to 384kbps

NOTE: This is likely to use up all your alloted data in your package (mine is 10Mb) so be careful of additional charges. This also violates the terms of your contract, and your service may be cut off.

Having said that, its good to have an option when you can’t find a Hotspot

technorati tags:3g, three, bluetooth, modem, macosx

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