Posted in General | By tim |
I recently did a major cleanup of my contact data – merging my “phone contacts” with their “email counterparts” (which in the past often meant I had two contacts for each person – one with a phone number and one with an email address or several). Plus storing them in one place (my work Exchange server) and syncing them out to places I want to use them – like my Yahoo mail account, my home Mac laptop and my Blackberry phone.
This bit was all quite successful and I dropped from 574 contacts to a more manageable 364 – with no duplicates. I used Yahoo AutoSync and an Excel export of Outlook contacts to achieve this.
At the end though – since I’d basically exported all my contacts, processed them in Excel and then re-imported, my various sources were out of sync with each other. I found the best solution was to make the contacts right in Outlook, then clear the contacts in Yahoo and my Blackberry and force a complete re-sync. This worked fine for Yahoo, but my Blackberry remained resolutely empty of contacts and showed no sign of resyncing.
Maybe it would have done if I’d left it for four hours, but I felt the need to force it more quickly.
Here’s are a few ways you can supposedly do it:
(1) on the Blackberry, go to Contacts > Options -> Desktop -> Wireless Synchronisation. Switch it from “Yes” to “No” and Save. Then go back in and switch it to “Yes” and save.
This did nothing for me. No sign of the contact records being resynced.
(2) on the Blackberry, go to Options > Advanced Options > Enterprise Activation and in the email field press and hold the ALT key and type CNFG. Once you enter this a hidden menu will appear and you need to change “Wireless Sync” to No, now exit this menu and wait 30 seconds and repeat the process but turn sync back to Yes. Once you’ve changed this setting you will see a slow sync will automatically start and it will repair all the wireless sync settings.
This did nothing for me
(3) on the Blackberry, go to Options > Advanced Options > Service book -> Desktop [SYNC]. Click on this and on the menu choose “Delete”. Then immediately, click Menu and then “Undelete”. This puts back the service book you just deleted.
This worked for me. Suddenly the Enterprise Activation process started running. Actually it got to 90% and got stuck on the Contacts – saying “Initalizing”. I left it for several hours and it was still stuck so I braved a “battery pull” and reboot and then it started Activating again. This time it worked nicely and an hour or so later it said “Activation complete” and bingo all my contacts were back.
Hope this helps someone!
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February 8th, 2010
Posted in General | By tim |
Today’s the day. HomeAway.com launches it’s advertising campaign bring back the National Lampoon Vacation stars – the Griswolds – in a superbowl advert and further webisodes showing that hotels are not all they’re cracked up to be.
Check out the advert here:
http://vacation.homeaway.com
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February 7th, 2010
Posted in General | By tim |
The world has gone mad! Be careful: go into any electrical retailer in the UK and try and buy a HDMI cable. You’ll likely get suckered into the great HDMI swindle. It seems a giant cartel is in place – ensuring that no such shop can sell these cables with anything less than a 1000% markup. HDTV manufacturers are all in cahoots over this one – and as the price of the TV and DVD players fall, it seems they are attempting to recover their profit levels by drastically over pricing the connecting cables. Also notice that when you buy a HDTV, it usually doesn’t come with such a cable.
In Curry’s Hammersmith, the cheapest HDMI cable is £39.95. And the ones which are “better quality” (including gold plating), according to the helpful sales staff, can be had for £79.95.
Now, as any electrical engineer can tell you, HDMI is a digital cable. Digital cables transmit 1s and 0s using a low signal voltage. Provided the cable is actually an electrical conductor, there is absolutely no way that gold plating can make any difference to the “quality” of the received image. Even in the old days, with analogue signals which suffered more from interference and arguably could perhaps be improved by a low resistance conductor, the difference was detectible only by committed audiophiles.
You’ll be glad to know I gave the Curry’s sales assistant a snotty lesson in cable conductors for digital cables and then went online and bought one for £2.95.
Think for yourself and don’t get suckered.
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February 6th, 2010
Posted in General | By tim |
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January 19th, 2010
Posted in General | By tim |
Here, “hacking” means finding a better (perhaps cooler, perhaps non-obvious) way to do something, and I’m a big fan.
(terminology of hacking explained here)
Sites like lifehacker.com are focussed mainly on the software side of “life hacking” but others, like ikeahacker.blogspot.com focus on the physical – in unusual uses of Ikea products.
My favourite ideas are based on “re-purposing” – the exploitation of loop holes in retailers’ or manufacturers’ products or marketing efforts to obtain working and useful products for a specific purpose at far less than the usual cost.
Usually the modification process is a fun project in it’s own right and often there are communities of willing volunteers on line helping out with ideas to make them work better or test different options.
The best example so far is my dell mini 9 – a 300 GBP fully functioning Apple Mac mini computer at a very low cost and very portable.
Other examples are a free sample pack of different filter papers, supplied by a company which caters to the film industry and supplies those filters in huge size. It just so happens that the free sample pack are cut to just the right size to fit over a regular sized flash-gun on an SLR camera and come in a handy booklet so you can select the best one for colouring your flash.
IkeaHacker shows innovative uses of Ikea projects to solve unintended problems or even do something crazy – for example this pimped chair with underseat heating…
Or try these fun photography hacks to take better pictures.
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January 1st, 2010
Posted in General | By tim |
Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable – Clay Shirky’s really intelligent thoughts about the future of newspapers, summed up by this one:
It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem
And similarly on changes in the book shop industry
Fascinating.
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December 29th, 2009
Posted in General | By tim |
After a lot of hunting, I finally found a fix for the various issues which plague the dell mini 9 after hackintoshing to Snow Leopard using Netbook Installer 0.8.3 RC4.
The issues were:
* Sound worked from the speakers, but not via the headphone socket
* Internal microphone wasn’t available/didn’t work and consequently Skype would crash when making an outbound call (presumably expecting a mic)
Solution:
* Get the AppleHDA.kext file from this post: http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/dell-mini-9-os-x-discussion/15380-sound-mic-working-applehda.html
* Open Finder. Press Ctrl + Shift + G and type /Extra
* Paste the kext file above into the Mini9Ext folder
* Run UpdateExtra (which is in the Extra folder) and click Update Extensions.
Now if you reboot you should find the Internal Mic is visible in the System Preferences Sound panel and sound works via the headphones!
Last problem is that whenyou put the Mac to sleep sound doesn’t work after the restore.
To fix this you need “SleepWatcher” a daemon that allows some control before and after sleep to kick the kext into shape. Follow the instructions here http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/dell-mini-9-os-x-discussion/15380-sound-mic-working-applehda.html and make sure you swap the path for the kext to /Extra/Mini9Ext/AppleHDA.kext and add “sleep 3″ like shown here: http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/dell-mini-9-os-x-discussion/15380-sound-mic-working-applehda-5.html
The only minor glitch is that when no sound is playing the headphones have a periodic hiss – but when playing sound it sounds great
So sound is possible, that’s pretty much all the functions working now.
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November 28th, 2009
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