For those that want to sync their calendar and access it online but don’t want to shell out for the cost of Apple .Mac, it’s been a while coming but now there is a solution: gSync from a small company by the name of Macness.
Technology
iTunes Plus is a Negative on the N95?
iTunes Plus was just made available to the public, and I straight away jumped in and bought some music from iTunes – the first time in over a year (yay DRM-free music).
It of course plays perfectly in iTunes & perfectly on my iPod… but – wait a second! My Nokia N95 won’t play it, with an error message of “File is Corrupted. Operation Cancelled”.
Google Maps Australia now does Directions
This may not be news to everyone – I’m not sure how long this has been the case, but I’ve just found that Google Maps Australia can now do very accurate address mapping, and with it comes the ability to provide turn by turn directions from one address to another (or many). Whilst this has been a supported feature in the US since day one, Australia wasn’t so lucky, until now.
Mac OSX Finder Refresh
A small but annoying thing about Mac OSX is that sometimes it doesn’t refresh itself when a file or folder is changed – especially when dealing with SMB (Windows) share drives.
In Windows you can hit F5 to refresh the current Window, but Apple seemed to have forgotten to add this feature to Mac OSX.
Well I searched the web and finally found an Applescript to do this
Vista Media Center and Videos on Network Drives
Well I succumbed and picked up Microsoft Vista Home Premium for my Media Center PC.It’s actually running extremely well and is more stable than XP Media Center 2005. It does have it’s little quirks, and one of them is getting my home movies that are stored on a network drive to show up under Vista Media Center’s Videos in a nice way** . This also more seriously effects Xbox 360’s running as an extender as Vista Home Premium no longer lets you set the extender up with a login script for it to see the network drives.HP Photosmart C6180 on Mac OSX
I picked up a new HP Photosmart C6180 printer today – nice printer with auto sheet feeding scanner and copier, as well as inbuilt fax. It also looks nice too. Problem is the Mac driver in the box…
iPAQ using Motorola V3x as Bluetooth 3G modem
So I have a HP iPAQ rw6828 (using a work provided Vodafone AU SIM), as well as a Motorola V3x mobile (using my own H3G or “Three” USIM).
Work have removed GPRS access on my Vodafone SIM at my request due to the ridiculous costs involved, so I thought I’d see if I could get my V3x working as a 3G modem with it over Bluetooth. It’s important to note that you need to have Mobile Broadband enabled on your 3 account.
Note: For the gadget/technically minded, this sounds easy (and it is if you use almost any phone from Sony Ericsson instead of the V3x), however no matter what I tried, with H3G’s limited help (they only support Windows XP) I couldn’t get it going.
Well now I’ve solved it, and here are the steps.
DVD to Windows Media Video Conversion
So this is a little different from my usual posts here, but I thought it might be worthwhile to some people.
This is my guide on converting DVD Films and Videos to Microsoft’s Windows Media format (WMV).