im-roberto

The past few weeks has had some pretty interesting news going on in the blogosphere or at least at Apple. I’m not fanboy yet, I’d consider myself being right on the fence but leaning towards the apple side of things for various reasons. In anycase I actually sat in front of my computer refreshing my browser watching the iPone 3.0 operating system announcement. In the beginning I was a little excited because there are a whole bunch of additions to the OS that is going to make the iPhone yet more functional and what not. Then when I thought of it I noticed that a good deal of those features have already existed on a jail broken iPhone. Having jail broken my iPhone nearly about a month ago I realize that maybe even with the new additions to the operating system that will be released sometime in the summer I may find myself reluctant to upgrade my firmware until its mandatory to do so.

By the way I’ve also been playing around with the Qik app for the iPhone which is pretty awesome because it enables you to stream a live video feed onto the net and from there upload onto Seesmic, Youtube and a few other services.

http://www.qik.com/lagrz

Exactly a month after I purchased my iPhone I recieve an e-mail from Best Buy’s Rewardszone membership with this insane deal on the iPhone for those who are Premier Silver members since last year. In order to get the Premier Member status you have to spend over $2,500 in Best Buy stores but if you have their Mastercard you can qualify by spending that same money anywhere. If only I knew they would have this crazy deal I would have waited a month and gotten $100 discount, oh well im still happy with my new iPhone. Hopefully there will be better offers than this later this year.

What can probably be done in order to complete this whole Sync circle of services that I have going is possibly set up Google Sync on my iPhone, then once all my contacts have been cleared is sync my iPhone with my Mac’s Address Book.app and if all goes well I will have my Plaxo contacts in Sync with my iPhone and from my iPhone have my Gmail contacts Synchronized as well and therefore closing that circle that Plaxo can’t do because Gmail Contacts are only Uni-Directional Sync with Plaxo. Holy smokes that was a mouthful. In any case, I have not yet tried this connecting this chain of services yet and will keep posted on it.

Yesterday I experimented with what I had mentioned on my blog post on trying to get a complete circle of sync complete but unfortunately I found out right after I posted my idea that it was not a valid one. Once after I had set up Google Sync on my iPhone I was no longer able to sync my address book or calendar using the iTunes sync because Google sync works with the MS Exchange protocol. There are various other work arounds to get it all working together but unfortunately they either require you to do some hacking on your mac, or that you use an additional software to get the sync done.

In order to do this you will need to buy Spanning Sync and set it up to sync with GMail, or you can use the hack to fool your mac into thinking it has a iPhone plugged in. I have already tried setting up the sync using the MS Exchange option on the Address Book preferences pane with the Google Sync settings but unfortunately that didn’t work out. I guess ill just have to settle with doing a little bit of hacking on you mac and let Plaxo do the rest.

I’m currently using Plaxo to keep all my contacts and what minimal use of calendar in sync with everything from my apple macbook to my windows live accounts, and partially my GMail account. The only problem that I have had is keeping my Gmail contacts in sync with my Plaxo account, because it currently supports a uni-directional sync. Meaning that it can only pick up changes on my Gmail contacts, but Plaxo cannot change or add contacts that I have edited from my Address Book.app or even just new people I’ve added to the MSN messenger. Today while browsing the world of Twitter I found some people retweeting about the new service by Google, Google Push. Which in some ways it competes with Plaxo, and Mobile Me services. It keeps your iPhone or other mobile devices synchronized with the various google services. The only downfall of it would be that when you set it up you lose all the contacts that you currently already have stored on your phone and it adds the gmail contacts to it instead.

What can probably be done in order to complete this whole Sync circle of services that I have going is possibly set up Google Sync on my iPhone, then once all my contacts have been cleared is sync my iPhone with my Mac’s Address Book.app and if all goes well I will have my Plaxo contacts in Sync with my iPhone and from my iPhone have my Gmail contacts Synchronized as well and therefore closing that circle that Plaxo can’t do because Gmail Contacts are only Uni-Directional Sync with Plaxo. Holy smokes that was a mouthful. In any case, I have not yet tried this connecting this chain of services yet and will keep posted on it.

Google Mobile Sync

NOTE: Please read on to my next post as some things didn’t work out with the uses on this post.

I’ve had a Bootcamp partition running Windows Vista on my Macbook almost ever since I purchased my mac early last year. Originally when I purchased my mac I was still afraid and having second thoughts. So I had installed Vista on my mac in order to feel a little more at home. Although I had the Vista partition as a safe zone I sucked it up and hardly used Vista. I used OSX, and tried to find alternatives to the programs that I used in Vista. Luckily I managed to transition with ease, possibly because I had switched to Ubuntu for a short period. The only thing I do miss is Windows Live Writer, for use with this blog. Luckily Wordpress has had a nice overhaul on their admin interface and somehow find it fairly easy to live with.

So after nearly 10 months without using my Vista partition I’ve decided it’s time to get rid of it and make good use of that hard drive space on my OSX installation. This is a short picture walk through on how to delete your Windows/Linux Bootcamp partition in OSX.

• Go to your applications folder by double clic.king your Macintosh HD > Applications Folder > Utilities and open the Boot Camp Assistant.
• Read the Introduction and select Continue.
• On the Select Task screen you want to select the Create or Remove a Windows Partition option.
• You will come to the next window Restore Disk to a Single Volume, read through the window and press the Restore Button.
• It will then ask for the main account password and continue on to the next screen.
• After a minute or two (may take longer) it will finally display the results and a quit button will appear and you are Done!