Monthly Archives: July 2009

Access your MobileMe iDisk from your iPhone

Apple has finally released the iPhone iDisk application for the iPhone! Bottom line is that you can browse your iDisk from your iPhone. You can view PDFs, Office and iWork docs.

idisk.pngPros:

  • It’s Free!
  • You can view PDFs, HTML, Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and iWork docs.
  • It’ll view images and stream video and audio (Apple supported formats).
  • It will cache files to the iPhone for faster access and you get to define how much space to use.
  • You can search to find your files.
  • You can share files right from the iPhone.
  • You can delete from the phone (oops, maybe this is a con!).
  • Works in landscape mode.
  • Keeps track of files you recently accessed via the iPhone.
  • You can access other member’s public folders.

    Cons:

  • You can’t view text clippings (why not?!?).
  • You can only view by alphabetical order.
  • HTML links are not clickable.
  • Can’t see full filenames sometimes (landscape helps) or file creation dates.

    All together, if you’ve got MobileMe and use the iDisk, this is a no-brainer to download.

  • Getting my memos from my Palm Handheld to my iPhone

    I never imagined getting my memos (just text notes) from my Palm Treo 755p could be such a hassle. First let me point out how important some of these memos are to me, they aren’t just from my Treo 755p: before that they were on my Treo 700p, before then they were on my Samsung SPH-i500 (best phone ever!) and also my Samsung(s) SPH-i330 and SPH-i300 (from 2001, I think). So some of these note have been around for a while…

    Googling around there is no good solution to get them on the phone into the iPhone Notes application, lots of people looking for solutions. The simple solution (but not what I wanted) was just to open Palm Desktop (for the Mac) and print all your memos to a PDF file and e-mail it to yourself and you can always open that later (or store it on your iDisk if you have MobileMe).

    Here’s the steps I went through to get them into the iPhone Notes application (I’ve only been using an iPhone since OS 3.0 so I don’t know when they added the Notes feature):

    phoneview.jpg1- Export your memos from the Palm Desktop software (I did this on my MacBook) choosing exported as tab delimited (you can turn some of the columns off if you want, I only exported the title and the body of the memos).
    2- Then I opened this text file up in the Mac’s TextEdit application, did a few search and replaces of any goofy characters.
    3- Then I used PhoneView from ecamm to view the notes on the phone.
    Here’s the mundane part:
    4- I highlighted the title and body of a memo.
    5- Dragged the selected text into the PhoneView application and let go.
    6- PhoneView created a memo with the first line of text being the title which was exactly what I wanted.
    7- Go back to step 4 and repeat for every memo you want. I only kept about 60% of my memos and more than a few of those might be out of date (but I have them!!!).
    8- Click the Apply Changes button in PhoneView to save the changes to the iPhone.
    9- I then exited the application and synced with iTunes.
    10- I then checked the Mail application on my MacBook for my Notes (why are notes kept in the Mail application?) and they were all there.

    PhoneView has a free demo, but I don’t know if any limitations will stop you from doing this. I already owned the application so I don’t know about this. If you’re reading this far, you obviously owned a Palm OS handheld so if you ever owned BeamPro, this is the company that wrote that software. And ecamm is the same company that wrote CardRaider which saved my Chicago photos last summer.

    Obviously, PhoneView isn’t made by Apple so I’m sure if it screws something up, it’s not covered under warranty. But a restore from your backup should make it all happy again if something happens.

    More ramblings about this process:

    This will take you a while if you have thousands of notes, so I thought I’d mention a few things.

    After step one (1) I was able to import this document into the spreadsheet in Google Docs and it put the title in one column and the body in another, so if you can manipulate it from there you might be okay. If I recall correctly if I could save each memo as it’s own text file I could just drag that to the Mail application Notes area (or PhoneView) but I didn’t have a way to separate the memos easily. Otherwise I think I just could have dragged 100 notes files in very quickly (Mail didn’t want let me drag TextClippings in nor could I view them via the iPhone iDisk application).

    Remember, the notes only get synced with iTunes, no wireless syncing with MobileMe (not even an option to view in MobileMe).

    WordPress makes me miss a few things about Movable Type…

    I think it’s safe to say at this point I’ve become a huge WordPress fan. But I was a huge MovableType fan for a long time and I miss a few things about it.

    What I really miss (and would like) in WordPress is –

    • A good search and replace in the administration interface (dashboard).
    • An easy way to maintain multiple websites with one login interface (a dashboard deluxe). From Movable Type I could maintain several blogs and with blogging clients I only had to log in once to configure for multiple blogs.
    • An easy way to maintain multiple websites with one login interface (a dashboard deluxe). From Movable Type I could maintain several blogs and with blogging clients I only had to log in once to configure for multiple blogs.

    Maybe I can do do this with WordPress mu (multi-user)? I’m thinking the last few times I looked at it mu still didn’t handle things the way I wanted it to. Multiple blogs with different domain names still seemed to need plug-ins and I guess I’d feel better if it was integrated in the core. And I’m thinking not all plug-ins are WPmu compatible. I’m thinking when WordPress and WordPress mu becomes one product the plug-ins compatibility will change.

    New banner image from Cardiff Bay at the top of my blog.

    The banner is an edit from a photo I took in Cardiff, Wales. It is of the Wales Millennium Centre (see photo) with (what they simply call) The Water Tower in front of it.
    walesmillenniumcentre.png
    These are located in Roald Dahl Plass (plaza) dedicated to the Cardiff born author Roald Dahl. This Millennium Centre is beautiful at night, I didn’t have my camera when I wandered down there when I was in town, but that photo will be on my list for the next trip. And hopefully there will be water coming out of The Water Tower next time too! The Plass is lit very pretty too!

    I’ve been thinking about Cardiff and also thinking about changing my photo so I choose this. I don’t have a lot of really wide photos that crop well so I looked around and found this one. Plus, I’ve got Torchwood on the the brain this week (month).

    On the photo (in this post) if you read the right half of the building you can see it says: “In These Stones Horizons Awen (Awe and?) Sing”. The left half says something in Welsh. I was told the building is built from materials made all in Wales.

    A Year Ago Today

    I’ve found a new WordPress plug-in that I like. It’s called “A Year Before“.

    It’s got options to show a year ago today (or months or days) what you were blogging about. I’m using “anniversary mode” which I think is taking the post from today for as many years back as it can find.

    Don’t worry if you haven’t been blogging long it’s got a “range” to show posts near a year ago (or six months ago). I’m running it on WordPress 2.8.2 (as of this writing) and it seems to be fine.

    On This Date

    2008 Best fix for my Convertible Rear Windshield
    2008 MacBook Rumors seem to be rising…
    2007 The Future of Television is selling me individual custom episodes
    2005 Google Moon
    2005 Don’t Be Afraid… Be Ready!
    2004 Photos! (London)
    2004 Did we walk? Boy did we walk!
    2004 Cowboy Junkies and Shawn Colvin

    I’ve been using it the last few days at the bottom of my left sidebar, but since I’m blogging about it I moved it to the top of the left sidebar, so you can see what it really looks like. I copied the text here so the links actually work. I’m not sure where I’ll move it to later.

    It’s interesting, maybe more to me than you, but they always say you should show links to older posts for newer readers. Without even reading them I’m reminded about a trip to London (and the concert I went to a few days before) and the slideshow viewer that never detected flash properly, a homeland security site (which now appears to be a FEMA site), Google maps adding the Moon, my dreams for a new MacBook and how $5 fixed my convertible roof saving me hundreds of dollars (and save multiple readers the same!).

    Torchwood Children of Earth now available on iTunes

    Torchwood: Children of Earth started in the US on BBC America last night and runs for the next four nights, kind of a mini-series of a season. Torchwood: Children of Earth [Blu-ray] BBC WarnerYou can already get Torchwood: Children of Earth at iTunes for $2.99 per episode in HD (or $1.99 for standard). Not bad if you don’t have BBC America in your cable package. Generally, iTunes has been that fast for US shows, but I don’t think they’ve been that fast with the BBC shows (or maybe it just seems longer since the BBC airs them so much earlier in the UK). I’m not sure what they’ll charge for the whole season once it’s available later this week (Torchwood seasons Season’s One and Two episodes are only $1.99 for HD and $0.99 for standard definition and you don’t even have to buy the whole season).

    Amazon has it on pre-order Blu-ray or DVD which ships next week.

    Other space information in time for today’s anniversary…

    I mentioned the anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing earlier today. Here’s a few other “space” things that caught my eye:

    themoon.jpg

  • Apollo 11 restored HD video.
  • Send your name to Mars and get a certificate.
  • For your iPhone and iPod Touch get SkyVoyager and SkyGazer for free today (normally $17.98 combined).
  • Photos of the Moon landing sites from the LRO.
  • And Google has added the Moon to Google Earth (desktop application).
  • That’s it for now. Please post any recommended links in the comments below.

    Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

    Forty Years Ago Today: We landed on The Moon!

    On this day 40 years ago Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. astronaut_Apollo_11.jpg I’m not sure what else needs to be added to that statement: “We landed on the Moon”! How amazing is that?!?

    Just for some frame of reference: The Moon is 238,000 miles away (384,000 km), if you were driving 75 miles per hour it would take you 3,100 hours. Keep in mind that’s speeding and you don’t get to pull over for any bathroom breaks or snacks!

    Actually it took them more like five days to get there, so just dividing that out, that’s around 2,000 miles per hour (assume it took them a while to speed up and slow down).

    When I was a kid, my mother purchased me a two record set of the mission. Lots of audio recordings of the launch and landing. I’m thinking there was some insert with a bunch of photos too. I played that a lot on my record player. I don’t have any idea what year she purchased that, but I’d say I was six or seven(?), and it was amazing to me!

    It’s still amazing to me. Whenever I can watch a launch of some kind or another, I always turn on the TV and still get thrills and chills. I get chills just thinking about it as I’m writing this…

    Apollo_11_bootprint.jpg
    The sad part is we only landed six times and then we stopped.

    Photos courtesy of Wikipedia.