ben robison
when only more words will do
Subscribe to RSSDesktop Application for Blogging on a Mac?
I know that there are a few applications that do this. I seem to recall looking at a few several months ago, but didn’t feel like I had a big enough need that I wanted to pay for one. Now that I’m looking to increase the frequency of my blogging, I thought it might be nice to give them another look.
Problem now is that I can’t seem to remember any of the ones I looked at before, and I’m really drawing a Google Blank. Any help from the masses?
Howto: Outlook Plays Nice With gCal Thanks to gSyncit
Being a Mac user at home is nice, but makes calendar compatibility with my work computer a little challenging. For awhile, I used my Blackberry and synced it to both computers, but it wasn’t made for this purpose and after a few syncs, it inevitably started crashing the Desktop Manager on my Windows machine at work while trying to sync calendars.
I got tired of completely clearing out the calendar to get it to sync again (I did it twice and couldn’t take it anymore). I first turned to Funambol and Schedule World with instructions from this article over at internetducttape.com.
I should have read the comments a little closer before trying it out, because this Funambol doesn’t work with Exception Dates. Exception dates occur when you have a recurring appointment and then change one occurence without changing the series. With my work, this happens all the time because I’ll have weekly recurring appointments with clients that often get bumped by an hour or a day. Whenever these exceptions occured, the sync process started adding appointments to my Outlook calendar even though I had said the sync should only go one direction. It also had an annoying habit of popping up the Outlook reminder dialog several times during the sync.
One of my colleagues pointed me in the direction of SyncMyCal. They make a $25 dollar product that he uses and said it handles exception dates very well. They also make a free version, but it will only sync a 7 day window which didn’t meet my needs. I’m willing to shell out $25 to save the aggravation, but a last ditch effort on Google revealed another possibility (I swear I performed the same search two days earlier).
gSyncit comes in here. Dave claims to offer the same functionality with a free version and a full that costs $10. The only limitation on the free version is no auto-sync and a popup when you load Outlook or sync. So far it works beautifully. I installed it this morning, and the first, second, and third sync went off without a hitch (or Outlook reminders popping all over my screen, or creating ghost appointments on my real calendar).
I figure I’ll give it a few days to see how it handles more new appointments and a few more exception dates, but I’m thinking that I’ll soon be paying Dave his $10 for a product well executed.
What I can now do is subscribe to my gCal work calendar with iCal on my Mac at home, and now I have a single source for everything happening in my life. And since iCal obviously plays nice with iTunes and iPods, my iPod is now the portable source of truth for my busy life. I guess I should here add my thanks to Google for supporting open standards and making my cross-platform life a little simpler as well. And thanks to Apple for doing that too.
Time to Roll Out the Upgrades
Just upgraded wordpress to the latest version. It was a little more involved than I liked, but once I got the latest version of my theme, then everything went off without a hitch. Now I’ve got database backups and code lying all over my desktop, but that’ll all be cleaned up in short order.
I’m excited for this version of Wordpress however, since it now has native support for tags. This is something that has been in Typo for ages, but the lack of a really good/cheap Rails host (well, maybe it’s laziness and lack of willingness to try different hosts) means that I had to wait for Wordpress to include it before I could use it.
Yes, there were plugins before, but I try to keep the mgmt of my site to a minimum, and stay out of the code as much as possible. I consider myself fully capable of diving into the code and the hardcore database stuff, but when you’ve got better things to do, why spend the time doing it?
Tags: Blogging, upgrades, wordpress
Microsoft vs. Apple
Just had an interesting experience that I found mildly humourous. Maybe I’m a little cynical about Microsoft at the moment (I just read a negative review for Office for Mac 08 at AppleInsider) but I thought I’d share a story about attention to detail.
I just noticed that the clock on my XP machine was an hour behind. Having just passed daylight savings time a week ago, I make the assumption that it hasn’t yet reset itself. So I open the properties box and make sure it’s set to automatically retrieve time from time.windows.com. It was. I forced the time sync, waited for about 45 seconds and was told that it couldn’t sync to that time server.
I opened System Preferences on my Macbook, to see what time server it synced to. I switched my XP box to sync to time.apple.com, it immediately refreshed and now my clock tells correct time. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions =)
iPhone or iPod Touch?
It’s no secret that I’ve been lusting after the iPhone for awhile now. I thought that the Touch was cool, but I’ve been really excited about having internet on a phone, being able to look at Google Maps while driving etc. And I think it’s cool to have a real browser on the phone; one that works with the real internet (as opposed to the fake internet that’s made for those other phones with crappy browsers).
Up until now, my excuse for really going after the phone was that it would mean that I didn’t have to carry my laptop around when I go places anymore. With my church responsiblities, I need my calendar everywhere I go now, which translates into carrying around my 6 lb laptop all day on the weekends. I use it for notes, my task list, and my calendar items.
The iPod Touch had a calendar, task list (I think) but no notes. And the calendar was not editable, meaning, I’d still have to carry around the laptop so I could put new appointments in. Well the latest firmware update (1.1.2) now adds editable calendar items, which I think includes tasks, and notes will be available without jailbreaking in February when Apple releases the SDK. As long as you’ve got a place with Wi-Fi though, there are already web apps that provide that functionality.
Are you following my convoluted thought process? I wanted the phone so badly that I was planning on dropping off my paid company phone plan and paying my own bill just so I could join AT & T. I think the Touch might be good enough to satisfy my techno-lust and is now really starting to look like the smarter option. Plus for the same price, you get twice the storage space. Can reason win out over my desire? What are your thoughts?