So. Spanning Sync turned 3 last week and as I’ve been using their service to sync calendars between my many computers since it was in early beta that means I’ve had 3 years of calendar syncing bliss.
Don’t get me wrong there have been problems; as software moves through early betas there always are… but overall the service has been an incredibly good fit for my needs, infinitely superior to google’s offering.
I eulogised them in an earlier blog post, Contact Sync, but if you’ve not got round to giving their service a go and you need to sort out your calendars then I highly recommend you check them out.
Tap, tap, tap… That’s all I can hear. Yes the sound on my year old MBP has disappeared and all I can here is my own forceful tapping on the keyboard.
Unfortunately this is not the first time this has happened. The first time it drove me nuts. I eventually shut down the computer (which I do rarely) and it solved the problem.
The actual fix is quicker and more simple. Just insert your headphones into the socket and remove them and like magic it seems to kick start the system. Phew. Now you know what to do if it happens to you too.
So. I’m frequently called by people who have lost documents in Microsoft Word. They’ve been working on something important but hadn’t got round to saving it and BOOM it’s gone.
Prevention is always the cure in these situations. If they had saved the document when they created and then saved it whilst working on it, they could always revert back to the most recent copy.
Sometimes if this has happened more than once I can’t help but tut to myself that some people never learn. So it was with a great deal of surprise I found myself in the same situation last week.
I had been working for hours on a new Social Media Strategy for a client of mine and low and behold Word crashed and I realised to my horror that I hadn’t saved it. Not once.
I cautiously relaunched word and it auto-recovered the two other documents I had been working on for the same meeting but not the 5,000 word strategy document. I felt very stupid.
So rather than just give up and start again (it was 2 o’clock in the morning and I had to leave for my meeting at 8 o’clock) I switched to google.
Now I was pretty sure that if Word had recovered two out of three documents then it had surely recovered the third, but where to find it?
The Microsoft help page was useless. I looked at numerous other pages, but it was this page from Indiana University that put me on the right track.
So for Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac you can find all your recovered documents by going to:
user – Documents – Microsoft User Data – Office 2008 Autorecovery
and if it’s saved, as mine fortunately was, then it’ll be in this folder with some innocuous name like ‘Autorecovery save of Document2’.
And remember to save your documents on creation! Prevention is better than cure. It’s a lesson I certainly try to keep to in the future.
So we completed the new logo for Slingsby’s Driving Academy at the end of last week and began adding it to the website, designing letterheads and such. One of the first things that my client suggested to do (actually tried to do herself!) was to change the Facebook Fan Page Profile Picture.
Ideally this should be an easy process, after all she had added a picture in the first place to act as a placeholder whilst we finalised the logo. Unfortunately the Fan Page Profile Pictures do not act as you might expect. Firstly we tried with an image that included not only the logo but the company name.
Unfortunately the picture then centred on the text in the middle of the image and there appeared no way to change the part of the image that was sampled. :-( Facebook’s help pages provided no extra help, despite searching and we finally settled on this image to solve the gravatar problem:
It’s a nice compromise on our part, but browsing the the Facebook user pages it is clear that Facebook is very unresponsive to users. There are frequently hundreds of messages requesting simple adjustments and changes, and very few responses from Facebook.
I imagine it must be very difficult for Facebook to cope with it’s significant growth, but it seems that rather than being responsive to its users and making small adjustments that improve the users experience. It’s disappointing that Facebook hasn’t embraced a more responsive interface.
So my friend @geetheflea tweeted with this question earlier today. Unfortunately for her I was going through my sisters new business plan and so twitter couldn’t have been further from my mind…
A mutual friend @tsmarsh suggested the following technique to her, neatly illustrated by this video:
Fortunately for her I don’t think that the recommended product, Mr Clean’s Magic Eraser, a USA only product is available here in the UK. Although on reflection I am rather nervous that it might be readily available in the pound shops of Holloway… you never know… and if it is, I am sure my friend will have found herself some. (see why here)
Anyway this in principle was not what worried me about the method. It was what follows: he adds a liberal amount of water to the cleaning product before going at it some on his keyboard (albeit a switched off keyboard) but it’s WATER none the less.
Despite the jazzy introductory music that had warmed me to his presentation, I was at this point mentally repeating NO, NO, NO. And the DUH when he mentions he once over did it with the water and had to leave his MacBook to dry over 24 hours!
So. Here is the right way to do it. What you want is the following:
– 1 Microfibre Cloth (My favourite brand is: e-cloth but any will do. Start from 50p upwards (last forever))
– 1 Bottle of iKleer Screen Cleaning Fluid (I prefer this but you can just dampen the e-cloth)
(iKlear do a great pack with it all included. You can buy it from Apple for £29.99 (which might seem pricy but I’m still using the same pack I bought three years ago!))
Anyway the most important thing is to make sure that you use a damp cloth, there should be no standing liquid on the keyboard ever, basically use the above video as a guide on how not to clean your keyboard, at least in terms of liquid levels. Oh and of course switch the computer off!
Also you need to take extra care not to be too rough when cleaning, MacBook keyboards have a habit of being a bit fragile, keys can be easy to dislodge and break off, and though the Apple store are often happy to just fix a new one on for you, it’s a pain.
So I hope this helps you avoid such horrible advice (sorry Tom ;-)) and keep your keyboard nice and clean, as well as your computer healthy.
So. This was unexpected. In one of my earlier posts on the 64 bit revolution taking place since the introduction of Snow Tabby I mentioned that VLC had been upgraded to version 1.0.1 that was now 64 bit compatible.
Unfortunately the 64 bit version of VLC only made it through one  more itteration, by version 1.0.3 it had reverted to 32 bit only. :-(  The explanation provided by the open source development team was that they don’t have enough developers to focus on it being 64 bit.
This has additional ramifications if you use VLC with Handbreak as it is now 64 bit and apparently the 32 bit and 64 bit codecs don’t play nice together. So if you’re having problems go here to download the 64 bit version. And if you know any developers who can help out with the development then ask them to give a hand!
I was very excited by the demos of Google Wave last September and waited patiently for an invitation, one finally furnished by my brother. After a few hours of playing with it I set it aside and although I thought it might be useful for a couple of projects I was working on, I couldn’t really find an immediate use for it.
So at the start of the year I when I was approached by my old driving instructor to re-vitalise her website and later her brand I was finally given the opportunity to try out Google Wave in a real life situation. So I sent her an invite and began to discuss the project with her using Google Wave.
I was very surprised how quickly she adapted to using the Wave, I think it was largely the familiarity that using Facebook Chat had given her with IM clients, only this time she was most impressed with the ability to see what I was typing as I typed (even me correcting spelling mistakes).
For the first couple of weeks of the project – the most important weeks – we went back and forth across a couple of waves, one dedicated to each aspect of the project. I was able to show her screenshots of proposed designs and get immediate feedback, and post alterations we discussed.
Both of us were able to come back to the wave and check for updates and more importantly instead of our discussion being fragmented across multiple emails it was all kept in a single organised place. From a working perspective this made the design and approval process much easier.
In a matter of days we had her new website up and running. After this our use of Google Wave tailed off, probably due to the lack of effective notifications to email meaning once the project tailed off its initial pace she simply forgot to login and check and we defaulted back to emails and telephone calls.
There were a few other drawbacks: the uploading of images was not always successful and more than once I had to resort to email; the adding of comments did not always allow one to easily reply to a comment if it is the last in the list, rather than add a new comment.
Overall for very beta software it performed well for the purpose of managing the project. It is clear however that it needs significant improvement before it makes it way into usage by the general population. It could also do with being improved more quickly that it currently seems to be.
If you’d like to check out the product of our collaboration take a look here:
So. A close friend of mine recently succumbed and got themselves an iPhone (about time!). A few months in, I visited her at her fabulous florists in Stamford Hill and I was surprised to see that she was working her way through her voicemails by listening to them! No visual voicemail loveliness for my friend.
So I took her phone and despite my experience I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to activate it, and O2’s site wasn’t particularly helpful. So I told her to give O2 a call and get them to set it up. A few months later, she was still struggling her way through voicemails by listening to them in sequence.
So I bit the bullet and a few google searches later I came across the solution. Simply call 1750 and it switches on visual voicemail. It works a treat. And now she can avoid having to wade through voicemails by listening to them old school. Phew.
So. I use gmail’s IMAP service to collect emails from each of my email accounts. I’ve used the IMAP service since it was introduced, as unlike the POP3 service it ensures that my inboxes, etc, are synced with the cloud and also with the other computers I used, thereby enabling me to sit down at any computer and see the same, identical information.
Unfortunately it is not unusual for these mailboxes to start displaying duplicate emails, which not only makes searching them more difficult (excluding the duplicates presented by the “All Mail” IMAP mailbox) and can eat up a great deal of extra hard drive space, especially when you have tens of thousands of emails spread across multiple accounts.
So when this started happening again recently I decided to do something about it. The solution if you use Apple’s Mail program is quite simple. It’s called “Rebuild” and can be found in the “Mailbox” menu of Apple’s Mail program here:
Click the item in the red box
Once you’ve clicked this button Apple’s Mail program will go about the task of rebuilding your mailbox, during which these duplicates emails that have been syncronised to your account will be removed. This process can take a couple of minutes, or a couple of hours depending on the size of your mailbox. I had a couple of thousand messages in the mailbox this afternoon and it was completed before I had finished writing this entry.
So Apple has finally started to update it’s Pro software starting with it’s Logic Pro and Mainstage products. So if you’re a music fan or pro then you’re in luck, you ability to address memory just went up from 4Gb to 64 exabytes (if you can afford that much memory – MacObserver reckons it’d cost approx. $450bn – or buy a machine that will fit it).
