I keep coming back to this one, so I figured I better mark it down for future reference. Also from macosxhints.com. This is mainly for using time capsule / airport drives for Time Machine backups. I'm not sure I'd want to hide usb/firewire drive volumes. To hide: SetFile -a V '/Volumes/Time Machine Volume/' killall Finder And then if you want to bring it back: SetFile -a v '/Volumes/Time Machine Volume/' killall Finder

Since I keep having to look this up I better note the two ways to accomplish this. rename /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg to something else and then copy in your own version of DefaultDesktop. Just make sure you rename the original first so that you've got an easy backup. sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow DesktopPicture "/Path/to/picture/you/want/to/use/image.jpg". Put the image in /Users/Shared so that all users have access to it, otherwise might be permissions issues. You can also always go with a couple little gui progs that'll do this for you too.

[2/13/09 update: As of Feb, you can use Google Sync setup the iPhone to sync contacts or calendars OTA. I still use the below desktop application to also sync iCal instead of waiting for an iPhone sync to update it.] [update: Google now has an app that'll setup the gCal / iCal sync for you. Sweetness. link]   So first, let me lay down the framework of what I'm trying to accomplish. At work I'm now using google apps (gmail for domains) instead of exchange server. But I'm so used to the Outlook interface that I set up Outlook as an imap client for gmail (don't forget to enable imap support in the gmail interface). So where does that leave me for a calender? Well luckily google already has a windows desktop app, google calendar sync, that sync's gcal into the outlook calendar; so I'm covered there. But at home, I'm primarily on the mac which means I'm using iCal and then syncing that to my iPhone. Google calendar has CalDAV support. Just follow the instructions and gCal and iCal sync. Which also means that if you set your iPhone to sync all calendars ...

There's a perfectly good tut on lifehacker but I wanted to copy it here so that 6mo down the road, when I want to do this again, I don't have to worry about the link being dead. [edit: actually I like this one from tuaw.com better.] There are reports that the rename trick has been squashed, but I haven't verified. So this is the GarageBand way. Which also means it's Mac only ... which is fine, this is for me so I have a guide on how to do it next time. And I have a Mac. So fire up iTunes and GarageBand, find the song you want to turn into a ringtone (this is of course assuming that what you want as a ringtone is already in iTunes) and drag it from iTunes into GarageBand. If it's not in iTunes, just open the file in GarageBand right? Now that the file is in itunes click on the Cycle Region button which activates the region loop tool (images stolen from LifeHacker) Now adjust the region to the section of the song you want; it has to be < 40sec and I've found that sometimes GarageBand complained and wouldn't export ...

I needed a place to drop iPhone wallpapers so that I can grab them without having to put them in iPhoto. Probably going to be updating this post for awhile with more wallpaper as a I make/find them. [update] I'll probably just end up setting up an iPhoto album/event just for wallpapers, but I'll still leave this here and update it anyway.

I woke up early Friday morning because I had to get Logan out the door before the house cleaner showed up, and I sat in my chair pondering if I should click that upgrade button. Last time I upgraded (was it 2.0.2?) it took upwards of 40min, and then got stuck in a restore loop where it kept asking me to restore the same backup over and over. Which finally resulted in my having to do a full wipe and restore. Luckily, then, I had the time. This time I didn't. With Apple's recent track record of botched rollouts I felt like I was rolling the dice. To my surprise, I walked away to go shower and get Logan ready, came back a few minutes later and it was all done. No restore loop. Everything synced up correctly. Hey, it worked! 3G reception, whether it's real or just messing with the signal display, more closely matches my old samsung blackjack. Haven't had a dropped call, or one that couldn't be initiated, yet. Contact list is snappy. I don't have reboot the phone every 24hrs. No app crashes. No app ...

I completely forgot to mark this one down; and to be honest, I'd kind of given it up for dead since it was so flaky. But I picked it up again a few days ago and have been loving on it ever since. It's just another itunes sharing app that lives on a computer and reads/streams the itunes dbase. To be fair, it also works with winamp and rhythmbox. But its claim to fame is that they've successfully gotten a iPhone app published to the itunes app store. Why would I want to stream my music from my home computer when the iPhone has a perfectly good iPod interface and you can load uncompressed music locally? Is your music library < 16GB? I know mine isn't. This app gives me access to all my music. I still load stuff I want to listen to when I don't have a network connection, or I want higher quality than a compressed stream. Sound quality is pretty decent, performance is great (now) and bandwidth usage is almost immeasurable. So now I've got iTunes living on my home server with the simplifymedia app. It ...

They sell a couple million iphones, but they expect you to use the same support infrastructure as their computers? I went in because when set to 3G I can't make, answer or maintain a call and they wanted me to wait until tomorrow (the soonest appt available at the "genius bar"). Just as I was angered at their unintelligent way of dealing with limited availability and lines, I'm angered that they don't staff at least one or two dedicated iPhone support reps.

It's a long story, but I finally got an iphone. I'm actually posting this using the wordpress iPhone app. Sadly, I'm thinking about taking it back. 3G reception is awful, and wifi blinks on and off randomly.

You'll want these [edit: Damn, wordpress 2.5 won't let me upload or link to the zip file within the wordpress directory structure; I'll have to find somewhere to put the file] Dell drivers for the broadcom 11n adapter if you're running Vista 32bit running under bootcamp. Without them, I was getting 3mbps max; now I'm up to 10-11mbps, which is what I get under OS X 10.5 ... I'd get better if the router wasn't stuffed away at the back of a storage closet. It also cures a lot (but not all) of the crackly sound.

A lot of people moan that this functionality should've been included by Apple and be fully supported. Anybody else who had excluded this would've been ridiculed, but being Apple, they get away with it. Was it a business decision so that they can market their own Time Machine backup appliance? Or was it lack of programming time/talent? As usual, I'm documenting this for my personal effects so that I can easily reference it later; but if somebody finds this on google and it helps, great. It took me a couple of minutes compiling how to pull this all together from a couple of different sources. Just a quick note: I find the difference between the windows and mac community is that mac people never document anything completely. They either leave out steps they just assume people should know or their they're poor writers (I guess I'm a poor writer too). Not sure which. On a difficulty scale of 1 to 10, this one is going to be a 4. Just because you have to know how to setup a server in the first place that has an SMB share ... or a NAS I ...

english post: http://t.ecksdee.org/post/19001860 japanese source: http://optica-optima.blogspot.com/search/label/DRAWERSicon alternate download: http://www.geocities.jp/chy065/ I'm documenting this and mirroring the files here for archeological purposes. Stacks are neat (somewhat) but what's kept them from being useful for me is that I can't tell what stack is what since the icon is replaced with the icon of the last item modified. Or how ever you have it sorted. Which often ends up being a generic dmg or folder icon. Bad UI. Until a UI change takes place, here's a way to change the stack icon and keep it displayed in the dock along with the stack overly icons they created. Before and after shot of stacks in the dock to better explain what I'm talking about. Hopefully more people will start creating stack icons.

Was looking forward to an os upgrade after having gotten somewhat used to using Tiger on a daily basis on my home imac. But for all the apply hype machine, this was one seriously anti-climatic let down. I'm sure there's a lot going on under the hood; I've never cared to pay any attention to Tiger beyond what an end consumer would, and I don't plan to start now with Leopard. But you'd think this was a Microsoft product after using it for more than a day. No other os upgrade I've ever done has killed so many applications in one swoop ... not even Vista. Looks like Apple finally took a page out of the MS play book: clean install needed for stability. Possibly it's because they went to full 64bit that's killing some apps? Things not working right after upgrade: Random hard lock ups when moving windows/browsing dock requiring a cold boot. Most likely a video driver issue, but isn't that the point of having a unified hardware platform? [update] turns out it was video bios issue, firmware updater released and hasn't locked since. Deja Vu no longer works. Sure if I want to ...