#mac

Quicksilver Shelf Plugin — My First Screencast

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As I was try­ing to kill time, I was research­ing Quick­sil­ver extend­abil­i­ty oth­er than just quick-launch­ing apps. Yes, I know Spot­light does it from the get-go.

My search led to a Lifehacker.com arti­cle (as usu­al, with this kind of things) writ­ten a while back about Gina Tra­pani’s Top 10 Quick­sil­ver Plu­g­ins (at the time: Novem­ber 2007). One of the plu­g­ins that intrigued me to check out was the Shelf module/plugin.

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Apple Ads on ESPN

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I saw this new Apple ad yes­ter­day on ESPN after read­ing about it from Ryan Sims. Its a cam­paign for the lat­est iPod shuf­fles.1

Apple has tak­en over the ESPN home­page in the past. Their ads have suc­cess­ful­ly inter­act­ed with ele­ments of the page, and not to men­tion, brought the clicks in as peo­ple have been intrigued by them. I know I was, as I had to replay them more than twice.

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  1. Here’s my write­up on that ver­sion. [↩]

Use the Cavalry 2TB CADA002SA2‑B External Drive in OS X and Windows

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I recent­ly pur­chased an exter­nal dri­ve to upgrade from my West­ern Dig­i­tal My Book 500GB Essen­tial Edi­tion. I need­ed the upgrade as I am plan­ning to upgrade the hard dri­ve on my Mac­Book Pro some time this year to at least a 500GB (from a 120GB). I decid­ed to go with the Cav­al­ry 2TB CADA002SA2‑B exter­nal dri­ve (aka. CADA-SA2).

It was sell­ing for a good price (~1GB/$1) a cou­ple of weeks ago. That and hav­ing the addi­tion­al eSA­TA inter­face helps with trans­fer­ring huge files (3.0Gbps vs 480Mbps, about 6.25x faster). Any­ways, my My Book was cur­rent­ly set­up with the fol­low­ing par­ti­tions:

  • 120GB for HFS+. I just use SuperDuper1 once or twice in a month, and/or when I want to do a OS X update, to have a bootable back­up just in case of Mur­phy’s Law.
  • And the rest, 380GB for­mat­ted on NTFS. I use that space for back­ing up music, pho­tos, videos, appli­ca­tion install files, etc. both for Win­dows and OS X

I some­what want­ed to do the same with the Cav­al­ry, but I’ve read on their site and their man­u­al that it does­n’t work on OS X 10.5+. Luck­i­ly, some­one post­ed a review on NewEgg that they have suc­cess­ful­ly got­ten it to work with Leop­ard.

You can get this dri­ve to work on Mac OS 10.5. The way Cav­al­ry Tech sup­port told me to do it was to find a OS 10.4 machine, for­mat it on that and then plug it into the 10.5 machine. All I did was put in my old 10.4 disc, boot from the CD and use disk util­i­ty to for­mat it. How­ev­er, if you don’t have a way to boot OS 10.4 you are pret­ty much stuck.

I hope that helps for those who decide to get the same exter­nal stor­age and use it with your Mac prod­ucts.

  1. SuperDuper is the wild­ly acclaimed pro­gram that makes recov­ery pain­less, because it makes cre­at­ing a ful­ly bootable back­up pain­less. [↩]

Sync iPhone and Google Calendar via NuevaSync

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I have been tin­ker­ing around try­ing to get GCAL­Dae­mon work­ing again after the update to Leop­ard, but it just has­n’t been the same from its for­mer self of 1‑to‑1 sync. Thought you can find dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions that may allow you to do this, it’s one thing to get it for free and do through the pow­er of the crowd. But things have been look­ing grim late­ly as get­ting GCAL­Dae­mon to work with Leop­ard is still up in the air. Enter Nueva­Sync.

Nueva­Sync allows direct, over-the-air, native syn­chro­niza­tion of cer­tain smart phones and PDA devices with pub­lic PIM, and cal­en­dar­ing ser­vices includ­ing Google Cal­en­dar. Nueva­Sync does not need any soft­ware installed on your device because it uses syn­chro­niza­tion pro­to­cols that are already built in.

I had giv­en it a chance. It requires you signup w/ nuevasync.com. Yah, I know its anoth­er account to keep track of from the many ser­vices out there, but hey… if it works—it works. The set­up is pret­ty sim­ple. You pret­ty much just have to fol­low the instruc­tions which were writ­ten in terms of a 7th-grader—easy enough.

A cou­ple of facts that I found out along with Nueva­Sync’s FAQ:

  • It cur­rent­ly sup­ports the fol­low­ing mobile devices:
    • Apple iPhone 2.0, iPhone 3G and iPod Touch 2.0
    • Win­dows Mobile based PDAs and smart­phones
  • You’ll be doing push/fetch to Nueva­Sync’s “Exchange Serv­er”
  • Adding an alarm noti­fi­ca­tion on an event will default to a “Pop-up” reminder in the even­t’s Google Cal­en­dar (gCal) ver­sion. Vice-ver­sa; you’ll need to select “Pop-up” as the type of remind when cre­at­ing the event in gCal in order to have it also avail­able in your iPhone.
  • Hav­ing your iPhone’s set­ting of “Push to OFF” and “Fetch to Man­u­al­ly” will still enable to Nueva­Sync to per­form its job while allow­ing you to save your iPhone’s mojo.
  • It can sync to mul­ti­ple cal­en­dars under your gCal account of those Cal­en­dars you have a per­mis­sion to write to. You may find out which ones via going to the Nueva­Sync sta­tus page.
  • Even though you can sync with mul­ti­ple cal­en­dars, cre­at­ing an event in your iPhone would default to your main cal­en­dar. This you can say would be a step back if your try­ing to keep things very orga­nized and cat­e­go­rize your events (i.e. Per­son­al, Work, Project A, Project B, etc.).

Sounds good right? So, if you aren’t real­ly using more than one cal­en­dar or don’t care if the events from your write-per­mit­ted cal­en­dars are merged togeth­er into one in your iPhone, I’d def­i­nite­ly rec­om­mend you to give Nueva­Sync a try. But don’t wor­ry, they have that item in their TODO:

So when will you sup­port mul­ti­ple cal­en­dars on the Apple devices?
Soon, it’s one of our top new fea­ture pri­or­i­ties.

Any­ways, I hope this helps. Please do let me know if you hap­pen to find new, inter­est­ing things about it. Have a good sync!