#mac
Quicksilver Shelf Plugin — My First Screencast
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.
Apple Ads on ESPN
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.
- Here’s my writeup on that version. [↩]
Use the Cavalry 2TB CADA002SA2‑B External Drive in OS X and Windows
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.
- 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
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!