Tag Archives: mac

Re-learning Mac

For the first time in over a decade, I have a MacBook again. So I’m re-learning how to use it as an actual useful operating system, from the perspective of having used Fedora Linux for 10+ years.

I remember a lot of things being a lot easier, but I suspect that by the time I stopped using Macs, I had a LOT of third-party thingies installed to make it more Linux-like.

Perhaps I’ll post some tips here as I discover/remember them.

Tip 1: Enable sshd by going to System Preferences, type ‘ssh’ in the search box, click “remote login”, and turn remote login ON in the dialog that pops up.

MobileMe, and syncing with subscribed Google Calendars

I just signed up for the free 60 day trial of MobileMe, and already, I hate it pretty hard.

The main – indeed, the ONLY reason for wanting MobileMe is to ensure that the calendar on my iPod and the calendar on my laptop are always always always in sync. Most of my really important calendars are shared, and so are maintained on Google Calendars.

Turns out that MobileMe only syncs calendars that live on my Mac, not calendars that I’m subscribed to from somewhere else – like Google Calendars. This renders MobileMe completely useless to me.

Now, I know someone out there has solved this. So, I adjure you to tell me the solution, some time before the 60 days run out. Or before I, once again, schedule two overlapping lunch meetings, neither of which can be cancelled.

Thanks.

FOLLOWUP:

Looks like this is a well-known issue. MobileMe won’t sync subscribed calendars. This means that MobileMe is utterly worthless for me. Shame, since with this one feature, it would be worthwhile.

Rumor is that iPhone 3.0 will have native CalDAV support in the calendar App, so it looks like I’ll just have to wait for that.

FOLLOWUP TO THE FOLLOWUP:

iCal on OS 10.5 now support CalDAV, and so does Google Calendars, so I can actually now manage my Google calendars directly from iCal. This was a bit of a revelation to me, since this has always seemed to be The Missing Feature of Google Calendars + iCal. Yay. Now I just have to wait impatiently for the iPhone 3.0 update.

LiDE 30 and the Mac

I have a LiDE 30 scanner, which is actually a fairly recent acquisition. It’s a nice scanner, in particular because it is entirely powered by USB, and so doesn’t need a separate power supply.

A few days ago I tried to get it to work on my Mac, which I assumed wouldn’t be difficult. I think I burned about 30 minutes on it total before giving it up as a bad job. There were a variety of different packages that claimed to do it, but none of them seemed to do much of anything, and none of them successfully recognized the scanner.

Anybody know of something that will get this working? It’s one of the new Intel Macs, and this actually seems to be the problem. I vaguely remember getting it to work on my pre-Intel Mac, but I just can’t remember for certain.

Palms and Macs

It has long irritated me how poorly Palm devices are supported on Macs. The Palm desktop for Mac is the finest software that 1989 has to offer. (Actually, the last release was 2005.) It doesn’t sync the memo pad. It doesn’t sync tasks (todo items) properly. It doesn’t integrate with iCal particularly well (there’s no support for categories, for example). And the user interface looks like something I’d expect on Windows 3.11.

And folks keep telling me “use Missing Sync, it’s better.”

I was leery of this, because I knew that it wouldn’t work, that it would introduce other problems, and that I’d regret spending money on it.

Finally, this week, I received an unexpected royalty check, and I got Missing Sync.

Turns out I was rather too optimistic.

It is duplicating events. It is duplicating task categories, and moving my items from one category to another. It is putting some of my events in the Havana timezone, and others in the Indianapolis timezone. It is duplicating text files that I had on my Palm. It is occasionally deleting recurring events, or eliminating all but the first occurrence.

So, to say that I’m disappointed would be a bit of an understatement. In fact, the only thing that does work as advertised is that I am now able to sync my memo pad entries to my computer, which was a major reason for getting this.

And each time I sync, there are new surprises awaiting me. A new category. A missing category. A missing appointment. An appointment shifted an hour or two in one direction or another, or duplicated a few times.

*sigh*. What a waste of time and money.