For the second year in a row, my wife and I participated in Earth Hour. At 8:30 I hit the main breaker in our apartment shutting everything down for an hour. During that time we read together by candlelight and reflected on just how much energy we use on a day to day basis. It was amazing to us how quiet it was without the ambient hum of electronics running, serving our whims, and it was humbling to think how hard it seemed to read by candlelight and how much we rely on technology for every aspect of our lives.
If you didn’t participate in Earth Hour this year I urge you to do so next year. It’s a simple and symbolic way to focus on saving energy and the mounting energy crisis.
What would you like to do with the existing calendars information on your iPhone?
When Exchange support was added in the iPhone 2.0 software last summer, turning on Exhange Syncing for Contacts or Calendars was an exclusive action. Once you turned on Exchange Calendars you could no longer sync your calendars on your iPhone with your computer directly. It appears that in the iPhone 3.0 that this is no longer the case. I upgraded to the beta of 3.0 last night and when I attempted to setup Google Syncing again with my calendars, I got the screen on the right.
Previously, doing this action would prompt me that all existing calendars on the iPhone would be deleted, now it asks what to do with the calendars already on the iPhone with an option to keep them intact. This indicates that Apple is planning on removing the limitation of supporting either Exchange OR synced content but not both.
Unfortunately iTunes seems to not know what to do with this yet, and if I don’t delete the synced calendars, iTunes is not able to do anything with them.
Also unfortunate is that the iPhone will still only support 1 exchange account, an attempt to add a second Exchange Account brings up the familiar “Only one Exchange ActiveSync account can be configured.” message. While most business users will only have one Exchange account to sign into, Google’s recent move into adding ActiveSync support to Google Calendar and Google Contacts means that at least some of those business users with business accounts on their company Exchange servers may want to setup their personal Google Calendar and Contacts as well, and they’ll be out of luck.
This is still good news, however, for anyone who needs their corporate calendars and contacts but has their own calendars and contacts on their computer as well that they would like to sync. Kudos to Apple for this non-touted but useful feature.
Back in August, I posted a how-to on keeping your iPhone (or iPhone 3G) and Mac in sync with Google Calendar all the time over the air, it basically required using both Mobile Me and Spanning Sync with an Always On Mac to make sure your iPhone was kept in constant sync with both your Mac and Google Calendar.
At the time, it was the only solution available to make this possible, now however, Google has made it all so much easier, and cut out all of the cost, in fact, I’m sure Apple is not too pleased about how Google has made it possible to have two way over-the-air syncing with iPhones for free, thus making their $99/year Mobile Me Service all but unnecessary to most people.
Without further ado, here is how to keep your Mac (which no longer needs to stay online 24/7), your iPhone, and Google Calendar all in sync for Free.
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That’s right, I said it, and so far I’m the only one who has. Google has announced that extensions are coming to Google Chrome but have been mum on when. However I saw something today, that indicates the timetable may be short. Google officially opened up registration for Google I/O 2009, their third annual (first one was just called Google Developer Day) Developer’s Conference.
Google Chrome Extensions Session at Google I/O 2009
Like last year, it will take place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Along with the open pre-registration, they’ve also posted a list of Sessions (subject to change). High up on the list is a session entitled “Developing extensions for Google Chrome” which contains the following description:
Learn how Google Chrome makes it easy to write extensions using the web technologies you already know. This talk will cover the basics of the extension system (distribution/packaging, installation, updates), as well as the different APIs to enhance with the browser.
I’d say this is a safe bet that if Extensions are not released BEFORE Google I/O, then they will be released as a new feature AT Google I/O. Extensions are coming, but what about Mac Support?
UPDATE FROM GOOGLE I/O: While the session went through as planned, it turns out my theory was wrong, they simply aren’t available to announce support for extensions yet, although it is coming soon, and they are really well implemented in beta.
Is the book better than the movie?
It is no secret that I’m a fan of the Chronicles of Narnia series of books and movies, and as a loyal fan, I follow news related to Narnia, and one of my favorite news sources for Narnia related news is NarniaFans.com. I don’t normally bother to post Narnia related news here, because I feel that I would never be able to do the justice that a dedicated site such as NarniaFans can do, however today my Google Reader showed me an article relating to Narnia that caught my attention for more reasons then The Lion.
In New Zealand, the New Zealand Book Council’s agency (Colenso BBDO) in Auckland, New Zealand, has come up with a rather ingenious way to try and get more young people to read. When people in New Zealand rent Prince Caspian on DVD from video rental stores in Auckland and the surrounding areas, they see the DVD on the left, and on the right a number of pages, in fact, they see the first 2 chapters of Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis, with a title page that contains the question “Is the book better than the movie?”
I felt like posting about this story here because I love anything that encourages young people to read. When I was growing up, the Chronicles of Narnia were some of my personal favorite books to read, and I read them over and over again, today sadly a lot of young people who go to see these movies (which are fantastic), don’t even realize that these wonderful books exist. By putting the first couple of chapters of a book in with the DVD Rental, perhaps children who enjoy the movie will decide to read the accompanying beginning of the book, and when they get hooked, will head to their local library to grab the rest of it.
This could obviously work for series other then Narnia, imagine if the Harry Potter DVDs included the first two chapters of their accompanying books. I know by chapter 2 of Philosopher’s Stone, I was hooked on J.K. Rowling’s style.
And why limit it to the DVD release, have movie theaters hand out pamphlets of the first chapter of Inkheart after children go to see that imaginative tale this month.
I applaud the New Zealand Book Council for trying out this imaginative campaign to bring more young people to literature. It is my belief that with more children reading books, we will have a much brighter tomorrow.
I recently migrated nick.pro and other sites from regulus over to a new server named Atlas, it’s much more powerful, but there were some hiccups in the transfer that I’m slowly having to iron out.
I also just upgraded Wordpress to the new 2.7, and I must say, I’m not a big fan of the all grey interface, but I’m liking some of the new features, for example the QuickPress block on the Dashboard that let me write this post without having to leave the dashboard at all.
I’ve been working a lot of extra hours as of late in order to put new things live on Justia, and it’s had a few negative side effects. Last Wednesday night I was up all night working on things for Justia and then only got an hour and a half of sleep before having to get up Thursday for another day. Unfortunately that hour and a half was obviously not enough, because I fell asleep in the shower and crumbled to the floor of the bathtub, bashing my knee against the metal soap dish, and then on the floor of the tub hard before jolting myself awake.
The doctor said I mildly dislocated my patella and sprained one of the ligaments that connects the bones down there. All throughout the past weekend up until today I’ve had to walk with a cane to keep the pressure off my knee.
Last night I had another all-niter of work, but fortunately didn’t injure myself again, tonight it’s 2:20 a.m. as I write this and I’m about to go to bed, so there’s a little rest for the weary, but it’s worth it. Tonight I pushed some significant improvements to a Justia site, which I might blog about later.
on the top of the screen. TweetDeck’s replies button uses the replies twitter feed feature from the Twitter API to work, so it returns the exact same list that you get on the home page.
