Monday, May 26, 2008

Wirelessly Sync Iphone Calendar with Nemus

Ok, to wirelessly sync your iphone calendar with any google calendar do the following:

In the installer, select System and then install NemusSync.

Since Nemus is only for 1.1.1-1.1.2 versions of the OS it will crash when you try to point it to your gmail account. Here's the workaround that worked for me.

Open up your terminal app and su to root or ssh in from your pc. Type the following commands:

ln -s /var/mobile/Library/Calendar/ /var/root/Library/Calendar
chown -R mobile.wheel /var/Applications/NemusSync.app

Now this is important. When you point Nemus to your new account hit the Get Calendar List button before you hit the Save button. Then all is well.

Note if you currently sync your Calendar with Itunes (or sync your gCalendar with Outlook and then sync Outlook with your Iphone using Itunes) this will create duplicate entries. Fortunately, Nemus comes with a button in the Advanced Menu which allows you to delete your iphone Calendar and start fresh. I haven't had the guts to try to upload events from the iphone to the gCalendar yet, so if anyone has success with that let me know.

View Windows Media/Avi files on Iphone

It doesn't exactly work the way you want, but if you have a mycast.orb.com account and either a wireless or edge connection, then you can stream avi files from your pc at home to your Iphone. Here are the instructions:

(1) Install the lastest version of Orb, obtained here.

(2) Create an Account (and make me your friend!)

(3) Right click on the orb tray icon then select Configuration and point it to the directories which contain you audio and video files you would want to view/share.

(4) In the Iphone Installer goto multimedia and select Orb Live. Once installed just give it your login and password and your ready to go.

(5) To actually view your movies select the movie button at the bottom, then select Folders to browse the file structure you pointed orb to in step 3. Find the file you want and enjoy.

Vista Crash Count (Update)

Add one more blue screen to the count: screen saver went on and vista went off.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Ipod/Iphone: Best Hack Ever

I followed these instructions and yes now i can login and remotely control my desktop at home using the ipod and can do so from anywhere in the world. Watch the demonstrations they're pretty cool and even a cheap bastard like me agrees that $15 per phone/ipod is quite a reasonable price to pay to be able to login to any computer to which you have vnc access. Unfortunately, I couldn't make it work with the Vista laptop but that seems to have more to do with the TightVNC server than anything else. I will give it another try soon as some people have had luck with UltraVNC on vista.

Thursday, May 1, 2008

Zotero

I often extol the virtues of Zotero as the finest tool for tracking references and storing and sorting electronic copies of your papers in a searchable indexable tagable way all within Firefox. For sorting new papers the Zotero button in firefox just makes things too easy. But for your existing library of pdf and ps files its a bit more of a hassle.

However, if you're in need of a monumental act of procrastination (as I was today) the following procedure seemed to work pretty well:

If the pdf already has a bibliographic entry in Zotero then just drag the file onto the Zotero entry to associate it. You can then delete the original file as Zotero has made a copy. If not, then...
  1. Right Click in the Collections window and Create A Collection called Unsorted Files
  2. Drag and Drop all your articles into this collection
  3. Go make some coffee or something while Zotero copies the files to its indexing directory. Firefox may ask you if it should continue or cancel the script...just click to continue
  4. Open up the new Collection you created Double Click a PDF to view the pdf in your browser
  5. You can now enter the bibliographic information by hand
  6. Alternatively if your looking at an academic article (i know i usually am) then it probably has a doi. If your very lucky that doi is blue indicating it is clickable if it is click it. This almost always takes you to a webpage that Zotero knows how to read. If it does then just click on the Zotero button to the right of the url at the top. If it doesn't then google the doi or title and author and you will likely find a page that does have a Zotero button you can click
  7. This created a new entry that has the correct bibliographic information and placed it into the Unsorted Collection. Now just drag the pdf file you started with onto the new entry and see that it placed the pdf under new entry in the tree structure.
  8. Finally, drag the new Zotero entry to the appropriate collection and then right click to Remove the selected item from the Unsorted Files collection (do not delete from library)
Note this creates a new copy of the pdf file in the Zotero Directory so you can now delete the original file if you like. Anyway, this was eight steps, but once you get going it does go pretty quickly. If you have a better solution or know how to automate this please let me know.