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So here’s a somewhat complicated but entirely graphical way of backing up your SMS messages from your iPhone into an excel spreadsheet. I couldn’t get Syphone to work so here is my solution.

The first thing you’ll need is iPhone Backup Extractor. It’s a mac program, but there are other cross platform backup decoders out there such as mobilesync-inspect. You’re looking for the SQLite SMS database (iPhone Backup Extractor calls it SMS.db). iPhone Backup Extractor is not compatible with iPhone OS 3.0 yet but it does work with 2.2.1. Hopefully 3.0 will work soon.

Run iPhone Backup Extractor and select your most recent backup. Scroll down to the bottom of the applications and choose iPhone OS. Choose a folder to save it in.

Then, use an SQLite browser such as SQLite Manager (don’t know why this is a firefox addon, but it rocks) to view the database.

All of the SMSes are stored in the messages table – you can right click on it and export it as a CSV. Alternatively you could export the whole database as an SQL or XML file. But open up the CSV in excel and you’re done! Sweet!

I’ve tried a few browser bookmark syncing services in the past, but I’m really impressed with Foxmarks, for their Firefox, Safari, and IE support.
As a bonus, once I set up foxmarks for Safari, and then synced my iPhone, my firefox bookmarks transferred to my iPhone.
Lifehacker recommends an app, O-Marks, for using foxmarks to sync your bookmarks over the air:
http://lifehacker.com/5051271/o+marks-syncs-your-foxmarks-bookmarks-to-your-iphone
But I find just opening up Safari every once in a while and syncing the iPhone works well enough for me.

For several months I have been trying to stream my iTunes library from my iMac to my wireless laptop in the living room on the same network. I’ve streamed iTunes with various software to other devices (other PCs, Windows Mobile phone, iPhone) using SlimServer, Simplify Media and Mojo, but for some reason it would not stream over the network.
I tried updating iTunes on both machines but had no luck. I tried using Simplify Media to share instead but that didn’t work either. I double checked the preferences on both machines. I disabled the firewall and AVG antivirus. Still no luck.
Finally, I solved it: I opened up Apple Software Update and installed the Bonjour update for Windows. So it was Apple’s fault but I couldn’t find any documentation anywhere. Oh well, it’s fixed now. Hurray!

For a while I was getting a maddening “The iPhone cannot be synced. An unknown error occurred (13213)” error every time I would try and sync my iPhone. No amount of iphone resetting or iTunes restarting would solve my problem. Finally this apple disccusion solved my problem – I had to turn off iTunes Genius and then it worked fine.
But that sucks, I liked Genius, and iTunes stupidly got rid of the mini store so now I can’t see any reviews or album information of the tracks I’m listening to. (Genius isn’t much better actually, it shows you artists’ top albums by default instead of information on the one you’re listening to. Bring back the mini store!)
Anyway, the solution was to upgrade quicktime, which I had been avoiding because it requires a reboot. Actually my 10.5.5 update crashed and almost hosed my machine so I had to use the 10.5.5 Combo Update (which I highly recommend, as you still have Finder and activity monitor control as it works) to upgrade and then upgrade quicktime.
Anyway, after I installed the quicktime update and reinstalled Genius, my iPhone sync worked fine.

I have too many calendars. I’ve managed to consolidate most of them though:

First, I synced my work Outlook calendar (on my PC) to my gcal with the fantastic app Google Calendar Sync. I gave it my info and told it to sync both ways every hour.

Then, I subscribed to my google calendar in iCal: First, in google calendar, click on Settings, Calendar Settings, Calendars, [your calendar], Calendar Address: and click on ICAL. Copy this URL, and then in iCal, paste it into Calendar: Subscribe… and have it update every hour.

And you’re done! My iPhone will only sync when I connect it to the computer, which is fine with me, but you can either subscribe to mobileme for push calendar notifications, set up text messaging alerts with google calendar, or use the web-based iphone version of google calendar in Safari.

-edit-
Edit: The events show up as separate calendars on your iPhone.

It looks like this currently does not work with mobileMe. You can convert the items to your personal calendar in iCal by exporting them and then importing them. See macosxhints workaround here.

There seem to be a variety of ways to import your contacts from your windows mobile phone to your iphone. This is how I did it. You will need: Activesync and Outlook on Windows, and Address Book and iTunes 7.7 on OS X.

1) Sync your windows mobile phone with outlook with activesync.

2) Launch Outlook (I have v. 2006) and click on contacts. Your contacts should be listed.

3) To avoid syncing all 1000+ contacts I had, I scrolled right, and clicked on the ‘Mobile Phone’ column to sort by contacts with a mobile phone number. I then selected only contacts with a mobile phone number and right clicked and chose ‘Send as Business Card’. This step might take a while because it’s creating potentially hundreds of attachments as vCards to a new email.

4) I tried emailing this to my email account on my mac. My server basically said ‘Are you crazy?’ and blocked the entire message – one for having hundreds of attachments and two because .vcf is normally a hostile file format for email attachments (lots of exploit potential in ‘em).

5) However, I still had a copy of my message in my Outlook outbox, and was able to right click on the attachments and choose ‘Save all’. Then I transferred the folder I saved them in to my mac.

6) Simply double clicking on one attachment opened address book and asked me ‘do you want to import 1 contact?’ I clicked yes. Then I selected the rest and dragged them to address book, and it asked me if I wanted to import the rest and I clicked yes.

7) Plug your iphone in, click sync in iTunes and you’re done!

Other options I can think of:

• Take your sim card and put it in the iphone with the sim card ejection tool and go to Settings > Mail, Contacts and Calendars > Import SIM Contacts. I’m not sure if it will let you get this far if the card is from another network.

• This link says you can click on the ‘MessageSave’ outlook toolbar button and select ‘Save all messages in folder Contacts’ and choose vCard in the format field, but this didn’t work for me (I don’t have that icon).

This weekend I freed up 30 GB of mp3 duplicates using a handy program called iDupe. I’d tried several programs before, including an early version of Corral all Duplicates without much luck, but iDupe was able to process songs via ID3 tags, file size, date modified, and some fuzzy logic I don’t totally understand. I don’t know how it works, but it did.

iDupe is $8 and has a simple 3 step process – selecting, analyzing and deleting. It will optionally remove items from your library and delete them, letting you review them first. Warning – it is only for OS X and windows users who accidentally buy it will not be refunded. My only complaint would be that it can only handle a maximum of 2000 files at a time, meaning even when I subselected iTunes’ ’show duplicates’ view, I still had to manually process chunks of my library at a time. It would be nice if it selected 2000 songs for you at a time, or even automated the processing in 2000 song chunks. But I trust the decisions it made and it worked great. Oh, and it removed all my dead tracks too.

For competition’s sake, Doug’s Scripts has evolved Corral All Duplicates into Dupin, but I haven’t tried it.

Great for when you don’t have any CD cases but have access to a recycle bin.

http://www.athensmusician.net/archive/2005-02-13_oragamicdholder.php

I have iTunes organize my library automatically, and also copy all imported items to its own music folder on my external drive.

I drag music into iTunes all the time, and then delete the original source, to keep my music organized.

If any of the folders you drag into iTunes are .m3u playlist files, which are common, iTunes will also copy any file they point to into its library. Often, you may have an m3u file in a folder with the same music; selecting all and dragging or dragging the enclosing folder will copy the same music twice. If you have an m3u file in your folder of music, either drag it in, or only drag in the music.

I find this to be a pain when dragging multiple folders worth of music, so I usually search for m3u files first and delete them before dragging them in.

iTunes, you’re on version 7! You should be smarter than this.

Um, WTF?

I installed the Leopard 10.5.2 update today and tonight my computer started wigging out. It happened when I was copying files from a USB thumb drive, but continued after I ejected it and quit all applications. I got a screen shot of it which tells me my graphics card is not on the fritz and my computer is not overheating (because it was software related). Today I installed the newest build of parallels (5584), the newest build of webkit, and the 10.5.2 Leopard update, so it’s hard to tell what caused it.

The apps I had running were:

Finale 2008
ITunes
Parallels
Safari
Webkit
Firefox
Textedit
MOTU Audio monitor
Google Desktop
Quicksilver
Slimserver
Logic Pro
LAMP

I have no idea what caused it. Anyone else experiencing this?

-edit

Immediately after you install the 10.5.2 update, if you run software update again, you get an option to install the Leopard Graphics Update 1.0. Whether or not this fixes this problem time will tell.