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What a dumb sounding title. You’d think something like this would be easy. Sorry, I’m slightly bitter at AT&T after a week’s worth of phone calls to get my DSL up and running and to get a router on the network. Even after threatening to cancel service, after telling them that I don’t know anyone who has broadband and doesn’t have a router, and that I’d tried two routers that wouldn’t work, AT&T still wanted to transfer me to their ‘premium’ tech support service for my third party router to get more money out of me. Netgear? Linksys? Ever heard of these? Deaf ears.

I tried spoofing my computer’s MAC address but it wouldn’t work. I tried using my router to dial the PPPoE connection but that didn’t work either. Yet when I plugged any computer directly into the modem it worked fine.

AT&T told me to ‘bridge’ my modem and have the router dial the PPPoE connection. Fail. It didn’t work at all. The solution is easy enough, if any of them had access to the right information: Keep the modem dialing the PPPoE connection. Then, plug in AT&T’s DNS into the router:

Primary DNS: 68.94.156.1
Secondary DNS: 68.94.157.1

and that’s it! You’re good to go. If you run a computer with a static IP, plug those DNS entries into its network settings as well.

I tried using OpenDNS first, which worked ok, but it was a little slower, it messed with my VPN, and I didn’t like seeing advertisements when I typed in addresses wrong. This solution works best.

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.

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.

I’m surprised that this is still an issue. This is just a reminder that you will drastically slow down your machine if you have a lot of icons on your desktop. I’m running a 2.4 GHZ machine with 4 GB of RAM installed, and applications like Safari 3.1 and Firefox beta 5 would still beachball on almost no CPU load. (I use the wonderful tool MenuMeters to constantly monitor my CPU usage.) This is the latest operating system and some of the newest hardware, and yet it still sometimes feels slower than my old G5.

I had to remind myself that Apple still hasn’t fixed this bug yet, in fact they might have only made it worse with quick look (though I love quick look otherwise). Anyway, drag all of your icons except your hard drive to your documents folder, or at least a new folder on the desktop, and everything will become zippy again.

You’d think with plenty of CPU cycles to spare and memory to use that WindowServer would behave better. I think in the era of multi-core, multithreaded computing, applications that halt the entire system (beachballing) is the number one problem. OS X is rock solid in terms of crashing, but I think it should have better halting management, I guess you would call it.

Software Update showed me the iMac EFI Firmware Update version 1.3 ready to install, so I would check it and download and install the update. The instructions said that System Profiler would say I had a Boot ROM Version of IM71.007A.B03, but it kept saying I still had IM71.007A.B00. I tried rebooting, running software update again, installing again, rebooting, but nothing changed.

Well, it turns out for some reason this installer just puts ‘iMac EFI Firmware Update.app’ in your Utilities folder and you have to manually run it yourself. This is different than every other update I’ve run from apple and there was no indication that this was a manual firmware update. Thanks to khorton and mirgilwin1 on version tracker for the heads up.

Anyone else having this problem? In the last month or so my display will wake on its own. It’s kinda creepy at night. I’m not running any remote control software.
This hasn’t happened since my vine server break in several months ago, but I uninstalled vine.

Recently (a couple weeks ago) an Apple software update made my iChat completely stop working. When I would sign on, no buddies would appear, and eventually it would flicker on and off repeatedly until AIM kicked me off with a too many sign on attempts error.
This thread solved it for me:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=246789
The solution was to log into my router’s setup page, click on WAN Setup, and click “Disable SPI Firewall”. Voila, that worked.

Other settings I tried that may work for you:
In WAN settings on the netgear page, uncheck “Respond to Ping on Internet Port” (mine was unchanged)
In UPnP on the netgear page some pages recommend turning UPnP on, but mine is off (try both). I will experiment later with whether this will affect audio/video conferences.
Delete the file ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iChat.plist (this will make you re-setup your account)
Delete the file ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iChat.AIM.plist

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.