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For a couple weeks now I’ve been wanting to create a Pandora station specifically for Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4 in C Major. I want to find more classical music that sounds like this. Now that Pandora supports classical music, I would try typing in “Bartok” into the search function, but I would get Bartok’s symphonies. I tried typing in “String Quartet bartok” but got no results because that is neither just a name of a song nor just an artist. “String Quartet No” got me intresting results, but the autosuggest listings did not give me Bartok.
Finally I figured it out: While listening to the Bartók station, I clicked on “about this artist” to go to Bartók’s page. From there I could navigate to the specific album and track I wanted, and then do “Create a Station” based on that track. Now I’m finding all sorts of cool string quartets.

Try it, it’s awesome.

Based on this URL hack to sort google results by date, I made a bookmarklet:
javascript:location.href =location.href + '&as_qdr=d';
Now if you google search and then click this button, it will sort your results by the newest date. Works in FF and Safari.

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 my iTunes music library, samples, video files, and more on an external drive, and the 5 second delay of my drive spinning up is annoying at best and prevents me from working at worst. I finally just found the menu that disables the external drive from spinning down. I don’t know how this affects the drive life but it’s worth it for me.

System Preferences > Energy Saver > uncheck Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible

As neat as the accelerometers on the iPhone are for switching between portrait and landscape modes, it gets to be annoying as hell trying to read when you’re lying down. You naturally hold the phone sideways when you’re lying down, and then the screen rotates, turning the text 90° away from you in landscape mode. You rotate it back and it rotates the screen 90° away again. The makers of the eReader application have already noticed this was a big issue and corrected it with a lock orientation setting. Safari, however, still does not have this.

I just figured out a workaround: lie down and turn the phone horizontally so that it goes into landscape mode. Then, continue rotating the phone upside down. Unlike the photo application which will display photos upside down, Safari will only rotate 270° and will remain in landscape mode, so you can comfortably read google reader in bed.

-edit2-
Ok now the yahoo plus mail server has stopped working so my second solution works best: You have to log into yahoo AT&T mail, click on settings, go to original mail settings, click on management, mail accounts, and verify each email address that you want to send with.
More info here, but make sure you go back to original yahoo mail to do this (new yahoo mail does not have this option):
http://helpme.att.net/article.php?item=11646

-original post-
The horrible AT&T tech support continues but the power of the interwebs comes to the rescue again.
This time I’ll publish the solution first:

Outgoing smtp settings for AT&T DSL and Mail.app
Outgoing server name: plus.smtp.mail.yahoo.com
Port: 465
Use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) (checked)
User Name: [youremail]@att.net
Password: [your password]

Now the story.
I still hadn’t been able to send any email from mail.app. This representative I got on the phone knew the difference between incoming and outgoing mail servers (yay) but was unable to help. First, the server smtp.att.yahoo.com was rejecting my password. I was using port 465 and SSL as instructed by this page but it wasn’t working. The tech was unable to help until I tried signing onto att.net webmail and was unable to login either, and so told her my email address wasn’t provisioned correctly. She walked me through completing registering my account by going to http://204.60.203.227/register, which is a dumb process but slightly less offensive than the AT&T software that they try to force you to install. GENDER was required in registration but phone number wasn’t, go figure. I had skipped some of these steps to try and avoid installing AT&T software on my computer (still got an autorun installed, and they tried to activex install it from this website but I cancelled it, ugh).

Anyway, so then I could set up incoming and outgoing email from my native @att.net account, but now if I tried to send email from any other third party account I got the message “The sender address was rejected by the server smtp.att.yahoo.com.” The tech tried to convince me that I should send through my third party servers and not them (I knew she knew she was lying when she said it was their problem), but I googled instead and found this page: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6841351&tstart=0

saiena was able to direct me to use the server plus.smtp.mail.yahoo.com instead. I’m not subscribed to yahoo mail plus, but with their crazy integration with ameritech, sbcglobal, yahoo, and all their other companies I guess this is how the integration came down to it. I don’t care, at least it works now!

-edit-
It looks like you need to verify other addresses before you send them. The above solution worked for me so I’m going to skip this step for now, but I got this email from AT&T after creating the account. It’s amazing that AT&T’s tech support didn’t know this.

We have received questions regarding the following error message which is received by customers when they send e-mail using a non-verified e-mail address:

“Unable to send the message. Please verify the e-mail address in your account properties. The server responded: 553 From: address not verified.”

If you have received this error message, you will continue to receive it for emails sent with a non-verified address until you verify your Yahoo! email address or any other non AT&T email addresses (e.g., name@company.com, name@college.com, name@yahoo.com, etc.). Verification instructions are available on the AT&T Help site http://helpme.att.net/article.php?item=11646. If you have already verified your non AT&T email address and are no longer receiving the 553 error message, please disregard this email.

Thank you for your attention to this matter as we work to improve your Internet service. Our goal continues to be to make you a very satisfied customer. If you are experiencing any issues and would like to speak to a customer support representative, please contact us at 1-877-722-3755.

Sincerely,
AT&T Internet Services

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.

A couple things I realized while moving:

1) You don’t have to deal with getting rid of stuff before you move, but make DONATE boxes to sort into that you can deal with later at your new place.

2) Trash bags are awesome, but quickly become disorganized. Old junkmail envelopes taped to the side of them work as great labels.

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).