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I’m looking forward to the Palm Pre coming out and, as such, I’ve been looking for a way to have all my contact info, calendar and email online.
I also wanted to this because I have a desktop machine, laptop and work computer that I use Thunderbird on and wanted to keep my info sync’d.

Well, thanks to a few of the great developers I now have my Email, Calendar, and contacts in Thunderbird syncing to Google, here’s how

Email:

This is the easy part.
Sign up for a free Gmail account and set up Thunderbird to connect via POP3 or IMAP.

I prefer IMAP since I use the three computers, IMAP will mark things as read when you read them, allow you to flag items, etc.. POP3 shows everything as unread on all the computers.

Calendar:

First of all, Thunderbird does not have a calendar built in when you first install it, but there is an EXCELLENT AddOn called Mozilla Lightning.

Mozilla Lightning

There is also a stand alone calendar application called Sunbird if you don’t want to have it integrated in to Thunderbird.

Now that you have the calendar installed, how do you sync it with your Google Calendar?
That’s where ‘Provider for Google Calendar‘ comes in.

This is a fantastic plugin that allows you to have read AND write access to your calendar.
Whatever changes you make in Thunderbird show up on your Google Calendar, whatever changes you make in Google show up in Thunderbird.. it’s a beautiful thing.

Contacts:

This gave me a little trouble.
It took me a little while to find a plugin that would work well for me.

I first tried a plugin call Zindus.
I had that installed for about a week and thought it was great, but then realized it didn’t sync any addresses, just phone numbers and emails.

After doing some reasearch I found that you have to turn on the address option, but it will store your addresses in XMLish format in Google.
The problem is that Google Contacts stores addresses as one big text field, rather than individual fields for street, city, state, etc… I assume this is to make it “international friendly” which is a good thing.

Well, this format didn’t work for me, so I went looking again.

This time I found the ‘Google Contacts’ AddOn and this one worked MUCH better for me.
Except for the address portion, it’s basically zero configuration. It will detect the accounts you already have setup and go and grab you contacts.. very nice!

Two little gotchas:

1. In the ‘General’ tab I had to set the number of contacts to download to 500. I thought I could leave it as zero and it’d just get everything, but it didn’t download all my contacts that way, BTW I have no where near 500 contacts.
   

   Google Contacts General tab

2. You have to turn on address conversion and change the way you want it to be displayed – either character delimited or ‘use a line break’, I use comma delimited. If you look at the address in Google it’s one long string with commas between each portion of the address, but in Thunderbird on all the computers it displays correctly.
   

   Address conversion

So now all my stuff is syncing online, it looks the same on all my computers running Thunderbird and I’m a happy camper.

The best thing is that I can use Thunderbird on any OS, as long as I have the plugins, and it will all look the same.

We recently had a remodel done on the house and as part of that remodel, we relocated the office.

This posed a problem as I no longer had Cat5e/Cat6 running to my setup.
I have my file / media server in another part of the house, so I need decent access to it.
Because of the configuration, of our one story house, there was really no way for me to run the cable.. so of course I thought wireless.

I already had an 802.11G setup, but that was WAY too slow for the files I was transferring back and forth.
Next was 802.11N, using Apple Airport Extreme.. HORRIBLE idea, these things don’t play well together and I often times got slower speed that the G network.

I got some Airlink 802.11N devices and, while I get faster speeds than G, it still wasn’t cutting it and got 50Mb at best.

Then I found out about the NIM100.

These are little devices that are often used for Verizon FIOS but you don’t need that service to use them.

So what are they? Well, they’re basically an Ethernet to Coax bridge.
They essentially allow you to use your coax wire, that’s already in your house for TV, for network wiring.

You plug the your Cat5/Cat6 cable in one port and plug it in to your network.
It will automatically detect any other NIM100s on the network and start talking.

I have three of these in the house, they just detected each other and started working, I had to do zero setup on them!

The speed is GREAT, I’m reliably getting between 90-100Mbps, 100Base-T speeds with so much less hassle than wireless!

You can get these devices on Ebay REALLY cheap, I got mine for about $30 each (in a bundle).

Recently we finished some construction on our home, and as part of the construction we moved our office to a much larger room. This was good, except for the fact that we are now on the other side of the house from the cable box and go through two splits on the way.

As you can imagine, I lost some bandwidth because of this. Where I was around 18-20 Mbps before, I was down to about 9-12 Mbps.. OUCH.

I tried everything I could think of from tweeking the computer & router settings to replacing my router… no dice.

Then I remembered we had got a signal amplifier for the TV signal because of the sensitive tuner on the Tivo (that’s a whole other post).

I pulled the amplifier off the TV, hooked it in line to the cable modem, cranked it up and… Boom! Instantly was up to around 14-16 Mbps!

That was really good and all, but I wanted as much extra as I could get. At home I have two wireless networks; a Linksys router for my 802.11g (only) and an Apple Airport Extreme for my 802.11n (only.

I had it set up so that my Linksys router was hooked to the cable modem and the AE hooked to that, I tried switching them (so that the Airport was hooked to the cable modem) and got another 2Mbps.

So, apart from high usage times in my neighborhood, I’m back up to a reliable 16-19 Mbps.. tonight I topped out at 20, which prompted me to post this.

Your mileage may vary, but something to think about and make sure you get a signal amplifier that’s rated to work with cable modems, not all of them do.
I ended up getting a cheap one to hook in line with the Tivo.