Archive for the 'Tutorials' Category

Putting your iPhone in ‘Field Test Mode’

Friday, September 12th, 2008

‘Field Test Mode’ on the iPhone can be useful, for most people, for one reason – To look at the true signal strength rather than the graphical display of the bars.

This really comes in handy to see if the new 2.1 firmware actually improves the signal strength or just makes you think it did. ;)

There are a LOT of other things to look at in this mode, but I won’t even pretend to understand half of them. :)

To put your phone in this mode, open up the keypad, type the following, then tap ‘Send’:
*3001#12345#*

Below is a shot of what ‘Field Test Mode’ looks like, with the signal strength in the upper left corner:
(Note – these are negative numbers, so the closer to zero you get, the better)

iPhone in Field Test Mode

iPhone in Field Test Mode

iPhone, Outlook, iCal and Google Calendar bliss.

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

Ok, so we use Outlook with Exchange, my phone is an iPhone and with the 2.0 update I can now sync to Exchange for mail and calendar (and contacts which I’m not doing).

The cool thing is that when you link to your Exchange calendar, you can view add and edit and changes (almost) immediately show up on the Exchange calendar.

The problem is that if you do that, it’s the only calendar you can have on your phone. Plus I use iCal on my Mac and Google Calendar from time to time… this post explains how I got around that and am now in calendar syncing bliss.

Basically the way I got everything working is I use Google Calendar as a back end for all my other calendars, meaning everything syncs to and from Google Calendar.

First iCal:
I use a program called BusySync, there is another app called Spanning Sync, but BusySync has MUCH better pricing. There is also Gcaldaemon, which is open source but kind of difficult to set up, let’s just say that that kind of app is why I don’t use Linux anymore, but if you can get it working more power to you! :)

This app lets you select which iCal calendar you want to share with which Google Calendar, then set a schedule to tell it how often to sync.. it works VERY well.

Now Exchange / Outlook:
There is a free sync tool from Google, but it only lets you sync your primary calendar. In my case this is my work stuff that I do not want to mix with my personal stuff, so this didn’t work for me.

What I ended up using was gSyncit. This lets you pick any Outlook Calendar and sync it with any Google Calendar.

I just created a new calendar in Outlook, called ‘Personal’, and synced it with the same Google calendar that I synchronized iCal with.

iPhone:
The iPhone was easy. I just set up a new Exchange connection, selected to sync my mail and my calendar and that was it.

Now when I go to the calendar on the iPhone I can see my calendar for work stuff, the one I created for personal or appointments for both calendars. :)

The best part about this whole thing is everything is bi-directional.

What I mean is that if I update my calendar on my phone (essentially my exchange calendar) it will immediately show up in Outlook, then when gSycinit runs it will sync with Google calendar and then when BusySync runs it will sync with iCal… so basically within 5-10 minutes my update will show up on all my calendars! :)

This goes for any of the calendars, I can update any of them and it will update all the other calendars.. a beautiful thing! :)

How I fixed the SMS on my iPhone

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

So this all started with my previous post, the one about the HiPhone on the way to my house.

Well it came (no I haven’t done the review yet), popped the SIM out of my iPhone and popped it into the HiPhone to play with it.

I put in the settings for SMS, WAP, etc… but it was late so I took the SIM back out, put it back in the iPhone and crashed.

The next morning I went to send an SMS from the iPhone, everything looked good, but the recipient never got it. I tried multiple people on multiple services and none of them got it either, I could get SMS but not send.

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Install OSX updates from command line using softwareupdate.

Monday, February 11th, 2008

Ok here’s the deal, I wanted to update my machine to 10.5.2 from work today, but I had put it in a state where I couldn’t use VNC anymore (I logged out of one of the user accounts).

Anyway, I stumbled across some info on how to list and install updates from the command line.. SWEET!

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Share your Bento database between users and / or computers

Saturday, February 9th, 2008

I just downloaded the trial of Bento the other day and it’s really pretty good.

I’m using it to track recipes and some real estate property we’re looking at.

The only thing I really DON’T like about it is the fact that you can’t specify a location for the database so you can’t share it between users or computers… or can you? :)

This tutorial will show you how.

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