'VIP mode' for iphone

I got this idea from a thread on reddit today. Here is the situation:

Imagine you are off for three months, watching your daughter under fantastic social laws in Sweden. Your primary phone is also your work phone. After the first week, you get tired of fending off customers and partners (Though you know i love you all!), but want to get calls from people you designate as "important".

OR:

You get stuck on call for work, and want to only have the phone ring when there is a 3:am emergency, not when your friend in India wants to call and see how things are?


On a Nokia, or Android phone, this wouldn't pose a problem, they both support profiles or applications that allow this. On the iphone, however, unless you want to jailbreak, you are left without many options.
Here is my workaround; Add this ringtone to your ringers in itunes. This ringtone consists of 29.5 seconds of complete silence. Now set this to your primary ringtone, and set the VIP(s) to any other ringer. I'll Suggest 'Alarm' for the use case above. This way, anyone who is unapproved can be ignored.

Since Apple doesn't see fit to give us custom SMS tones, you'll probably want to disable to SMS notification.

Fixing a broken iphone <> iPhoto Sync issue.

Putting this here in case anyone else might find it useful.

Occasionally, an image will cause my iphone 3Gs to freak out. If you want to see what i am talking about, save this image of the Stockholm metro system to your iPhone using safari. When next you go to sync with iPhoto, you'll get an error stating that it has no idea what to do with the photo. Syncing then stops. :/

The second way to get this issue is to very quickly start recording a video, and then to exit the camera app. This results in a 0b file that iPhoto chokes on.

Lucky me, i had BOTH of these going on. Once iPhoto bails, it unmounts the iPhone. Wonderful, eh? So how to fix this?

1) Grab a copy of iPhone explorer
2) Navigate to the DCIM folder, and then 100APPLE.
3) Copy any images you want to save out of the 100APPLE folder, this corresponds to your "camera roll".
4) Delete the DCIM folder. Yes, the whole thing.
5) Find and delete the PhotoData folder.
6) Reboot the phone.

The phone should now sync with iPhoto properly now. You should be able to add your photos from the 100APPLE folder to iPhoto manually.

Geektool is awesome: Part 2

I promised more, so here is the final cut of my geektool setup. Thanks to ebf0
for help with some of the bash stuff. If anyone reads this, and wants any of the scripts just let me know.

Heres a dark background:

And heres a light background. Spiffy, eh?

Geektool is awesome

So a recent thread on reddit reminded me how awesome Geektool is, especially since the 3.0 RC is out. I set to make my desktop geekier, and provide some interesting info as well.
With sourcefire, its important to know what the latest SEU (snort rules) is. I put together a script to show this on my desktop using geektool:

curl https://support.sourcefire.com 2>/dev/null|grep "SEU Update"|grep -o "SEU\ *[0-9]\{3\}"|grep -o "[0-9]\{3\}"|awk '{print "SEU: " $1}'

Yeah, its ugly, but it does the job alright. Any of you uberscripters want to clean it up, make it more elegant, and make me look foolish, please feel free to do so. :)

More to Follow

How do you organize your thoughts?

While never diagnosed officially, it is pretty clear to those whom i live and work with I have ADD. This does have its benefits, such as hyperfocus: http://bit.ly/nrDp , but in general my brain is a study in Chaos Theory. For example.. how many tabs do you have open in firefox as you read this? Me? 14, and only one of them is research for this article.
After watching Adam Savage's most recent TED talk, the thing i found most interesting was his method of sorting all his data. Basically he is using a folder full of folders, which is a very old fashioned construct based on the storage of physical objects. This method is primitive at best, and leaves a lot to be desired as far as searching and categorizing. Not to mention the disk requirements, and the need to keep a decent backup.
I tried using this method again after seeing his video, but found it just too limiting and cumbersome, requiring too much work on the frontend for me to actually keep it up for more than a week.
Then i realized i had the tool i needed already installed, Evernote. Evernote is a free, cross-platform notebook/information capturing tool. It is both Web and client based, making it available from anywhere (except my Nokia Phone :( ). Before seeing Adam's ted talk, i was using Evernote much like i was using google notebook; Start with a project, add data, subdata, etc, and then end up with some sort of "finished product". What i realized is that Evernote functions really well as an idea farm, i stick in some random data: a picture, a bit of text, a quote, etc and save it, but the saving is not the important part, the TAGGING is.
Finding data is easy. Anyone with a bit of google-fu will be able to locate a specific piece of data with only a little effort. It is the associations you make with the data, and how it fits in with other pieces of data you have that is the important bit. Take for example the ADD link above. I remember reading this years ago (the link above is a copy/paste from somewhere else, anyone who knows the original source, email me), i also remember that i used the information in that article to promote my strong points at a salary negotiation, and that the context i found it in was "benefits of ADD in Technology".
This is where the Folder system starts to break down. What folder do you put this in? Health? Self Improvement? Job? You can either make a snap judgement and put it in the "best" folder, or make multiple copies of the data, one in each folder. Neither one of these is ideal, multiple copies are ineffecient, and the "best fit" loses its associations. This is where Evernote's (and Gmail's too!) tag system starts to make a lot of sense. Since you can have multiple tags associated to one piece of information, you can have that information available in any of the contexts you have associated with it. As an example, here is a screenshot of some broccoli i added to Evernote:

Note that there are several tags for this image, going from very definitive (Picture) to whimsical (Yum), and i dont have to ruin a folder structure to accomodate my weirdness. Additionally, Evernote has some great OCR functionality, allowing you to search for text within documents and pictures.
By dumping all of my thoughts and random finds into Evernote, i am able to brainstorm based on the tags, and follow the trail of my thoughts through my various notes. The tagging system allows my chaotic brain to act naturally, without forcing any strange constructs on it, while still allowing me to follow my train of thought backwards and not forget the information or the context in which i encountered it.
How do you organize your thoughts?

Review: Crumpler Right Hand 15" Laptop Bag

I have been a fan of OGIO bags for a long time now. My Trusty Ogio metro has been with me for almost 4 years and is still in great working order. When traveling, the side zip laptop pocket is fantastic when going through airport security, no fumbling, just pop it out. With all that being said, why on earth would i want another bag?

As it turns out, people dont see guys carrying a "bookbag" as serious. I dont know why, but when walking into meetings with my Ogio bag, i see people looking at it with a "i cant believe this guy is serious" look. Also, my Ogio bag was is very cumbersome for the typical day trip. It doesnt fit under the seat on an airplane, and tends to accumulate crap (I am a total packrat!).

With those things in mind, i decided that i needed a messenger-style bag, in a nice businessy color (aka black). Looking at ogio's current lineup, the closest thing they have is the "hip-hop":

Egads, what a fugly bag! Its like a laptop sleeve, a hipster, and military web gear all got drunk, had an orgy, and this poor bag is the unholy result... it should not be! Sorry Ogio, i love you, but.. no.

My coworker Leon swears by his crumpler bag, and i must admit the quality of his really grabbed my interest. After a few months of seeing them in stores, and checking their website (https://www.crumplerbags.com/) I decided that i wanted one.

Besides having an annoying flash based website, crumpler also appears to market different models in different regions. The bags at the stores in sweden, were NOT the bags available on the US website, but luckily the UK website was more or less agreeable with what i am seeing here. (and STILL didnt have the same products as the US).

After a bit of overthinking on my part i finally decided to get the "right hand". Its just big enough for a day trip, and looks pretty damn good. I didn't end up getting it for Christmas, as planned. Instead my (lovely) wife gave it to me as a "Just because i love you" gift.

So i have had the bag for less than a week, and already i love it. If there is one thing I noticed immediately... its Quality. This bag is built like a brick shithouse, and should last for at least 10 years. Another interesting feature is the (sophomorically named) "Third Leg". This esentially acts as a stabilizer, making sure the bag doesnt flop around when you are on the go. This is going to be VERY useful when the snow melts and i can start riding my bike again!

Its maiden voyage is tomorrow, when i go to see ebf0, so stay tuned for a field report.

Heres a look at the Innards of the bag:

Unbearable Internet connection!

For the Past 3 days my ISP (www.bredbandsbolaget.se) has been damn near unbearable. Tech support says that they're having problems with "the server that connects us outside of sweden". Riiight. They might as well have told me that the inter-tubes are clogged and they are waiting for the plumber to come and remove some stuck pr0n.
I am an understanding person, more or less, i dont bitch about the fact that im paying for a 24Mbps connection and getting 11Mpbs... but three... friggin...days?!? Thats just unacceptable.
I cant help but wonder if it has something to do with the piratebay trial going on now. Is all of sweden DDoSed?

UPDATED: Looks like they finally got their shit together and fixed the issue. Speedtest.net shows much a much improved situation:

Ok, Maybe i DO have something important to say.

Granted, i know nobody is reading this, but hey, its my blog and you cant stop me. My friend and coworker Joel Inspired me today, and so I am going to be creating some content for public consumption.
Stay tuned.