I finally got an iPhone and I’m loving it so far. Everything is working swell, except for MMS (picture messaging) with other Telus clients. Its a quirky situation:

• I can’t send MMS to other Telus clients
• I can receive MMS from other Telus clients
• I can send an receive from non-Telus clients (Rogers, Fido, Bell)

I don’t know what’s going on at Telus. They have been very friendly and understanding on the phone, but the data department seems a little brain dead on the issue. Its a “known issue”, but it hasn’t been resolved. They also closed all the tickets related to the problem without a fix. The rep I spoke with today said I should “check from time to time”. That’s not really an acceptable solution, but I have received a credit for %50 off last month and the promise of another if the issue isn’t resolved.

So no progress yet, and my only suggestion would be to email pictures instead at this point. Are you having the same problem?

Also I’ve attached the latest Telus Carrier Update file (5.1) for others who are on the troubleshooting journey….

I have four email accounts that I want pushed to my iPhone. 1 Gmail, 2 Google Apps, and 1 external account. Since you can only use 1 Exchange account (Google Sync) on your iPhone I had to come up with a crafty solution.

You could forward all mail to one MobileMe / Yahoo / Exchange / Google Sync account. The problem with that setup is that when you reply to emails they will all be sent from your push enabled account, and not necessarily the one they were sent to.

Instead, I setup all of my email accounts using IMAP and set the fetch interval to 1 hour. This way I can open emails on the right account and reply normally. I’m still not getting push, so I also went into the online settings for my email accounts and setup forwarding to a single Google Sync address (eg iphone@mydomain.com). Now I have the four normal email accounts and one push (iPhone Pushmail) that receives all mail from the others instantly.

Another problem. Now I receive immediate notifications of new mail, but once I open up Mail it fetches from the IMAP accounts, and now I have duplicate new emails. Gross. To solve this problem I logged into to my iphone@yourdomain.com Google Apps (Google Sync enabled) account, and setup a filter that makes all messages “skip the inbox” and applies a label “iPhone” to them.

Then I went in to my Mail settings on my phone and enabled push for the new “iPhone” folder on my iphone@youdomain.com account.

The result: when new mail is received, I get an instant notification. The counter on Mail doesn’t increase, but there is a sound and the phone vibrates just the same. From this point I can open Mail and new messages are quickly fetched from the IMAP accounts.

This solution is far from elegant and I hope if you find something better you’ll share it with me. Hopefully Apple can work with more email providers to make push support a little more common.

Something in has changed in Snow Leopard that causes problems on some Gmail and Google Apps accounts. I’m not completely sure whats going on behind the scenes, but a problem has arisen where Gmail complains the “Account exceeded bandwidth limits.” This means that too much data has travelled between Mail.app on your Mac and Gmail, and Google automatically cuts your account off to maintain service for other users.

If you’ve already been blocked, don’t worry, you can still get your mail online. The block should be removed within a day. I also changed this setting that seems to have prevented me from getting blocked again. In the menubar, click Mail > Preferences > Accounts > select your account > Advanced and change the “Keep copies of messages for offline viewing” to “All messages, but omit attachments”.

Select "All messages, but omit attachments"

Please tell me if this solution works for you guys. I hope that either or Apple or Google comment on this issues because it does seem to be effecting a number of people.

Using the built-in zoom and screen sharing capabilities (or any VNC) together on OS X can be a real pain in the posterior. If you leave your screen zoomed it becomes virtually unusable via screen sharing or VNC. That’s because there is no way to effectively move the cursor (and therefore the screen position) or turn off zoom (since you can’t easily access System Preferences, and the keyboard shortcut isn’t applied to the remote machine).

As someone who uses zoom quite extensively, I often find myself trudging up flights of stairs to manually zoom out one computer so I can access it from another. Its pretty counter-intuitive. I would have though Apple to make zoom usable remotely, make it easy to shut off or just disable it when the Mac is being controlled remotely.

But no, there was no solution. So I found one myself. I put together a cute little AppleScript and packaged it up as an Application. It executes the keyboard command to zoom all the way out, re-enabling your Mac for remote use.

It can be used in a number of ways.

1. Put in your dock for a painful, yet possible, launch.
2. Executed via SSH in Terminal (I’ll explain in a follow up post)
3. Soon using a companion app on your local Mac (this will do the SSHing for you)

So here’s the app. It is an AppleScript that zooms out your screen. That’s it, it zooms right out and quits. As usual, released under the Creative Commons license (with no warranty).

I know this of limited utility even to a small group of people, but it was irritating enough to me I though I would share. Tell me if this turns out useful for you.

Telus told me that, because I was already on contract and out-of-warranty, I would have to pay $250 for a “software fix”. I was also welcomed to pay the unsubsidized price (about $350+ for anything from this century) for a new phone, plus a $10 new activation/transfer fee. I understand that Telus is a business and needs to make money, but since I’ve been a customer for several years, and have three lines on my account, I figure they could have offered me something a little nicer. Tough luck.

Anyways, I wasn’t about to pay hundreds to get my old broken phone fixed. I settled on a getting a new phone. Since I plan on getting an iPhone with Fido after my contract expires next spring, it didn’t have to be that flashy. I stumbled upon the prepaid phones available from Futureshop and Bestbuy. They are brand-new phone from a couple years ago. I groaned, but settled on a KRZR k1m for only $79CDN.

Its actually a really good phone, and I’m liking it quite a lot. I never got into hacking my Nokia, but this little Moto is very hackable and I’ve made a number of adjustments. Its also pretty thin, and I like the external music controls. The cool thing about this (and probably other Motorola phones) is that a USB cable and software are included.

My only complaints about the phone are the horrible Telus music player, and the disparaging lack of Mac support. I’m happier with this phone than I ever was with my Nokia.

So there you have it. If you’re phone dies, or is lost or stolen, you have a cheaper option. Its not as nice as being able to swap a sim card like you can on GSM networks, but its better than shelling out $400 for a so-so kind of phone.

New and refurb iMac.

Some of you know that I ordered a refurbished 24″ aluminum iMac last August. The ordeal proved to be an exercise is in my patience and sanity, but now that the dust has settled I can make a few conclusions. The biggest problem was the faulty displays that shipped in my first two iMacs. I explained the problem in detail when I got the first machine. The second was slightly better, but had more or less the same problem. Since I was a month behind on some work, I decided to keep the second machine until I was back on track. Generally that means giving up any hope of getting a replacement (within 14 days of purchase). Service was supposed to be my only option. I figured that didn’t matter, since a new refurb unit would probably have the exact same problem. 

After Christmas I decided I had caught up enough and took my iMac into the Apple Store to get it fixed. The genius told me there problems with LCD, but also with the graphics card and optical drive. He said that it would cost Apple more to fix the machine than it would to send me a new iMac. I agreed to exchange my machine, getting ready for another disappointment. I had no idea that when he said “new” he actually meant new. Apple shipped me a brand-new iMac in retail packaging, and I sent the second defective refurb back.

It was a frustrating five month ordeal. Ultimately, though,  I paid $1400CDN for a 2.4GHz 1GB refurb and received a brand new 2.8GHz 2GB iMac. The new one is flawless, just what I had expected from Apple in the first place.  

Most people have a better experience than I did. As far as I can tell, the 24″ iMac has been the only fiasco to date. I suppose the moral of the story is that if you order an Apple Refurb, you’ll get a top quality product. Eventually.

My goal is to sync or stream all of my digital media (music, TV shows, movies, pictures etc) to a large SDTV (standard definition television) in the family room.

 1) AppleTV

The AppleTV is an amazing little box. It’ll sync or stream nearly all of your media from any computer that can run iTunes. There’s also some nifty plugins to extend its functionality. On paper it looks perfect, but in practice it caries a number of limitations.

• Initial cost
• File type limitations (think DIVX etc)
• Limited configurability/tweaking
• No support for SDTVs

These limitations are somewhat superficial, I could solve most of them by hacking and having a bigger wallet. At this time, however, the AppleTV just isn’t a viable option.

2) Tiger + ATV4mac

Because I already have an unused Mac mini, this option removes the up front cost of running my media center. AT4mac is a really cool project that lets you run the Apple TV OS as an application on any intel Mac running Tiger. It requires OS X 10.4 because the Apple TV OS is based on the older version, and it turns out that installing Tiger on my mini was the most difficult step. I installed Perian to cover those missing formats and picked up an Apple DVI to Video converter to connect to the television. Audio went through a headphone to composite adapter directly into the receiver. The procedure to get ATV4mac up and running was quick and painless. Afterwards I was able to sync, stream and play with my media flawlessly. All the functions of the Apple TV were present and functional. 

The problem is, once again, that I’m using an SDTV (See update below). While the ATV4mac brings down the resolution, it still has a widescreen ratio. This means the right most 1/4 of the picture is cut off. By using this solution I avoided all the issues surrounding the Apple TV except for the problem related to my SDTV. 

3) Leopard + Front Row

Until an HDTV enters the equation, it looks like the Apple TV route isn’t the way to go. The next obvious solution is Front Row. I had problems with Front Row on Tiger crashing, so I reinstalled Leopard on the mini and chose some tools to make things work. 

I installed Perian again, and I also got a copy of Sofa Control. It lets you do almost anything you can do with your mouse and keyboard right from your Apple Remote. Then I installed Syncopation. This little app is idea for our project. It connects to iTunes libraries on the network and automatically merges them into to one. All the media can then be played in Front Row. Its pretty slick, but I’m disappointed that there isn’t a free alternative. I’d really like to sync remote iTunes libraries just like you can an Apple TV. You can’t buy or rent content directly from Front Row either, and there’s also the missing YouTube and Flickr access. This solution is less than perfect, but at least it works without cutting off the screen.  

In conclusion I have to say none of these solutions turned out to be all I hoped for. The good news I can watch video and play my music, even if the process to do those is convoluted. I hope that someone finds a better solution or that I get an HDTV, and I’ll update this story once one of those things happens.

Update: I found a solution (SwitchResX) to the ATV4mac / SDTV problem. I’ll provide a tutorial soon outlining how to get your intel Mac and old SDTV to work together.

So last Sunday I followed the advice of many veteran Mac users and pulled up the Apple refurbished section. Its stocked with nearly everything in the regular store at a great discount. For the savings you give up the gorgeous retail boxes (refurbs ship in a plain brown box). That’s it, really. The product may have been taken home by another customer, but has since been returned to Apple and reconditioned. This process involves replacement of any internal parts, if necessary, and a thorough cleaning or case replacement. Refurbs arrive in perfect cosmetic condition with no scratches, scuffs or imperfections with brand new keyboards, mice and accessories. They have same warranty as new Macs and are generally better inspected than new machines. Mine apparently fell through the cracks.

Needless to say, I was willing to make the compromise. I can do without the box, and don’t mind if the was computer pre-loved so long as it doesn’t show cosmetically or in function. I ordered my refurbished 24″ aluminum iMac last Sunday. 

Yesterday the FedEx lady visited with a giant brown box. Inside was a perfect, or so I thought, iMac that looks absolutely brand new. I turned it on and immediately noticed the backlight was disturbingly uneven. I told myself this was normal, and after an hour or two it would look fine. It didn’t though, the display is a massive issue. My screen exhibits the following problems:

• The left side is far brighter than the right
• There is a yellow tint in the center of screen
• Sides are very dim, this is noticeable most with light colours
• There is a horizontal dark section that spans from right to left

An unedited picture I took of the screen.

My description makes it sound a little worse than it is, and my intention isn’t to exaggerate. The iMac is still quite usable. Its just that even at the refurb price, I expect better for the money. Comparing the display quality of my new iMac and my iMac G4 is a joke. The G4 has an obviously superior backlight (although not as bright). I called AppleCare and I was immediately offered a replacement. Hopefully I receive something from a later build week that comes with an improved display. 

Please note that this isn’t a vote against going the refurb route. This problem was existent in quite a few early aluminum iMacs and I probably just received one of those duds. Ordering the machine, having it shipped and using it has otherwise been a very positive experience. The quick offer of a replacement is appreciated, but I’ll reserve judgment on wether I’d buy refurbished again.

More information on defective 24″ iMacs: 

http://blog.neofoto.nl/?p=3/

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1093045

http://www.trick77.com/2008/01/13/uneven-imac-displays/

UPDATE: Downloads and everything less the photography section are working again. I’m planning something different there anyway.

The first issue is small problem with the new editor that I described on the MyBB Community Forums.

The width of the editor (when composing a PM at least) is a problem for people running fixed width themes. The width really should be editable in the template or with CSS. I don’t think this is possible right now, can we make this change?

As seen on my fixed width template, and on the MyBB Community Forums, the editor causes problems where pages are squished and elements overflow. 

This is just a suggestion, but it would save a lot of grief for people making themes for their own sites or distribution.

Some good discussion ensued, but it doesn’t look like anything will be done before 1.4 final. Now I, and other theme developers, are left find work arounds or introduce inconsistency into MyBB’s otherwise fantastic interface. I’m investigating methods like a javascript or plugin based patch, but these will likely delay the release of my two fixed width themes N.Design and Dark Intentions. Please hit me up in the comments if you have a suggestion for these problems.