Following these instructions and these instructions (more or less) on HowardForums I was able to get custom ringtones on a Telus m540.

My Suggestions

1. Don’t use UniCDMA. Get ahold of the CDMA Workshop software instead.
2. Don’t waste your money on a legit ringtone, download and edit the ones below. (I wasted hours trying to make them from scratch)
3. If you’re having lots of trouble try the sample files I’ve included in this post without any edits first. They should work. Leave me a comment or go post in one of the forum topics on HoFo if you need some help.

Included for you here are a sample 11.txt, 11.dd and 11.gc file (its Speechless by Lady GaGa in case you’re wondering). To make your own ringtone follow all the linked instructions (CDMA Workshop method is best) then edit my .txt and .dd files, replace the .gc with your own .mp3 and upload to the folders described in the HoFo instructions. Best luck.

• A Coast Capital chequing or savings account (its best to use one with no transaction fees like “The Free Chequing, Free Debit and More Account” or “The High‑interest, No‑fee Savings Account“)
• A PayPal account. Its important that your name is entered exactly the same on both your PayPal and Coast Capital accounts.

To link a new bank account you’ll want to start by opening PayPal and logging in there. Under My Account click Profile, then under Financial Information open Bank Accounts, and from this page click “add”. Depending on your situation, there are a number of ways you can get the rest of the info you’ll need.

1) If you have cheques for the account you want to add, then all you have to is follow the instructions on the PayPal site. Copy the information from your cheque using the diagram supplied.

2) If  you only have online banking there’s a little more leg work to do. Start by logging in at Coast Capital, then open the summary for the account you want to link with PayPal (by clicking on its name). On this page you need to copy the account number (the number circled in red). This number is unique to the actual account, is not the same as your membership number, and is usually 12 characters long. Enter this number in the “Account Number” field on PayPal, and re-enter in the confirmation field.

Then you’ll need to find the transit number for your branch (usually the Coast Capital branch where you opened your account). Look for your branch on this page and copy its number into the “Bank Transit Number” field back on PayPal. Enter 809 in the “Institution Number” field.

And submit! That’s all. In a few days you’ll receive two small deposits, and then you can go back to PayPal and confirm your account. You’ll be able to fund purchases from your bank account, as well as withdraw funds from PayPal into your Bank Account.

Coast Capital will not charge you for PayPal transactions if you have a bank account with no transaction fees, although PayPal will ding you $0.50 for transfers less than $150CAD. This is cheaper than using hyperWALLET ($0.85), and its a lot more versatile. Using PayPal is also a great way to accept credit card payments without having setup a merchant account.

1. Click the Account tab on the right.
2. Click Edit Friends (the first link under your name)
3. Type the person’s name under the Facebook logo
4. Click the X to the right of the their name
5. Wonder why they made it so difficult??

At least its less complicated than removing a friend from real life..

It looks pretty expansive although I can already see some potential problems. I can’t wait to see what coverage will actually be later this quarter in Q1-Q3. Feel free to comment and share.

UPDATE: There’s an awesome, updated map available now. You can even overlay different carriers and zoom in on your area.

Wind Mobile base stations in Vancouver (licensed). Click to enlarge.

Here’s the deal: you can use push email from MobileMe, Yahoo or a Microsoft exchange account. This is kind of limiting, seeing as most of the world doesn’t want to drop $100 on MobileMe (see my older post), doesn’t use Yahoo mail and isn’t a corporate email junkie. The good news is that someone has been thinking about the rest of us and that entity is Google. They are offering a free service called Google Sync, which is essentially a personal Exchange account that you can use with your iPhone and other mobile devices.

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.

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.

If you use WordPress as a CMS, or just want to customize your sidebar per-page, then there is a solution for you. I’ve spent a long time looking for a way to show only the sidebar content I want on each page. For example; I might like to show the latest news on the home page, helpful links on a resources page and photo thumbnails to add interest to an About page.

Up until now I’ve been using the K2 Sidebar Manger. Its worked well in practice, but is buggy, unsupported by some widgets and is now discontinued. The replacement I found is something called Widget Logic. It uses exceeding powerful conditional tags built into WordPress and allows  you choose where you want specific widgets to show up. It is a little difficult to setup at first, and you’ll need to familiarize yourself with the proper syntax. Here are some examples that you can use once you install the plugin.

1) We’ll start by showing a widget on one page only.

is_page(‘About’)

That’s all you need to place in the Widget Logic box. The code is actually quite intuitive, you just specify which page you would like to show the content on. This will show the widget on any page called About. You could also use the page’s ID number.

2) Now lets show the Latest posts on a static home page, the blogs index and on single blog posts. 

(is_page(‘Home’) || is_home() || is_single())

 Same idea, but wrapped in parentheses where ”||” represents “or” to WordPress.

3) You could also show text on any given pages. In this example I included text on a page and all of its child pages.

global $post; return (is_page(‘Society’) || $post->post_parent==”26″);

The “global $post; return” section is necessary because the conditional tags don’t officailly support child pages yet. “Society” is the parent page and “26″ is that page’s ID. When we place this code in the Widget Logic box, “Society” and all of its children will show the widget you’re working with.

Hopefully the fine people at WordPress can cook up something a little more smooth, but in the mean time we have a very functional way to show page specific widgets. If you have any questions about Widget Logic, or need some help with syntax, I’ll do my best to answer in the comments.

It started a few months ago when I got my new iMac. Long story short; it was a disaster, I got a new one, its a little off as well.. Anyways, it scratched my Leopard DVD. No problem though, I acquired a new image and tried to burn it to a double-layer DVD. Toast quit halfway through and seems to have toasted the DVD drive. The half-baked disc was stuck in my iMac and the drive isn’t recognized anymore. This pushed me to find a different way to install OS X, and I learned a lot in the process.

Booting from an External Hard Drive
Most people know you can boot almost any OS X capable Mac from a FireWire hard drive. All you have to do is restart the machine, and hold down the Option key until it shows you the list of bootable disks and click on it. Many people don’t know that all Intel Macs can also boot from USB hard drives. This means you can clone your internal HD to your external USB drive, and have a fully bootable backup whenever you need it. Its also possible to copy the OS X installation DVD to an external, boot from it and install (this method is faster than using the DVD). This takes us to the next possibility.

Booting from your iPod
I recently went on a house-call where an OS X reinstall was needed. Rather than carry around a bulky external HD, I stuck the OS X installation in a partition on my iPod video. Just like any other USB drive, its fully bootable (by Intel Macs) and be used to install OS X.

Leopard is Universally Bootable
But the system that needed a repair was PowerPC Mac mini. Uhoh. PPC Macs can boot from USB drives, right? Well that’s true, but if you install OS X 10.5 (Leopard) there’s a way to get around this problem. As long as you own or can borrow an Intel Mac you’ll be fine.

1. Start the PPC Mac in Target Disk Mode. (Turning into an expensive, shiny FireWire HD)
2. Plug the iPod or USB drive into the Intel Mac.
3. Boot the Intel Mac holding down the Option key, boot from the USB drive containing OS X Install. 
4. Choose the PPC’s HD as the destination (you made need to change to use the GUID boot record).
5. Install OS X as normal.

This fresh OS X Leopard install is universally bootable. That means it’ll run on either a PPC or Intel Mac. So after the install is complete and you restart the PPC computer, it’ll work just as if you installed it directly on that machine. This method is typically faster, and great if your PPC Mac doesn’t have a DVD drive (or doesn’t quite meet the requirements like my 800Mhz iMac G4). Its also worth noting that you can use Leopard recovery discs from one Mac to install OS X on the HD of another. Just follow the instructions as posted above, but the PPC Mac could also be another Intel Mac. For example, I used this method to reinstall Leopard on my MacBook and my iMac G4. I’m not sure about the licensing implications of this method. I own a Leopard family pack disc, its just scratched.

Want to sync to your address book, calendar, and bookmarks? Don’t want to pay $100 a year? Doh.

fruux is a lightweight and convenient system preference pane, that syncs your Address Book, Calendars, Tasks and Bookmarks between different Macs.

All you’ve got to do is download the .prefPane, double click to install, and make you’re account… That’s it. No credit card, no blown budget, no lost contacts, no MobileMess. If you’ve got a desktop and a notebook you can install it on both and start syncing right away. If you’ve got a lab full of Macs you can install on all of them too, because there are no silly limits on how you sync.

This isn’t to say that MobileMe is a bad product, and certainly not that this service is any better. Fruux is all about “Just Sync, No-frills!” so you won’t find disk space, website hosting, email, web-access, or any of the other neat features that MobileMe comes with. There’s really no comparison between the two though, if your looking for free syncing then use Fruux. If you want anything else (think iDisk, email, etc) then you need MobileMe.

Fruux's sync log in System Prefrences

Of course, if you’re crafty you can find free alternatives to those other services too. In conjunction with Dropbox, an IMAP GMail account and a free hosting account for your site you could be setup as well or better than a bona-fide MobileMe account at no cost. Thanks Fruux!!

I met a little snail in the garden the other day. He looked cool, but the first photos I took didn’t have enough colour. I tried moving him for different backgrounds, but no matter where I put him the focal point was something else. The pictures were boring.

Then I saw this flower, and to my surprise the combination of the two worked really well. The flower pulls the eye in and then pushes it over to the little snail. Separately I don’t think the snail or flower would have made for great photos on this background, but they do make a great team. Check out the rest of the photos on my Flickr.