Technology & Stuff

This is an old post that I found on my hard drive.  I’ve re-written it in more of a how-to format.  Hopefully someone might find it useful as I know that it took me a lot of trial and error before I found a setup I was happy with.

The Problem

Like most people I have a number of domains that all have email accounts associated with them, a work email, a Gmail account, a desktop email client, email on my iPhone, and occasionally I need to access my email via the web.  The problem is how to manage all of these accounts across multiple devices and have each device reflect the changes made on the others.

The Solution

To address this problem I use one account that acts as a hub for all of my email.  I’ve chosen Gmail for this purpose as it has generous storage and good spam filtering.  The first step is to set Gmail up to check all of your other email accounts, to do this go to Settings -> Accounts.  As you’re setting each account up you’ll be given the option to verify each account so you can send from it. Once you’ve added all of your email accounts, and also verified them for sending, the last thing to do is to tell Gmail to automatically reply from the same address the message was sent to.  This option is in the “Send mail as” section under Settings -> Accounts.

The next part of my email universe is the desktop client.  I use Apple Mail, so I’ll describe how to set things up using that, but the same results can be achieved using Thunderbird.  My Gmail account is set as an IMAP account and I’ve set my Sent, Spam, Trash, and Drafts folders up to use the corresponding folders of my Gmail account.  This is important because when I send an email using Apple Mail I want it to go to Gmail’s Sent folder so that it’s visible via the web and also on my iPhone.  To do this in Apple Mail, select the Sent folder under your Gmail account on the left and then go to “Use This Mailbox For” under the “Mailbox” menu and select “Sent”.  Repeat this for Spam, Trash, and Drafts.  The last thing to do in Apple Mail is to set up your additional email addresses so you can send mail from any of them.  In Apple Mail you simply add them to the “Email Address” field under your Account Settings (Comma Separated).  If you’re using Thunderbird you can do this by adding Identities.  Both Apple Mail and Thunderbird will automatically reply from the address the message was sent to.

The final piece of the email puzzle is the iPhone.  My biggest problem with the email client on the iPhone is the way that it handles multiple accounts.  Fortunately our system avoids this problem as we only have to add the one Gmail account.  Once you have your Gmail account set up on your iPhone it’ll keep everything synchronized.  Where the system falls down slightly is the inability to send or reply from different accounts.  That means that anything sent from my iPhone comes from my Gmail account.  It’s the only blemish in my otherwise “perfect” email setup.

I was turned on to the fact that there was a problem with Twitters Suggested Users List by Dave Winer who’s written about it a lot. Eventually the New York Times picked up on it and wrote this excellent piece. There’s no doubt that Twitter getting involved as curators is a problem, all I need from Twitter is for them to concentrate on providing the platform. The idea behind the SUL does however relate to one of my biggest problems with Twitter; how do you find new and interesting people to follow?

While I think that the SUL fails miserably at addressing this problem it’s obviously a problem that other people are having too.  Last month when Twitter updated their settings and removed the ability to see replies from people that you follow to someone that you don’t, they heard from users that were upset because they used the feature in order to find new and interesting people to follow.  In the fallout they said that they’re working on new ways to improve discoverability, unfortunately we haven’t heard anything about it since.

The most obvious and immediate improvement that Twitter could make to address this problem (after dropping the SUL) would be to add groups.  Laconica has added groups successfully and so has friendfeed (rooms).  Groups would make it considerably easier to find people with the same interests and immediately join in the conversation.

Groups, or rooms, are one way to address the problem and they’d definitely help in some situations.  Another solution that I’d love to see is user generated SUL’s.  Everybody should have the ability to put together bundles of users that they think are interesting and then make them available for others to subscribe to.  Google just did something similar with Google Reader, giving users the ability to create bundles of their favorite feeds that other users can download.  The same idea could be adapted to work within Twitter.  My only other request for this feature is that users subscribed to within a bundle stay segregated from the other users in my subscriptions so I can cull a given bundle or completely remove it if I don’t like it.  Also if we could have this by Friday?

Sr White House Correspondent for ABC News Jake Tapper possed this question on twitter, “Q: Any ppl who voted for POTUS unhappy w/image of him getting frozen custard as today’s events unfolded in Iran? Or bogus right wing meme?” and apparently he received some less than respectful or ernest responses.  While I may agree with the sentiment expressed by some twitterers who roasted him for even asking the question I liked his response “@JamilSmith just a question on twitter, not the lead story on World News. ok? i wondered what ppl thought. so i asked.”.  Give the guy a break people, he’s just a guy on his weekend wondering what people think about something he saw.  If @jaketapper didn’t work for ABC News would his question have incited the same response?  It raises some interesting questions about reporters and their participation on twitter.  We want them to participate the same way the rest of us do but we’re still holding them up as infallible.  Reporters aren’t infallible, they’re people who love news, just like us.

After finally deciding to start using my flickr account today I started looking around for ways to have my photos automatically sent to twitter.  Flickr has an option for posting to twitter but it doesn’t do exactly what I want, it requires you to manually select photos to send to twitter and enter your text.  I was just looking for something that’ll take anything that gets uploaded to my flickr and post the title and a link to the photo to my twitter account.    There might be other services out there that already do this but I ended up writing a script to periodically check the RSS feed of my photo stream for anything new and post the link and title to twitter for me.  Now it doesn’t matter how I upload my photos they all get picked up and posted to twitter, the way God intended it to be.

This post is also a test for TwitterTools, do I need to do anything special or will this post automatically get sent to twitter for me?  We’ll see.

I’ve had a number of blogs over the years and for one reason or another have always avoided using wordpress. Mostly I’ve written my own scripts to handle displaying posts because of the flexibility and customization it provides. Most recently I was using Habari which I liked a lot but finally I’ve bitten the bullet and I’m now using wordpress. The reason for the change of heart relates to my earlier post about php. Like php wordpress has people power behind it. Meaning that just about any plugin that I can think of already exists for wordpress. More than plugins though, I was finally swayed by the wordpress iPhone app. I wanted to be able to update my blog easily from my iPhone and a quick search showed that wordpress was one of the only platforms to have a dedicated iPhone app. This is my first post from my iPhone, pretty cool.

This story is disturbing for a number of reasons but it’s most disturbing because it’s becoming common place. Tasering people is not safe! The Courier Mail story states that the man was well known to police therefore they must have known that he was mentally ill. The story also makes no mention of the man having any weapon. Why is it necessary to Taser, or even Capsicum Spray, a mentally ill man without a weapon? Are we to believe that two or more police officers with batons aren’t able to collectively subdue one mentally ill man? Giving police more potentially lethal weapons to use, and more decisions to make regarding there use, is not the answer. Adding to the tragedy is the fact that more often than not the victims in these cases are the mentally ill, those least able to look after themselves, our policing and public policy should do the most to look after these people.

A couple of months ago police in Perth tasered the driver of a stolen vehicle through the window of his car while in pursuit! It’s clear that police aren’t able to make reasonable decisions regarding the appropriate use of these weapons. Enough is enough!

I recently received an email from a client who wants some additions made to some software that I developed for him. He wants to be able to generate specific reports and have the results saved into an Excel Spreadsheet. While I haven’t generated Excel files directly from PHP before, I have used PHP to send results directly to a printer and also to PDF files, so I was pretty sure it’d be a simple matter to do the same for Excel. A quick Google search turned up this page which describes how to do exactly what I need. The sheer number of people that write code in PHP means that anytime you have a problem there’s a pretty good chance that somebody else has already solved it, and that’s the power of PHP.

While rumors and speculation about Apple’s WWDC keynote abound, what do we actually know? They’ll definitely be talking about Snow Leopard, and they’ll definitely be talking about iPhone 3.0 software, and that’s about it. Conceivably they could actually just talk about these two things and nothing else, but everyone’s expecting more right?

What about the next generation iPhone hardware? It doesn’t make sense that they’d announce iPhone 3.0 software for existing iPhone 3G customers without introducing a new phone first. So I’d expect a demonstration of Snow Leopard and it’s availability, probably August or September, and the introduction of a new phone available in a couple of weeks, at which time the iPhone 3.0 software will be available for download for existing iPhone customers.

What about all of those 10 inch LCD’s that Apple was reported to have bought up? Speculation is that they’re being used for either a net book or a larger format iPod touch/tablet. I’m not convinced that there’s room for a product between the iPhone and the MacBook, it seems like It’d be filling the needs of a small number of people.

Also doing the rounds is the long predicted smaller/cheaper iPhone, this one’s a favorite with the financial analysts for some reason, probably because they see it as a chance for Apple to increase market share and capitalize on their brand and increase market capitalization along with some other analyst buzz terminology. Again I’m not convinced on this one,. If the iPhone becomes smaller and cheaper, it’d also have to become less powerful. A less powerful iPhone that can’t run applications or deliver a great browsing experience seems like a horrible idea.

And finally for the grand daddy of all the rumors. Steve Jobs is going to come out at the end of the keynote as the “one last thing”. I can’t imagine Jobs ever being the “one last thing”. Apple have repeatedly said that they expect Jobs back at the end of the month as originally announced. My prediction is for a fairly subdued (and predictable) WWDC with a special announcement in July where Jobs will take the stage and announce something new.

All of this is of course, complete guess work. Considering the effort that everyone goes to to try and get the inside scoop on what Apple are up to it’s amazing that they’re still able to pull off any surprise. We’ll all find out soon enough how close our guesses are but in the mean time I’d like to say thank you to Apple for keeping tech fun.

Seemingly out of nowhere Vodafone Australia started rolling out Visual Voicemail for its iPhone 3G customers late last week. The first I heard of it was when I received a text message notifying me of its impending roll-out last Thursday. We have three iPhone carriers in Australia (Vodafone, Telstra, and Optus) and until now none of them have offered Visual Voicemail. It’s kind of surprising that Vodafone spent the time and money considering the other two carriers don’t offer it, but it does gives them a competitive advantage, and with an announcement re the next gen iPhone expected next week, this gives new customers a reason to choose Vodafone over the others.

Over the weekend I had to perform a restore on my iPhone in order to get it to update to Visual Voicemail. However my partners phone recently began using Visual Voicemail without the need to perform a restore. So while they didn’t hit the Friday deadline 100% it looks like the roll-out may now be complete.

As someone who relies heavily on Voicemail for work, I love the update. The ability to go directly to a specific message combined with the ability to see your messages in a list is a huge time saver for me. It might not be earth shattering technology (and a couple of years after it was introduced in the US) but it’d definitely be enough to get me to choose Vodafone over the other carriers if I were a new customer. Well done Vodafone.

I know it seems unlikely but is it possible that Microsoft has a sense of humor about Bing? Is Bing a recursive acronym for Bing Is Not Google? Is the Snow Leopard on the Bing search page a reference to Apple? Whatever the truth is I like believing both are true, it makes Microsoft somehow more likeable.