What do you use to keep multiple computers in sync? I think I’ve got a pretty good toolset down. Here’s what I use…

Mail: Google Apps for Your Domain IMAP access. Same mail on my phone, both computers and on the web.

Calendar: Google Calendar. Sync tools or ActiveSync access are available for virtually every platform.

Contacts: Google Apps ActiveSync support for the iPhones, Plaxo for all other clients (Thunderbird, Outlook, Apple Mail) is a little intrusive as configured by default, but is easy to tame and works great.

Bookmarks: XMarks (formerly FoxMarks). Google had a plug-in for FireFox that worked great, but they’ve stopped development. XMarks now has IE support… not that I’d ever use IE.

Documents: Windows Live Sync (formerly FolderShare) works very well for a subset of our documents — its PC and Mac, despite its new name. Mozy back-ups archived stuff.

Media: iTunes sync/sharing with our iPhones and the AppleTV for music and movies. iPhoto pushes to Flickr and Facebook, and I keep a manual back-up as well.

If you’ve played around with NextStep/OpenStep trying to build a sample app — say, so you can find out how much OS X/the iPhone is like those sweet black machines of yesteryear — you might have an error like this one, when attempting to build a sample app you’ve created: AppKit.h not found (or any one of the other billion header files that are missing)

This may mean an incomplete installation of the Developer tools. Here’s what to do:

• From the Developer CD, open the NextCD folder and then Packages.
• From the Services menu, use Open Sesame to open the Package as Root
• Install the Package to its default file locations.

Now, in your project in PB, you may need to tell the compiler where to find those libraries.

• From the Tools menu, open the Inspector and look at the Build Attributes.
• Under Framework Search Order, Set… a new path to where those files just got installed: /NextLibrary/Frameworks
• Do the same for Header Search Order, but use /NextDeveloper/Headers

Now you should be able to Build in Project Builder! Note that PB doesn’t have a “Build and Go” that I can find, so once you build, you need to use Workspace Manager to find your newly made .app and double click it to test it out.

Sometimes when you’re working on a UI in WPF, the actions of one method won’t actually happen before the next method begins running on them. This can cause weird results if your second method depends on the first method’s changes being done rendering.

Use the UpdateLayout() method to make sure your changes are actually done before you begin operating against them. It will make life so much better.

I spent the whole day smashing my head against the wall with Silverlight, and got nowhere. Here’s what I went through over the past 6 hours…

• Try to find a way to make an element’s left, be equal to the UserControl’s width * -1 (to hide it completely)
• Found out that in animating Silverlight, the destination value cannot be dynamic
• Found out than in silverlight, dynamic resources cannot be used at all
• Try to find a way to pass in the width of the element from the hosting page
• Found out that you can’t bind directly to passed in values, you need to create a binding object which will hold them.
• Found a way to bind a textbox’s value to the passed in value
• Try to bind the animation to the passed in value
• Found out that animation does not support “binding” instruction
• Try to find a way to programmatically set the destination Left value for the animation
• Found out that in Silverlight, you can’t use FindResource to get a handle to the animation
• Try to find a way to manually find objects in Visual Tree to get a handle on the animation.
• Found out that the Object Tree is returning null values even if you have the x:Name defined for your (non-display?) elements.

Still have no idea how to animate an element to a non-hardcoded position. Basically, the whole day has been wasted so far…

Basically I have a VisualState like this:

<vsm:VisualState Name="EditingComentsState">
<Storyboard x:Name="EditingCommentsStoryboard">
<DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames BeginTime="00:00:00" Duration="00:00:00.0010000" Storyboard.TargetName="stackPanel" Storyboard.TargetProperty="(UIElement.RenderTransform).(TransformGroup.Children)[3].(TranslateTransform.X)">
<SplineDoubleKeyFrame x:Name="EditingCommentsStateKeyFrame" KeyTime="00:00:00" Value="-500"/>
</DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames>
</Storyboard>
</vsm:VisualState>

And I want the value (currently -500) to be either a function of the Control’s width, a passed-in value, or a calculated value — basically a Run-Time not a Compile-Time value. So far the only things I can set it to are literals or StaticResources. Anyone have any idea how to make Silverlight stop being a total jerk?

Expression Blend doesn’t work properly in a typical VMWare 6.* environment. Some people report lock-ups, I just get a garbled screen. Fortunately, the fix is easy: disable 3D graphics acceleration in the VM Settings…

Via this guy…

Copy and enable Cron from 10.4.

Schedule Cron jobs using crontab at the command line. Use Ctrl+D to exit crontab once all your jobs are created.

Examples:

Restart the AppleTV at 8:10am every morning (say, to re-establish network connections with computers that were off during the night):

10 8 * * * sudo /sbin/reboot

Shutdown the AppleTV at 1:00am every morning:

0 1 * * * sudo /sbin/shutdown -h now

You’ll need to enable the frontrow account to use sudo without a password.

To connect and print to a Vista printer from Leopard, install LPR/LPD from Printing Features in the Programs and Features control panel in Vista. Connect the printer using the LPR path with the computer name (or, likely you’ll have to use IP address) and printer share name. To add an LPR printer, you’ll have to expand the Toolbar to show “Advanced.”

To connect and print to a Leopard printer from Vista, don’t bother trying the built-in stuff. Just download and install Bonjour for Windows, and use the Printer Wizard to add the Mac’s printer.

This past week I was the unfortunate victim of hard drive failure on my 1stgen Macbook Pro. After looking through my local NAS and finding that my most recent backup was done in April, I kicked myself a little bit. I have everything available to me to do regular backups, but like most people I am just too lazy. I decided that I wanted to try and get Time Machine to perform backups to a network share instead of a local drive. A simple terminal command was all that was needed to make my network volumes show up in Time Machine.

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Just changing this preference has worked for many other people, but I get the a message from Time Machine stating “The backup disk image could not be created.” Nothing on google or the apple support forums seems to give any good info on the situation.

Any ideas?

Yes! It IS possible to watch NetFlix Watch Instantly content in Canada on your XBox 360! However, I will not post the details here, for fear of them closing the loophole somehow. So, if you want to know how I did it, ensure that you have the following requirements, and then e-mail me, in person, and I’ll reply with the details…

E-mail address:

Requirements:

• An XBox Live Gold Membership with a U.S. Gamertag (*See comments for a work-around)
• An XBox 360 equipped with NXE and a hard drive
• A US Credit or Debit card (PayPal can help you with this)
• A valid US Mailing Address
• A NetFlix membership of any kind (including a trial membership)
• A computer running Windows XP or Vista 32-bit only (a VM will do)

If you can’t meet these requirements (and I’ll admit, they’re steep) don’t bother contacting me. I can’t help you.

Update (17-April-09): It seems this loophole has finally been closed on the server-side. If anyone knows another work-around, I’d love to hear it!

Here’s a cool little release for those interested in making a Mac more like an AppleTV.
Scott Q writes:

I’ve just finished writing my own version of the AppleTV screen saver called QTV. After lots of searching I couldn’t find anybody that had a working version that actually did the same stuff the real AppleTV version did. QTV will work on both Tiger and Leopard (10.4 & 10.5) and has a random array of photos that you specify floating vertically across your screen at varying 3D depths and moving at varying speeds while periodically rotating as a group. My version also allows you to optionally have a glimmering sun cast it’s glow across the entire scene. You control everything thru various settings including: speed of front, middle and rear photo scrolling, the folder to search for images in, spin to the left or right, cast shadows from front and middle photos, the rotation interval speed, and whether to show the glowing sun or not.

Read more about QTV and download from his website!