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There’s nothing like avoiding the blame.

Every word of this post describes me exactly. Creepy eh ?

I thought it was brilliant!

The Nerd Handbook

I’m a bit of a geek, there’s no real way of getting around that. Also, im a particular kind of geek. I’m a Mac user. Now there is an army of devout Apple followers who will berate anybody who so much as questions the very brilliance of a Mac.

I’m not one of those.

I’m a funny hybrid. I still own windows boxes, and am very much tied to windows because of certain applications i use at work. I’ll even occasionally dabble with Linux (well Ubuntu, one of the more user friendly forms of Linux). Yet still, nothing i use really measures up (in my eyes, I’m not here to start an argument) to my Macbook Pro.

As such, i do the vast majority of my day to day emailing, browsing and communicating on my Macbook. Therefore you can understand my complete frustration and being unable to sync my phone, a HTC hermes running windows mobile 5 with my main computer. I have tried various syncing utilities over time, but none have been effective or free. This has meant one of two alternative options.

1. manually adding any events/contacts to whichever device i wasn’t nearest to when i need to make the addition.

2. bypassing my mac completely and always syncing with a windows box.

I tried the second for a while, but i just found it a plain nuisance as i rarely sat in front of the same windows machine on a regular basis. Like i said, i encounter them a lot at work but those machines are part of our media server so it would be completely inappropriate to run outlook on them. I have an office pc at work which is windows but never sit in the office. I pick up my work email on my Mac via webmail bypassing the need for all that. At home i have 2 windows boxes, one is a file server and the other a media server which get well used. But again, always via my mac!

The whole re-entering events multiple times completely defeats the object of the modern interconnected world! So one big HALLELUYAH to the very great lifehacker for discovering Syncmate its a freeware app for doing the windows mobile syncing to ical, address book, bookmarks, iphoto… infact you name it. I’ve had a bit of a play with it today and so far i’m very impressed. It just works, first time ever time. The way i expect it to!

If you balance your computing between OS X and Windows enviroments then you’ll definitely be familiar with the thumbs.db and .ds_store files that litter the jump drives and transfered folders you share between the two computers. I’ve recently come across a solution on the tech-blog Lifehacker (well worth a read if you dont already!) Rather than plagerise their work i’ll just point you in the right direction

This is one for all those intel mac owners (which sadly doesnt include me yet). iAlertU is an anti-theft alarm for your computer with some nice features. It can be quickly armed/disarmed with the apple remote, takes photos of the thief with your isight camera then mails them to your email address. The alarm can be linked to mouse movements, key presses or (my favourite) to the inbuilt motion sensor.

Check it out at http://www.slappingturtle.com/home/

I have to say that fonts aren’t something i can get excited about. Not in the same way i do about a good media server anyway. But today they invaded my world of media based geekery with the potential for chaotic consequences.

Onlyview is the server of choice for the show im currently programming and on the whole this is a great asset to the project. Unfortunately one of the limitations of this tool is its lack of support for newer fonts. The only such support it offers is for true type. You can therefore imagine my concern when the show fonts turned up as open type

Fontforge was the app that came to the rescue. The first thing i feel i should say about it is that its not strictly an OS X app. Its an open source project designed for flavours of unix, but the developers offer both comprehensive instructions and packages for running on OS X, Linux and Windows.

On OS X it runs pretty happily under X11, and i found the instructions to be the quickest and easiest of all platforms (just run the installer and off you go!). It offers a huge range of functions, many of which go above and beyond my knowlege of computing and fonts. Most notably for me was the easy conversion between font formats. Result!

Today i discovered Display Fusion. A freeware application geared towards those running a multi-monitor XP setup. You can pick the images from your collection or give it keywords for a Flickr search. It then allows you to span them across the entire width of your desktop maintaining whichever aspect you prefer.

Not one of those ‘i-can’t-do-without’ programs, but if you’re going to spend as much time staring at your screens as i do, you might as well make them look nice!

Find out for yourself here