Sell a Name or an Image?

The new marketing “trick” seems to be to give a product a nice name, which sounds “expensive” and “design” like. So the marketing boys come up with a nice name. Compaq for instance has been using “pressario” for a while now. But when I say that I have a “pressario”, do you really know what kind of computer I have? Do you know which computer to buy when you hear my praise on my great new computer?

Get an Onscreen Keyboard in OSX

Always forgetting how to do accents on characters, or where the euro sign (€) is? Use the on-screen keyboard and see where the special characters are while holdin down the option key, or the shift-option combination. Read the small tutorial on HackAddict.net on How to Get an Onscreen Keyboard in OSX.

Orange highlighted characters are the combinations. So do an Option-E, let go, and then an “o” to get “ó”. Have fun finding all the combo’s. Using the keyboard viewer is faster than the character palette, and in addition learns you the key combinations for often used characters.

Seemless Bluetooth iSync

In my last post, I wrote about how I got HomeZone to detect my bluetooth phone, and automatically start iSync. While I was playing with it, I noticed how HomeZone opens the Address book application and iSync, and doesn’t close them. To make it more seemless, I used a script I found at The Technocrat to start and stop iSync without interfering with your work. Here’s how I did that.

HomeZone: Start iSync automatically

Recently, I installed “Do Something When” and use it to start rsync scripts when I plug in certain USB devices. By doing this, every time I plug in my USB memory stick containing my Password Gorilla password databases, it gets backed up (Apple style, with timestamps). Needless to say, it then gets backed up by TimeMachine.

I also needed this hands-off approach for synchronizing my iCal calendar with my new Nokia 6300 phone. Enter Homezone, a very cool app that can detect if a certain Bluetooth device is in range, and start iSync. It can also lock and unlock your screen when your phone is in or out of range, respectively. I did find some buttons looking funny when running it in Leopard, but it does work fine.

Next up: a review between Busy Sync and Spanning Sync for synchronizing iCal with Google Calendar.

Stretch pants…

… invented for people who order size 12 pants for their size 18 butts.