Duplicate events with GooSync

Both my wife and I have Windows Mobile phones, and we use Google Calendar for our calendars.  GooSync allows us to wirelessly sync our calendars with our phones.  My wife and I both have GooSync accounts, which sync to our own Google Calendar accounts.  The permissions on some of the calendars has been setup so either one of us can add events.

There appears to be a bug where events are getting duplicated, seemingly on every sync.  From looking at the duplicated events, they are being created from my wife's phone.  Maybe it is caused because these events were created by my account, and maybe GooSync can't handle this.

links for 2008-02-27

• 
  
  Xbox.com | Personalities - Elle: Parent's Guide to Family Settings
  
  
  A guide for setting family settings on the Xbox 360 and Xbox Live
  
  
  (tags: xbox xbox360 familysettings)
  
  

jUploadr

To upload my photos to flickr. I have been trying to use flickr's tool, Flickr Uploadr.  This tool lets you drag photos to a window, to upload them.  You can use the tool to set keywords and permission settings when uploading.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work that well.  Sometimes the transfer just stops, and the only indication is a little message in the lower left corner of the window that says "Bonk!".  Other times, there is a message that says something like "Houston we have a problem! There is a network problem....", but in this case the network connection is fine.

I stared to think that this could be caused because Comcast could be filtering some of this traffic, as I am uploading several GB of photos.  But then I decided to try a different application to do the uploading.  So I tried jUploadr.

jUploadr is a java application that has the same functionality as Flickr Uploadr.  But this applicaiton handles the transfers so much better.  In addition, it also uploads meta data for photo, so any title that you set on a photo in iPhoto, will be transferred to flickr when you drag the phots from flickr.

SmugMug

My friend Steve commented on this post, where I mentioned that I am trying flickr as a photo management site, mentioning SmugMug.  SmugMug is a pretty nice site to to photo management.  They offer a 14 day free trial, and then several different subscription options.  Similar to flickr, SmugMug has several desktop uploading clients available.  In addition to that, there are some site that will let you automatically migrate from flickr, or other sites.

I really like the look of the site, as the albums look more polished than the albums do on flickr. Also, since the main focus of SmugMug is not sharing, it leave the UI to be uncluttered.

I uploaded about 300 photos and added tags for each of them.  The upload process was pretty painless, and adding tags to each photo was a lot easier than it is on flickr.  But unfortutately, the site was getting pretty unresponsive, when I was attempting to look at my uploaded photos. In fact, many of the web browser connections were timing out, so I had to manually try the connection again. 

The other problem is that it doesn't appear that you can have a single photo in two albums.  You can duplicate the photo, but that is not exactlywhat I want to do.

links for 2008-02-22

• 
  
  HOW-TO: Printing from Ubuntu to a USB Printer on Airport Extreme Base Station - Ubuntu Forums
  
  
  (tags: ubuntu linux airport print)
  
  


• 
  
  Disk encryption may not be secure enough, new research finds | The Iconoclast - politics, law, and technology - CNET News.com
  
  
  (tags: disk encryption hardware security technology exploit)
  
  

Disabled dynamic content plugins

I have disabled several of the plugins that I had installed on this blog.  The tagcloud and the related posts LifeType plugins creates some interesting views into this blog, but they take a long time to process when making new posts.

I will take a look at adding a background process to update this data, or changing the algorithm to be more effecient. 

Online Photos Service

We have been using iPhoto for our photo management system.  This has worked pretty well on our macs, even though I had to take some steps to have access to the photos on our multiple computers. 

Now that I am using Ubuntu, I want to find a way to share these photos on all of our computers.  I started to copy all of these photos onto our network attached storage drive, but I only can modify the photos in iPhoto, otherwise iPhoto gets out of sync.

links for 2008-02-13

• 
  
  Drm: Microsoft Has No Answer For Their Broken XBOX Live DRM
  
  
  (tags: 360 xbox drm)
  
  

DVR revisited

In this post, I mentioned some problems that I was having with my Comcast DVR.  Comcast has come out an replaced the DVR, and everything thing seems fine.

PhpGedView

I wrote about phpGedView before.  I have been using it as the hosting software for our genealogy web site.  I had only been using it as a read-only view of the data, and using a desktop application to modify the data.

I just realized that there is pretty cool feature.  My sister wanted to update some information, so I created an account for her, and she was able to do her own edits.  You can also configure accounts so that an administrator has to approve of changes before they will be posted. 

This is turning out to be pretty good software for family collaboration. 

Recordings on Comcast DVR

We havent looked at the recording on one of our Comcast DVRs for several months.  Last week, I decided to watch one of the shows on the dvr, but there were no recording in the recording list.  Also, the list of scheduled recordings was empty.  For some reason, the DVR decided to erase all of its settings.

I am annoyed, especially since we are paying Comcast for this box.  Since our Series3 works downstairs, maybe I will look in to replacing the Comcast DVR with a SlingBox/SlingCatcher or a Media Center/Extender combination

PowerPC Edubuntu

Our iMac is starting to get pretty slow when running the kids flash-based games.  This seems to get worse as new flash games are created.  (I think that these flash apps are not being optimized for low powered computers.)

So I was curious to try Edubuntu to see how well the iMac performs.  The Umbuntu distributions include the ability to boot directly fom the CD to try it out, so this would be perfect way for me to try edubuntu.

 Unfortunately, I was not able to get either our iMac or iBook to boot from the CD.  It would just hang after selecting the boot options.