Why is there such a lack of information on whether the iPhone has the capability of tethering to a laptop in order to gain access to AT&T’s EDGE for dialup networking (DUN)? I’m determined to find the answer and hopefully before the launch date on Friday. I have a sinking feeling that the iPhone will not be allowed to tether to a laptop/computer. How else could AT&T justify to themselves an unlimited data plan to iPhone users that is substantially less than other smartphone plans?

Anyway, back to the point. I know that many Apple Geniuses and salespeople have finished their training (not to mention the AT&T folks), so surely someone, out of the several thousand who were trained, asked this same question.

Oh yeah, and if you get in towards the front of the line at the Rosedale store this Friday, please save a spot for me. I’ll even bring some treats with.

***Update, July 4, 2007***
As many of you have probably already found out, tethering is not possible with the iPhone, right now. I anticipate that Apple will add this functionality in a future update.

***Update, August 10, 2007***
I’m glad someone was able to figure out a way to make this happen… It doesn’t appear to be the easiest hack to implement, but its now “possible”:

http://cre.ations.net/blog/post/tether-your-iphone

Excellent! A few weeks ago, my poor lawnmower met the unfortunate fate of ramming a second tree stump in my backyard. It now puffs smoke like the aptly named dragon. Rather than immediately fix it, I decided to go green. This morning, I purchased a Brill Model 38 from Ingrid at Reed’s Sales in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Ingrid cut me a discount with the “Living Green Expo” pricing, so I bought in.

My first experiences with the mower are largely positive, but first a little background. My lawn is surrounded by very large maple and oak trees on all sides and my front lawn is a steep hill with a 7 foot drop. The backyard seems to be getting rather bumpy from a bunch of voles tunneling around (no, not moles). Other than that, its a smallish lot by American standards, about 50 feet by 200 feet.

Right, one of the first surprises I’ve found is dashing up and down the hill in the front yard with the 17 pound Brill is that it is definitely a relief over the lumbering Lawnboy. In addition, the lack of any ear damaging noise that emits from it, zero consumption of gasoline, and fewer planned blade sharpenings have me elated. It cuts grass quickly and effectively, particularly well when the grass is already fairly short and dry. My sweet spot for grass length seems to be 35 millimeters (hey, its German engineering so get use to metric). I think its fair to say I’m in decent shape and the Brill stresses my body no more than the gas powered mower it replaces.

The downsides are minimal, but I’d be negligent to not point them out. One is that it doesn’t doesn’t seem to cut the grass quite as neatly as a regular gas powered mower. I’ve managed to mitigate this problem by overlapping more with my mowing, but there are a few stubborn blades of grass that just resist the whir of the Brill. Despite my overlapping technique, I think the time to cut the yard is about the same, as you can walk much faster with the Brill versus a silly gas powered mower. A second drawback is that you cannot get as close to trees and other obstacles with the Brill, which is OK, because I use a gas powered trimmer (yeah, I’ll find an electric one later) to tidy things up. The last issue is something that I should have been doing with my gas powered mower too. Before you mow with the Brill, you better walk around the yard and pick up your dog’s excrement in addition to every little twig if possible. The Brill will easily get jammed on a small twig, but you just push the circular blade backwards an inch and it will dislodge. As I live in Minnesota, I live in the middle of the forest, and this hasn’t been a huge problem yet.

Overall, I’m very happy that I got it. When you first get it, don’t get down on it too fast. Spend some time learning the ins and outs and you’ll be happy with your purchase. Go Green!

Its ridiculous Apple doesn’t make this easier in Preview in Mac OS X 10.4.x, but… If you need to change the font size of text annotations made to .pdf files in Preview, I saw this posted at macosxhints.com. Quit Preview if its open, launch Terminal.app, and paste this in:

defaults write com.apple.preview NSSystemFontSize -int 9

This will screw around with the font size of the buttons for printing out of Preview, so if you get frustrated and need to change it back, follow the instructions above and paste this line in to Terminal.app instead:

defaults write com.apple.preview NSSystemFontSize -int 13

I really hope its easier than this when Leopard ships this year.

For some reason I need make a script executable once every blue moon and I always seem to forget how to do it. Getting old is frustrating.

To make a script executable in Mac OS X, fire up Terminal.app and type this in at the prompt (or add a space after the “x” below and then drag your script on to the Terminal window):

chmod +x /file/path/script_name.sh

Press enter and you’re done. The single line above makes the script, named “script_name.sh” located in the directory “/file/path/”, executable. There are probably easier ways to do this, but it works for me.

To execute the script, just type the following into the terminal (assuming you’re in the same directory as the script):

./script_name.sh

I wanted to bring the Macworld Keynote to a buddy of mine who’s in a nursing home right now. He doesn’t have internet access there, so I thought I’d just bring it to him by saving a stream from Quicktime… Quicktime doesn’t allow for such shenanigans, but the venerable VLC does.

To do this, fire up VLC, and open the stream for this year’s keynote by choosing “File->Open Network…” and enter the address of the stream: “http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/jan/j47d52oo/m_8848125_650_ref.mov”. Test the stream by playing it. Nice…

Let’s use the Streaming/Exporting Wizard to save the stream. Press “Apple+Shift+W” to launch the Streaming/Exporting Wizard and then select “Transcode/Save to file” and click “Next”.

Click “Existing playlist item” and select the stream in the window below followed by clicking “Next” to continue.

On the next screen, just click “Next” to continue, leaving both options blank.

Leave “MPEG PS” selected and click “Next” to continue.

Name the stream what you want it called and click “Next” to continue.

Click “Finish” to begin downloading the stream.

It should download at the pace of your connection, I believe, but mine only came down at real-time – maybe due to traffic…

The data connectivity has been a hassle with some new 8703e’s and Verizon that we now have in the office. Here’s a couple troubleshooting steps to check for or establish connectivity with Verizon. To check for basic data connectivity:

1. Send a PIN to yourself.
2. Go to “Options”, “Status”, copy the PIN (using the scroll wheel and pressing to copy), go back to “Messages”, press the scroll wheel to compose a PIN, in the To: line press the scroll wheel to paste in the PIN, and then type “test” in the subject and body fields.
3. Press the scroll wheel to send the message.

If you received the PIN, the issue is with your IS department and their BlackBerry Exchange Server. If you didn’t receive the PIN in your inbox, re-establishing the routing functions of the BlackBerry:

1. Go to Options->Advance Options->Host Routing Tables.
2. Press the scroll wheel and choose “Register Now”.
3. Return to Message to check your inbox for a message that says “Device has been registered.”

Return and repeat the first half of these instructions to check for connectivity. If you still aren’t receiving emails or able to surf the web on your BlackBerry, call Verizon.

So, for over a year I had my personal certificate for signing/encrypting email working just fine in Mail, but today I got cute and tried to update my personal certificate to include my GMail account. When I deleted my old Thawte personal email certificate from Keychain Access, I screwed up and deleted the personal certificate ALONG with the X509Anchors entries for Thawte. This was crucial, because when I created the new/updated certificate at Thawte and went to import it back into Keychain Access, it imported fine, but Thawte didn’t replace my X509Anchors entries. Hence, when I fired up Mail, the padlock S/MIME icons weren’t appearing for signing and encrypting individual messages. After pulling my hair out for too much time wondering why the buttons weren’t showing up, I finally got smart and hopped on another Mac I have and I exported the Thawte certificates from the X509Anchors in Keychain Access and imported them back on to the machine that I impaired.

After doing this, my new/updated certificate now works flawlessly (and I switched to CACert now too, so we’ll see how this goes). Figuring out the X509Anchors deal helped me to get CACert certificates working as well. The signing/encryption buttons don’t show up in Mail unless you have corresponding entries in the X509Anchors keychain for the Certificate Authority you wish to add personal certificates for…

So, a mere 5 days after running my new MacBook Pro, I got to work today and booted the computer from a shutdown state. I was greeted with fans running continuously, at full speed. I thought it was strange, so I restarted while resetting the PRAM. No effect. Next, I reset the Power Manager using these instructions:

1. Shutdown MacBook Pro.
2. Remove power and battery.
3. Hold power button for 5 seconds.
4. Insert battery and power and turn MacBook Pro back on.

Everything is peachy again, but a little concerning…

Also, before the fans ran continuously, my trackpad was exhibiting strange behavior. There was a one second or more delay when I attempted to use the trackpad after using the keyboard. By fixing the Power Manager, it appears the trackpad issue has gone away as well.

Possibly related side note… I did bike to work today with my MacBook strapped to my back. I had it in a backpack inside 2 jackets that covered my upper body. The temp outside was 35 degrees. After arriving at work, the MacBook felt like room temperature, so I don’t think I exposed it to any severe conditions.

Stay tuned…

I was struggling with converting a .pst archive to a .dbx (so I could bring a huge .pst archive over to Mac OS X and Mail.app). It turns out to be really easy.

1. Open Outlook (in my case Outlook 2003) and open your .pst archive. Next, go to Tools->Email Accounts, click the radio button for “View or Change existing email accounts”, and then under “Deliver new email to the following location” you should choose the name of your .pst archive (in my case it was called “Personal Folders” (see screenshot). You’ll get some warning about all new incoming mail going to your .pst archive, but just continue, as we’re almost done with the repugnant odor otherwise known as Outlook.

2. Open Outlook Express (if you can’t find Outlook Express, go to Start->Run, type in msimn.exe, and press OK to launch it if it exists somewhere on your machine), choose File->Import->Messages->Outlook and then choose the mailbox you want to import (or all of them if you must).It took about an hour and a half, using a speedy IBM ThinkPad T42, to pull in an archive over 1 GB, but it did it eventually…

3. Before you quit Outlook Express, go to Tools->Options->Maintenance->Store Folder and note your file path to where your .dbx files are kept (mine is “C:\Documents and Settings\bschwie\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{3203D4E4-3933-4654-8ACC-63655A457D5D}\Microsoft\Outlook Express”).Next, to convert the .dbx files into .mbox files, grab “DbxConv”, a DBX to MBOX converter by Ulrich Krebs. Toss DBXconv into the same folder as all of your .dbx files, open a DOS prompt, navigate to the directory that contains the folder full of .dbx files and DbxConv, and then run the following command:dbxconv -mbx *.dbxDepending on how large your .dbx files are, this may take a while (I had a 1.5 GB file that took a half hour). After they are converted, rename the file ending for each file from .mbx to .mbox…

4. After the .dbx files are converted, move the folder containing the .mbx files to your Mac (finally!). On your Mac, renamed all the .mbx files to .mbox. Fire up Mail on your Mac and go to File->Import Mailboxes->Other and then navigate to the folder containing all the .mbx files. All the .mbox files will be grayed out, but just click the “Choose” button and the next window in Mail will show you all the .mbox files it can convert (it will ignore the .dbx files if they are present). Click the OK button to begin importing… Again this may take a bit depending on the processor inside your Mac.Alternative ending… If you aren’t able to get DBXconv on to your PC you can fire up Entourage on your Mac, instead. To go this route, skip steps 3 and 4 above and while you’re in Outlook Express, make a folder on the desktop and drag all the mail messages that you want to convert to the folder on the desktop. Then, transfer this folder containing all your messages in .eml files to your Mac. Fire up Entourage and drag and drop these .eml’s. Once they’re all converted (Entourage may appear to lock up, just be patient), you can export from Entourage to an .mbox file for Mail.

Here’s what I did to get my Yahoo Mail importing into Mail.app with the latest Yahoo.lua 0.1.9d for FreePOPS (or MacFreePOPS).

I opened yahoo.lua and changed line 252 from:

strRegExpWebSrvUrl = “webserviceURL: ‘([^’]+)'”,

to:

strRegExpWebSrvUrl = “webservice: ‘([^’]+)'”,

Then I downloaded Firefox 1.5.0.7, switched on the Yahoo Mail Beta, and then turned it back off.

Next, I quit my mail client and quit FreePops (in my case, MacFreePOPS).

Finally, I launched MacFreePops and then fired up my mail client, Mail.app again. Everything started downloading like the old days!!!