Crooks.net

Apple offers a set of web services they dub MobileMe.

It’s a nice set of services for which they want $99/year. As a full-fledged geek, I have to admit I’m intrigued by MobileMe because it sounds like a fun set of things to play with, and it’s even possible I’ll cave someday and try it. But $99 is a lot of money to spend every year. I’m going to tell you why I really have no need of this, and maybe why you don’t either.

I’ll cover the services one-by-one:

• Email

  MobileMe: With MobileMe you get a new email account with an “@me.com” extension. They have a very nice web interface to access your email, and it also has an IMAP interface so you can use any email client such as Apple Mail on your Mac or email on your iPhone/Touch. Setup on an Apple device is particularly easy.

  

  My Solution: I have my own web host with Dreamhost, and with that I get total and complete control over my email. I have several domains so I can have addresses that end in “@crooks.net” or “@scrooks.net” or a few others. Because of that, I can give individual web businesses a unique email address, and if they start spamming me I can then just send any email to that address to the trash. When email comes in it’s easy for me to automatically check it for spam, send it to multiple locations, put it in a specific folder, or anything else. There’s also a way to access my email on the web, although the interface is not nearly as slick as the MobileMe email web app. I’ve already got email thoroughly covered.

  

  Solution For Others: Gmail seems to give you about the same thing as MobileMe mail, and a lot of people are happy with that. It’s free. I personally don’t like the idea of leaving all my email eggs in Google’s or Apple’s basket, but that’s just me.

  

• Contacts

  MobileMe: MobileMe will keep your contacts in sync between your iPhone/Touch, Apple Mail on the Mac, and Outlook on a Windows PC. They also provide a very nice web app to access your contacts.

  

  My Solution: To be honest, I don’t really have that big of a set of contacts, and I don’t really need to access them that often. I keep the Contacts app on my Mac up-to-date and it gets synced to my Touch whenever I plug it in. Good enough. In addition, Spanning Sync, a solution I use for my calendars (see below), syncs all of my contacts to GMail. I’ve never once looked at them there, but it’s easy so I do it anyway.

  

  Solution For Others: If you use GMail for your email, you might as well use it for your contacts also. Like me, you could use Spanning Sync to keep your computer contacts in sync with GMail if you have that need.

• Calendar

  MobileMe: With MobileMe you can create multiple calendars for whatever groupings you want. They have a very nice web interface to access your email, and it also syncs nicely with either the Apple Calendar app or Outlook. The calendar syncs wirelessly and fairly immediately with an iPhone or Touch.

  

  My Solution: Our whole family lives in Google Calendar. It offers up as many different calendars as you want, it’s free, and it’s got a very nice web interface. I also use Spanning Sync to keep the Google calendars in sync with the Calendar app on my Mac. From there my Touch is also kept in sync whenever I plug it in. I can make changes anywhere and the change gets synced everywhere. I would still have to use Google Calendar and Spanning Sync even if I used MobileMe, simply because the rest of my family is on Google Calendar. I have no real need for changes on my Mac to be pushed wirelessly to my Touch.

  

  Solution For Others: Google Calendar is the way to go. It’s great.

• Gallery

  MobileMe: MobileMe makes it easy to put photo collections on the web in a very nice interface to share with others. You can post pictures directly from your iPhone, and if you use iPhoto on a Mac syncing the pictures is a snap.

  

  My Solution: I really have two solutions for this. For personal family photos I use our family web site where I’ve installed a few pieces of software. It’s not nearly as easy as the MobileMe stuff, but I’m in full control and I like that. I also have a SmugMug account that I use for all other photos. It’s got a terrific interface and many, many features. There’s also a nifty iPhone app that lets you directly post your iPhoto shots. I may eventually punt on putting pictures on our family web site and just use SmugMug since it’s so nice.

  

  Solution For Others: There are numerous photo hosting sites out there, but I still recommend SmugMug even though they charge a small yearly fee. Their service is just too good.

• iDisk

  MobileMe: MobileMe provides 10GB of synced file storage. You can have these files sync to your Mac and Windows PCs. Files can be put in a public area so anyone can get to them if you want. Bookmarks and some system preferences can also be synced between Macs.

  

  My Solution: I recently discovered Dropbox. Dropbox works much the same as MobileMe sync, with files automatically syncing as they’re changed on any Windows or Mac PC. There’s also access from the web, along with public access and a decent interface for sharing photos if you want. They are working on an iPhone/Touch app, but it’s not out yet. With Dropbox you get 2GB free, and can pay a monthly fee for much more space if you want it. I personally sync all of my documents (no media files) and still only use 10% of 2GB, so the free version works great for me. One thing I’m still missing is syncing of browser bookmarks and Mac preferences. I’ve looked a long time for a good cross-browser syncing tool and haven’t found one, but I think foxmarks, a tool for syncing Firefox bookmarks, will soon support multiple browsers. And it’s really not that hard to live without Mac preferences syncing — I don’t have that many Macs.

  

  Solution For Others: There are a few file sharing options out there, but I’m going to have to recommend Dropbox.

It really doesn’t seem like I’d get much added value for $99/year, and that’s why I’ve never signed up. Apple seems to keep tweaking and adding things to MobileMe, so maybe someday they’ll do something that really grabs me. Until then I’ll do without.

15 years ago I have vague memories of filling up my car and watching with amusement as the total cost equaled the total gallons exactly. Gas was $1.00 a gallon. (Or more accurately, $0.999 a gallon, which added to the amusement because the totals didn’t exactly match if you got enough gas.)

Now I marvel at these graphs generated on my iPod Touch using a very nice vehicle data tracking application called Gas Cubby.

First there’s the graph of gas prices Terry and I have paid in the last 6 months or so.

What a range! All the way up to $4.20 and then down to $1.19 last night. I’m really hoping it goes down to a dollar, simply because there’s something fundamentally satisfying about having the price exactly match the quantity.

This graph is the real kicker, showing how much it’s cost to fill up our two cars. The current trend has been very helpful.

This blog entry is very Mac-centric. You have been warned.

Our family is a big user of Google Calendar.

We’re also big Mac users. The rest of the family is fine always going to Google to check out the calendar, but my personality is such that I can’t stand not having my Mac iCal program synced with our Google calendars.

For over a year now I’ve used Spanning Sync to sync my calendars and it’s worked quite well.

It’s a two-way sync, and after doing a lot of experimentation with various mechanisms to sync Google calendars on both Windows and Mac, Spanning Sync was the only one that appeared to do it correctly for every calendar event. (I do a lot of odd repeating events, like repeat every three days and then I’ll change a single event in the series to skip only two days.)

Now Google has announced that they support iCal sync directly. So why stick with Spanning Sync (other than the fact that I just paid for another year of service)? I was wondering that myself. In the back of my mind I was thinking, “It’s working, don’t mess with it,” but I knew at some point I’d get around to tinkering with the free Google stuff, at the very least because I can’t help but tinker with stuff.

Now today Spanning Sync has released a blog entry that answers why I will stick with them: http://blog.spanningsync.com/2008/12/how-does-google-caldav-compare-to-spanning-sync.html. Point #2 is the big reason for me: bidirectional sync with the iPhone/Touch.

A great number of my calendar entries are entered directly on my Touch, which I then count on being synced to iCal on my next iTunes sync, which I then count on getting picked up by Spanning Sync and sent up to Google Calendar. Apparently that process isn’t going to work with the free Google stuff, so it’s not an option for me. Spanning Sync will get my $15 every year, at least until something else changes.

Spanning Sync has also never screwed anything up, which I’m a little paranoid about since that calendar data is very important. And from what I’ve read, on the off chance something does get screwed up at some point, apparently it’s repairable when using Spanning Sync. See point #3 in their blog entry.

(If you actually made it to the end of this post and are interested in Spanning Sync for yourself, use this link to save $5.)

Does anyone else think that Craig T. Nelson with long hair just looks freakishly wrong?

Looks like somebody slipped in on the iTunes App Store a screen shot of their app taken on a jailbroken phone:

The Crooks.net domain turns 10 years old today. We would be celebrating Crooks.com turning 11 years old today instead, but 11 years ago I wasn’t smart enough to realize that dropping $70 on a domain name was worth it.

It’s come a long way, starting out as pure junk managed with Microsoft Frontpage, moving eventually to its current form, junk managed by Drupal.

Here’s hoping for 10 more years of boring content that 2 or 3 family members can sometimes take a look at.

The difference between using Twitter and blogging:

Twitter: You know that exactly three, and only three, people are reading what you write, and you know exactly who they are. You tend to think, “What do I have to say that any of them really care about? Do I really want to tell them about how my kid just ate a booger using less than 140 characters?”

Blog: You have no idea who’s reading what you write, and suspect it’s likely only 3 people, two of whom are Mom and Dad. You tend to think, “I’m going to write this for my own amusement, because if I get lucky enough to amuse someone else I’ll probably never even know anyway. And I can post that slick video of my kid eating a booger and write 12 or more paragraphs about it.”

And if you get more popular on Twitter it goes like this:

Twitter: You know that 34 people are reading what you write and you only know who 16 of them really are. You tend to think, “Wow, that’s a lot of people so what I write better be good. And I have no idea who 18 of them are so maybe I should be careful what I write also. I better skip today’s booger news.”

No, there’s nothing really coming about one of my kids eating boogers. I suppose I could tell the story about the Wall Of Boogers someday….

And hey — Mom, Dad? If you wonder what the hell Twitter is, read this. And then forget about it.

I liked this. But I liked the original song also.

Before I got my iPod Touch I had an iPod Video. (Just in case it’s not obvious, that thing would play videos as well as audio content.) I subscribed to several video podcasts that interested me, and just as I did with my audio podcasts, set about creating a couple of smart playlists to present the videos just the way I wanted them. I had one smart playlist that listed the videos from shortest to longest. Using that one I could start things up when I knew I didn’t have a lot of time and still knock out one or two items, or even if I had more time I could feel like I was catching up on things better by knocking out several shorter items instead of a few longer items. I also had a smart playlist that simply listed all the items from oldest to newest.

Then I got my iPod Touch, transferred these playlists over, and… they didn’t really work. Oh, they still presented things in the correct order, they just inexplicably didn’t play any video. All I could do was listen to just the sound from the video which sort of defeats the purpose. I don’t know if that was some kind of weird conscious decision on the part of an Apple engineer, or if they just didn’t have time to finish it, but in any case it was a very annoying missing feature that made no sense. To watch my podcasts I had to open up the Videos app and pick and choose individually what I wanted to watch next. I hate that — I want to programmatically set things up and let it rip until I say stop.

I kept my smart playlists around in the hope that this would be fixed. Now much, much later, it finally is! The 2.0 release surprised me by playing those smart playlists with video, just like my old iPod Video used to. I was surprised because I haven’t seen mention of this anywhere else, and based on what I read when I searched around for a solution when I first ran into the problem, lots of other people were also quite unhappy about it. Hopefully they’ll all give it a whirl with the new release like I did and be pleasantly surprised.