Recently I just bought myself an iPhone and it’s become my second brain. It only took a few minutes to get it working with our Exchange Mail server however I quickly ran into a hurdle in viewing non-PDF documents in my email over the iPhone.

To overcome this challenge, email your docs from the iPhone Mail app to iphone@pdfonline.com
The service converts your attachments to PDFs and emails them back to you.

The majority of us don’t backup on a regular basis. It usually isn’t until we lose a bunch of critical data that the light bulb turns on and we start backing up for maybe a week or two and then we stop. Apple’s new Leopard operating system contains Time Machine to fix that problem. Time Machine runs in the background, backing up your entire hard drive without you having to remember to manually run a backup.

This was one of the niceties which excited me about upgrading to Leopard; however I was somewhat disappointed to learn after upgrading, that Time Machine would only backup to another physically attached hard drive. In my situation I primarily like to place my backups in a remote location such as a networked server. I work of a laptop, so my physical working location is always changing and I’m not going to carry an external drive with me all the time. Luckily, after a few hours of research I found a nice tweak to let me use our office network servers as my backup location.

Here is how you do it:

REQUIREMENTS
Obviously you need to be running Leopard and you’ll need a network share which is larger or equal to your hard drive in your Mac. In my case these shares are in SMB and AFP.

1. Go into Applications / Utilities and open up terminal
2. Copy and paste this command into terminal (all on one line)

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

3. Hit enter / return
4. Mount your network share, in my case my share is off our server called INAS1 and my share is called User-Backups
5. Go to System Preferences and open Time Machine

6. Click on Change Disk
7. Select the share you wish to backup to, I’ve selected User-Backups

6. That’s it, you’re done

Wait up to 15 minutes and you should be set. To verify it is working open up your network share in Finder and you should see a file which is named [your computer name] [your MAC address].sparsebundle

Be sure to post your questions and your results using this method.

A while ago I posted a blog about image retargeting, a new form of image resizing that uses algorithms to determine what part of the image is most important and what can be stripped away during resizing.

And while the video helped illustrate the concept of image retargeting, it didn’t allow for first hand usage of the technique. Therefore I would like to direct your attention to riszr.com. An online flash application that allows you to upload images and resize them using retargeting (along with the normal methods). Then you can save your retargeted image out.

Rsizr.com is really well done, and greatly helps to demonstrate just how beneficial and powerful image retargeting is. It even offers advanced features such as area selection for retargeting protection. A technique that allows you to select parts of the image and protect them from being retargeted. Head on over to www.rsizr.com and give it a whirl.

For about the past year I have been using a program by the name of Spotlaser that helps add some functionality to spotlight searches in OS X. Basically it allows the user to have a bit more control over exactly what they enter when looking for a document. For instance: creation date, text within the document, exact filetype, file size, etc. Spotlight is capable of finding all of these things (and more) but at times the default spotlight interface can make it hard to do. Mainly because you are forced to open up a finder window, run a search, and then add a filter rule for each search option. With Spotlaser you can do complex searching in a nice interface without the hassle.

Perhaps in Leopard spotlight will get a better interface but until that happens thankfully we have Spotlaser.

Recently I came across DabbleDB, a ajax-ified online application for building simple to intermediate database structures. After briefly using the system I had the following observations.

• It is a nice tool for sharing simple database information as a replacement for Microsoft Access or Excel Spreadsheets.
• An API would be nice. I can see the tool being utilized for basic web site functions such as calendaring, event planning, news releases or tracking leads. However, I couldn’t find an API which would let me tie in our web apps with the DabbleDB.
• The interface is clean but often not intuitive. Several times I tried to make changes to the database structure so I could show the location of several stores on a map. When I tried to view the results the software asked me to assign locational data. I wanted to make the address information locational but it only let me specify state as the locational element.

DabbleDB is definitely worth checking out. I think it still has some maturing to do but overall it’s a slick app and I applaud the developers and their effort to make databases management more user-friendly.