The glorious media room with 60 inches of tv 
This was probably the first room we setup and really used at the new house. Can you blame us? I’ll try not to bore everyone with details but a quick rundown of what we’ve got running down there…
A few thousand dollars later we’re almost done furnishing the great room upstairs. A few before and after shots Here’s how it looked nice and empty:
Since then we’ve setup the dinning room table, and the new sectional and coffee/end tables are finally here, yay!
We found some matching window treatments just have to get the energy to hang them, maybe I’ll find some time this weekend since it’s a 3-day weekend - oh how nice.
We ordered quite an expensive sectional and since it was ‘custom’ we knew we’d have to wait a long time for delivery - no problem there. So delivery day comes and the team of people unload, unpack and setup the sectional with haste. A quick visual inspection looked great, signed for it and off they went. Well upon further inspection the wedge piece in the middle was missing a foot, and one of the holes where you screw the foot into didn’t have a nut (nothing to screw into), it was just a hole. I called to complain to the furniture store and they said it would take 3 weeks to get us another foot! They offered to have a repair guy come and install temporary taller legs for the wedge.
My roommate being a little more vocal than me when it comes to complaining quickly picked up the phone and called them back. They had the audacity to say they were doing us a ‘courtesy’ of sending someone out to our house to install temporary different sized feet for just the wedge. hahahahahhahaha Now I’m not usually the one to get really upset on the phone, but if I had been on the phone to hear that I would have unleashed a wrath upon them.
I guess since I’m blogging about iPhone I better get up to speed and get this site ‘iPhone Optimized’. Using the plugin/theme duo from iwphone.contentrobot.com the optimization was a snap. If you point your iPhone at this site you’ll see a slimmed down optimized version.
If you are like me and stuck on a Windows box you’ll want to bookmark this plist conversion tool. Simple and to the point, it takes a binary xml .plist file and spits out the raw xml. Do a File -> Save As… with the page it returns, the browser just doesn’t display the raw text properly.
Thanx goes out to the peep who put that online!
Here’s a hint to help those looking to create shortcuts for common things…
Upload/create the file /var/root/.profile with these contents:
# Aliases
alias pico='pico -w'
alias rm='rm -i'
alias ssh='ssh2'
alias myssh='ssh2 username@myserver.com'# User specific environment
PATH=$PATH:/sbin:/usr/sbin
TERM=vt100export PATH TERM
This assumes you have uploaded vt100 for using fullscreen goodies like pico. If you haven’t got vt100 on your iphone remove the TERM line and remove ‘TERM’ from the end of the ‘export’ line.
Note: You must have the binary ‘login’ uploaded to your iPhone from one of the bin-kits for this to work.
If you are a *nix user no further explanation is needed, you know what that file does and why… for those who don’t read on…
I’m a little too tired to actually give you great news saying I have a way to sync your notes, but I can give you a way to get access to the notes data…
The notes are stored on the iphone in sqlite format, so first grab a sqlite binary from here if you don’t already have it on your machine: http://www.sqlite.org/download.html
Load up your favorite iphoneinterface and grab your notes.db:
cd /private/var/root/Library/Notes/
getfile notes.db
Then to play around with your notes database pass in the filename to sqlite binary, something like this
sqlite3 notes.db
That will drop you into the command line and you can go wild, for docs on sqlite usage see this: http://www.sqlite.org/sqlite.html
I had attempted to do the safari bookmark sync via iTunes and I ended up losing a bunch of iphone bookmarks, but I also got a couple of bonus bookmark folders that I could not delete… well more than one way to skin a cat.
If you are suffering from the same problem, or just want to clean house and remove all your bookmarks at once here a simple way. Load up your favorite iphoneinterface and grab your Bookmarks.plist file:
cd /private/var/root/Library/Safari/
getfile Bookmarks.plist
Make a copy of this file for backup purposes just encase you decide you didn’t really want to delete your bookmarks.
I’m a PC user so I didn’t have the luxury of being able to edit this file in its nice pretty xml format, if you are on a Mac you should be able to selectively edit this file as you wish.
I just opened the file in my text editor, did a select-all, delete, save.
Upload the file back to your iphone, and your safari bookmarks have a fresh start (and those pesky ones that didn’t let you delete them are gone!).
Are you having problems trying to get GMail and iPhone to play nicely? Colin has written up a great article detailing a solution that might work for you quite well. It isn’t as hard as it looks, just make sure to read carefully 
Basically entails setting up a filter to ignore anything you don’t want on your iPhone (mailing lists for example), and forwarding the rest to an imap enabled server. Then your iPhone checks the incoming imap server, and you set your reply-to address desired. A few options are presented in Colin’s article to help you figure out the best solution.
First off, what is IMAP IDLE and why should you care? Cliff note version “IMAP IDLE == Push email”
Okay, okay it isn’t exactly the same but it pretty much serves the same purpose. If an imap server supports IDLE it allows a compliant client to retain a connection to the server so that the server may alert the client to changes in the mailbox. This includes new mail, status changes in existing mail (changes from read to unread and back again), mail being moved and/or deleted. The result is a nearly ‘push’ like appearance.
Sounds great - sign me up, the iPhone must support this because yahoo is doing it for free for iPhone users… NOT!
