How to sync your Nokia E71 with Google and Mac Book Pro?

Sunday, August 2nd, 2009

The new iPhone is still not released in India yet (Aug 9 supposedly), so till then I thought of cranking up my Nokia E71 with whatever free but useful stuff I could lay my hands on so that it feels good to own one till the new iPhone comes :P Nevertheless after all the apps added in there, it feels like its a good phone after all :D

  • To start with I installed Fring to be connected with my Google, AIM and Skype pals and people at work.
  • For blogging I added Scribe and set it up with my Wordpress installation(the one I use for my son’s blog)
  • I installed AccuWeather but uninstalled it later coz it was not really used though it gave a 15 day forecast in a calendar view
  • Opera Mini (it has a nice bookmark that lets me choose from thousands of free apps and games!
  • GMail of course!
  • And then some more…

But then it still felt very incomplete without a true ’sync’ solution. I dont like to install software unless its really necessary. For example I have owned at least 4 Nokia phones till now but never installed the PC Suite… Firstly I hated its name and secondly I could transfer images and videos through a USB cable or bluetooth.

Google has created a nice solution for syncing Google contacts with your phone(which is great coz then it acts as a backup for all your phone contacts in case its lost, I ve lost 2 so far, one HTC and one Nokia) but its solution for syncing Calendar never worked! So I wanted something that could sync calendars between Google, E71 and my Mac Book Pro (iCal) I found one called GooSync which allows you to sync one Google calendar free! That was enough for me. It worked like a charm but then the iCal was still neglected. So I kept looking till I found one (to my surprise) on the Nokia Europe site. This is a 150 kb plugin for the Mac’s iSync which syncs iCal and the Address Book to the E71. Make sure you ve synced the devices first with Bluetooth. You may need to run the Bluetooth setup to discover your phone once even if you ve already set it up earlier. From there on its Cakewalk :D

And the last thing that was required was to share my phone’s internet connection with the Mac Book Pro, this didnt take long to search (it was on the Nokia site itself somewhere around the iSync plugin)

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FireFTP 501 Invalid number of arguments solution

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

Very recently while I was trying some trial versions of Kaspersky, Bit Defender and Webroot when I noticed that FireFTP stopped working on my mac book pro! I noticed that this happened instantly after installing Webroot Internet Security. I disabled the network firewall and FireFTP started working though one of the accounts was still not opening up and gave the error

501 Invalid number of arguments solution

The same account worked from the Vista machine where Webroot was installed. So (in FireFTP) I selected Edit>Connection Tab and there I *checked* Passive Mode (which makes the flow of data from client side than server side for security reasons and firewall problems).

Some more info on Active and Passive FTP

A little easy to read (& understand :P ) info on the same is here

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Gmail! The best personal organizer

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

I m a sucker for tools that help a person organize himself, task lists, reminders, memo s etc. I have used many applications but found myself still looking for more again and again. My criteria was as follows:

  • to do list (with priority + reminders)
  • memo s
  • calendar
  • chat (with AIM support)
  • Office tools
  • All of this in single interface
  • And above all, a facility to access it from any computer as well as my mobile phone

There are a lot of apps that allow you to do most of the above but not all. I always knew I could use Gmail for a lot of things (with Labs offering Docs, Chat(with AIM) etc along side) but it wouldnt show me the calendar and there was nothing for memo s. But not any more… I installed GreaseMonkey and added a script found here and I have Google Notes(for memo + bookmarks), Google Reader + full Calendar).

Now in one Gmail window I have

  • Gmail :P
  • Chat (with AIM)
  • Google Docs
  • Reader
  • Notebook (for notes :P , memo + bookmarks)
  • Calendar
  • Tasks

And not only is this available from any machine… it is also available on the phone! Here is a screenshot of my Gmail… (I have closed all the tabs so that you wont see my top secret info :P )

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Rainlender

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

Here is a really nice OS independent, free to do list manager which (if you want) can integrate with online services like Google calendar and Remember the Milk.

http://www.rainlendar.net/cms/index.php

Its called Rainlendar and it sits directly on the desktop along with a calendar(with highlights) and sorts nicely by category or date or priority or all of the three. A to do list manager should be quickly accessible coz it wouldnt be too effective if you have to open up something first to see the to do list.

I am not such a great fan of Remember the Milk but I do like BackPackIt.

To start Rainlendar, or for that matter anything else, every time you boot into Ubuntu, you need to add the program to the Sessions list found in System > Preferences > Sessions. Rainlendar can be found in /usr/bin/

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