Download: Making it work

Things have been quiet on the blog and in my new year through the first week, though not as dead as my previous post on my usual January slump forecasted (or probably should have cursed me with), thank god. Outside of being lazy, hanging out with friends and family, and ignoring new apartment house chores, I've mostly been trying to blaze a trail through yet another endless list of to-dos under the exciting category of "things that should have been done last year!"

This morning I finished captioning the final batch of a large December shoot that was such a low priority for my client that they told me flat out, moments after hiring me and suggesting a handsome fee, that there was almost no chance they would ever use the images for anything. Their real mistake, however, was later replying that they didn't need to receive the final images until "January sometime," which gave me a perfect reason to join in the spirit of making it an even lower priority during a busy month. A medium-sized FedEx box sealed and dropped off later, I'm on to the next item, which is, now lets see here, "enter contests ASAP." Fuck me! No way am not doing that tonight!

But because I also really didn't want to organize our new closets, or hang shelves in the garage (sorry the girlfriend!), I decided to take a look at my more vague long-term list of things to get fixed on a rainy day that are annoying but not pressing. On top of that list was trying to get my fancy Treo cell phone back into working order, which I was prepared to spend an entire sarcastic blog post talking about. Luckily for you, and me, I became very, very bored talking about looking around the web for the solution I needed. And after a couple of hours I solved my problem, and was so jazzed that I even went on to solve yet another Treo issue that I've been meaning to finally gather up all of my nerd power on.

And so instead of the inane chatter that could have been (similar to that Little Train that Could), here instead I offer the answers to my particular Treo problems - they might even work for you, if you are a moron like me and bought this giant thing for an insane amount of money (no, no, Mom, I actually got a sizeable discount!).

Problem 1: Treo 700P (Sprint) will not fully sync with Mac OS X

Solution: The Missing Sync for Palm OS

Skinny: Ever since upgrading from my Treo 650 (which met a sudden and untimely end in about a million pieces on the sidewalk in front of my post office), I've been unable to sync my new phone with my Address Book and iCal applications (OS 10.4). Palm/HotSync and Mac/iSync have never worked well together I've learned, but it wasn't working at all for me, and I had to resort to entering numbers manually that I needed to have on my phone. After going through several forums, I saw a variety of posts about Missing Sync, which is a 3rd party Sync conduit manager that replaces HotSync and overrides iSync (I think). Though the software costs $20 (there is a 2-week free trial), it immediately fixed what ailed my phone, and not only do I have all of my names, calendars, and digits back on my phone, its greatly expanded what will transfer over to my Treo from the Address Book categories. (Without being too nerdy here, HotSync has never allowed you to transfer over certain categories of data, such as mailing addresses, birthday, or the extra notes that I like to add to the bottom of an Address Book entry.)

Problem 2: Using a Treo 700p as a Bluetooth modem

Solution: Dial-up networking tutorial (& hack)

Skinny: Being able to wirelessly use my Treo as a way to go online (and transmit photos on deadline) with my laptop while traveling was one of the big reasons that I wanted to buy the damn phone in the first place. Even so, after months of trolling online and trying different configurations I was never able to get a consistent connection that was 1/3 as fast as the Pony Express with either my 650 or new 700p. Tonight I finally found a tutorial that made sense to me and I was able to easily follow. The giant added bonus of Trevor's guide is that it included an easy to install hack that bypasses Sprint's ability to tell the difference between when you are surfing the web from your phone, or from your laptop using you phone, which in turn saves the user $40/month (which is how much Sprint's business connection service is apparently). I did some checking up and this hack seems to work and be legit, but I'll be sure to come back and revise this post if I'm stuck with the $40 this month after testing it out.

So I hope that helps someone out. Do please make sure that you backup your Treo before attempting either fix, just in case. Now its time to try to be enthusiastic about closet reorganization!

**For those of you who are also Apple nerds and are currently glued to your computer(s) for the MacWorld Expo announcement of the new iPhone, I'd like to state for the record that I feel like a total jackass going on and on about my Treo the night before this insanely rad new product was unveiled. Thanks Steve!**

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