More eBay Auctions

I have up for auction on ebay 2 Texas Instruments Ti-83 Graphics Calculators here and here. Perfect for those starting high school.

I also have a 512mb RAM stick up for grabs from my now defunct Apple iBook G4.

Finally, I am also getting rid of BioShock for the Xbox 360.

Go get em.

gSync: Sync iCal and Google Calendar

Whether its a good idea or not, I’ve transferred a lot of my life over to Google in recent months. It started with search years ago, and then email via Gmail, and more recently I moved from a local RSS reader (Vienna – Which I highly recommend: Mac only) to Google Reader. The reason for the move is that I like my RSS and email to be accessible and synced up wherever I am. The same goes for my calendar. I use iCal on my Mac and wanted it to sync with Google Calendar.

When Spanning Sync was first released in beta it seemed the perfect solution but I baulked at the $25 USD annual subscription fee or $65 USD outright purchase. Fortunately along came Macness with gSync. I’ve followed it through its beta releases which were many and had a few bugs (though I never experienced them) and a commercial version was finally released a few months ago.

It can sync multiple Google Calendars with multiple iCal calendars and is pretty flexible. You can set it to override Google or to sync your two calendars. The features listed on the Macness website are:

* Autosync: define when and at what intervals to update calendars
* Flexibility: use multiple iCal & Google Calendars
* 2 way sync: bi-directional synchronisation
* Privacy: sync directly to Google (no third party server)
* Apple SyncServices: gSync is based on Apple’s SyncServices allowing us to integrate with anything that uses this (e.g. iPhone, iSync, etc…)

One of the benefits according to the developers is that unlike Spanning Sync, gSync connects directly with Google Calendar rather than with a third party server. This isn’t a big issue for me but if you’re paranoid about privacy then this is an obvious benefit. gSync has also recently been listed on the Apple downloads website as one of the Staff Picks. I’ve had few cases of double entries and that type of thing, but I suspect that could be as much a limit of the respective calendar technologies as of gSync itself. I don’t know if it is possible for the program to better recognise changes to existing entries but that would be welcome.

I’d recommend gSync, especially in light of the 10 GBP price tag (about $20 USD). There is a free 30 day trial available and you should back up your iCal and Google Calendars before using.

Old tiger

Quick postscript to the Safari 3 beta post.

The recently released 10.4.10 update of tiger doesn’t break Transparent Dock like the Safari 3 beta does. I also came across another program called Clear Dock but it uses Application Enhancer which I’m a bit wary of. It just strikes me as crapware. Anyone else used it?

Safari 3 points to 10.4.10 version of Tiger?

I went and installed the beta version of Safari 3 after the WWDC keynote recently. Much to my surprise it installed itself over the top of Safari 2 and required a reboot. Safari 3 itself seems more like Safari 2.1, there’s not much in there to justify a whole new version and I uninstalled it pretty quickly.

Fortunately the uninstaller does a resasonable job, there’s a site that shows you how to run them both on the one machine. But what I noticed is that even after uninstalling, my dock was still broken. I use a program called Transparent Dock that makes the dock ‘float’ by removing all the background and outlines. But this didn’t work after installing the beta. This is because the beta installs version 10.4.10 of the dock and this isn’t removed by the uninstaller. I had to copy the old dock application off my backup to get my dock back.

I have no idea what other stuff the beta installs, but this may mean that Tiger 10.4.10 is definitely on its way and will be the first OS X build 10 for a while.

Why is Apple screwing Australia?

 While it is all well and good that you can get DRM free music at the iTunes store now, despite the fact that you have to pay a 30% premium for the privilege, Apple is still screwing Australia.

The pricing on the US store is $0.99 per song. At the current exchange rate that would translate into an AUD figure of $1.20 per song.

While the Australian dollor has gone up recently it hasn’t gone up enough to have brought the difference down from the $1.69 that we currently pay in aus per song. That’s a 40% premium for an intangible product that doesn’t have any transport costs or overheads that would justify the difference.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the record companies had a hand in this and decided that because Australians are more enthusiastic consumers of music than the US (our CD sales went up last year) they decided that they could gouge us.

And you currently can’t buy any video except music videos on the Australian ITS. Seems like Australia is not a market that Apple, or any digital content vendor, really cares about at all.