1. Download 3.0 firmware from here
2. Make sure you have the latest iTunes installed
3. Backup your iPhone by synching it as usual
4. There are 2 ways to deal with the upgrade. Complete Install or Upgrade
5. Since Complete Install will take F O R E V E R, I would choose the Upgrade path
6. Holding down the Option keyboard button while clicking on the Check for Update button on iTunes
7. Choose the downloaded firmware file and wait. After a couple minutes, your new iPhone 3.0 is ready to go!!!
8. In case you want to do a clean install just like when you do the Windows or OS X upgrade. Instead of clicking on the “Check for Upgrade” button, you click on the “Restore” button

Have fun with your NEW iPhone 3G 3.0 phone!!!

P.S.: Gizmodo has an article listing out all the firmware file you need to “search” for.

I was using the old 20″ Apple LCD display as my secondary monitor with the iMac. Since the Spyer 2 Suite/Express only supports single monitor, I was unable to calibrate the 20″ display anymore.

I copied the profile from my old G5 tower to the iMac and used it as the profile for the 20″ display. The color is off a little bit (due to different video card), but it’s better than using the native default color profile.

Recently, I bought a Dell G2410 24″ LED LCD monitor for less than US$250. The default profile has very serious blue cast and the color is off horribly. The G2410 really cannot compare with Apple’s 24″ LED display (US$224 vs US$899). However, I really need to have the color fixes as much as possible.

ColorVision Spyder 3 Pro and Elite support multiple monitors but ColorVision is asking for US$169 for the Pro and US$249 for the Elite model. The price is really beyond my budget. So here is the little hack to let your Spyder 2 to calibrate on dual monitor settings.

1. Goto System Preferences
2. Goto Display
3. Goto Arrangement
4. Click on Mirror Displays
5. Launch the Spyder 2 software
6. You should see the mirrored display on both monitor
7. Put the Spyder on the secondary monitor instead of the primary monitor
8. Start calibrate!!!

1. Goto System Preferences
2. Goto Accounts
3. Make sure you pick the user you use to login
4. Goto Login Items
5. Click on the + sign at the bottom of the list
6. Browse the Shared network share. Make sure you open up the directory/folder you want to auto mount
7. Click Add
8. You should see the newly added share appears as the volume kind in the login item list. When you reboot and login, the share will be mounted automatically.

1. Download ffmpegX
2. Download mpeg2enc
3. Download mencoder and mplayer
4. Unzip mencoder and mplayer. Move mpeg2enc, mencoder, and mplayer into a permanent location under the user directory
5. Install ffmpegX and launch it. ffmpegX will ask the location of mpeg2enc, mencoder, and mplayer. Specific the location of the libraries by using the Locate… button. Punch in the current user password and hit the Install button.
6. Download the RealVideo 9 codec from here. Make sure you download the right architecture (PowerPC or Intel) of the codec.
7. Install the codec
8. Now, we can locate the newly installed codec using Finder. Use Go | Go To Folder… and enter /usr/local/lib. Copy the codecs folder to /Library/Application Support/ffmpegx/reallib
9. Restart ffmpegX and it should be able to recognize the Real Video format (rmvb or rm).

It is a very easy to use tools for capture any part of the screen. Once captured, you can save the screenshot into a file and use Preview perform some simple tweaks such as cropping or resizing.

For advanced users, Mac OS X has the keyboard shortcuts mapped to the screen capture functions. You can check that out from Keyboard & Mouse in System Preferences.

However, there is one more tricks on capturing a Window using shortcut keys: Shift-Command-4 and then Space. The cursor will turn into a camera and you can use it to capture single window from the screen.

What happen is Beta 2 is not open to public and the official version is not ready yet when Beta 1 is expired?  Microsoft already mentioned Beta 1 is mainly for testing only and not for daily use.  However, once we have tried Windows 7, we really don’t want to go back to Windows XP or Vista again.  What should we do?

There are some people hacked Windows 7 Beta 1 so that it won’t be expired.  Also, the patch removes the desktop watermark and the feedback button on the application title back as well.

Click here to download the Plus Patch V7 by Orbit30.  Make sure you right click to run the application as Administrator.  After following the instructions in the screen, your Windows 7 should be ready to go.

Note: I have applied the patch but still haven’t tried to change the BIOS date/time after July 01, 2009.  If you want to try that, make sure you have backup all the important data first.

MobileMe Mail

MobileMe comes with the Mail service. It works pretty much the same as the other web based email client except it comes with the push service for the iPhone/iPod Touch. It shares with the 20GB storage with the standard MobileMe account and you can pay more to increase the storage size. MobileMe Mail supports IMAP for incoming emails and SMTP for outgoing emails. However, MobileMe Mail does not have email filtering and the spam filter sucks.

There are a lot of free solution to replace MobileMe Mail. As all we know, Gmail (Google Mail) is the best free email web client right now. It comes with about 7+ GB storage and it supports filtering, labeling, folder, etc. The most important features are FREE and AWESOME spam control. Gmail supports POP3 and/or IMAP for incoming email and SMTP for outgoing emails. There are uncountable number of features and new features are adding in via Google Lab almost every month. Although IMAP is not true pushing technology, it works well with iPhone/iPod Touch.

MobileMe Contact

MobileMe Contact works very well with Mac OS X’s Address Book application via MobileMe Sync. It supports international format of address and phone number. Also, you can add almost unlimited number of fields into the address book. For example, you can have multiple home phone numbers and multiple work email addresses. This is a very useful features and a lot of other address book applications are missing that.

Similar to Mail, Contact is a push service for iPhone/iPod Touch as well. Alternative solution could be Gmail Contacts, which comes with the Gmail account. Mac OS X Address Book supports syncing with Google Contact natively. However, I don’t have good experience with that because the fields in OS X Address Book are different with Google Contacts. Occasionally, the sync screws up my contact information. This is one of the reasons I don’t want to give up the expensive MobileMe account.

In addition, Google just releases Google Sync Beta for iPhone/iPod Touch yesterday. I don’t have a chance to try it yet but it seems could be the other alternative solution to sync Google Contact with iPhone/iPod Touch.

MobileMe Calendar

Same as MobileMe Contact, the MobileMe Calendar works almost perfectly with iCal (Birthday calendar and subscribed calendar don’t work together via MobileMe Sync). On the other hand, Google Calendar is still a big winner on free calendar solution. Also, we can use the newly released Google Sync to synchronize between iPhone/iPod Touch with Google Calendar and using 3rd party solution such as Spanning Sync with iCal on the Desktop/Notebook.

MobileMe Gallery

I don’t use MobileMe Gallery that much because I am using Flickr and Smugmug for most of my photography works. MobileMe Gallery works the best with iLife’s iPhoto and iPhone. For the alternative solution, we can use Flickr’s free account or Google Web Picasa. Google Picasa works even better than iPhoto and it’s FREE as well.

[smartads]

MobileMe iDisk

iDisk is always a problem since the day it was introduced back in the late 90′s. It shares the same storage space with the MobileMe storage, which is around 20GB. The syncing mechanism is slow and problematic. For the past few years, I have encountered at least 3 times of corrupt synching and forced me to cleanup everything. iDisk was a simple WebDav implementation and now it turns into a cloud service.

There is rumor about Google is working on GDrive. As a result, there is no Google solution for this feature. However, we can use Drop Box. The free Drop Box account comes with 2GB storage. The client supports Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux! Drop Box also supports version control so you can always rollback the deleted files instantly from the web client.

MobileMe Sync

MobileMe allows synchronizing data (contact, calendar, keychain, bookmark, dashboard, gadgets, and other 3rd applications data) across multiple Mac’s. I found out synchronizing contact and calendar are the most useful features. I don’t sync the keychain because I don’t want to mix up the keys between work and home accounts. I don’t sync the dashboard and gadgets because I have different setup for work and home. As for the bookmark, since I mainly use FireFox 3 instead of Safari, it is no use at all.

As I mentioned earlier, Google just released Google Sync for Mobile Device. It solves the issues about synchronizing contact and calendar between desktop/notebook and mobile devices. For bookmark, the best alternative solution is Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer. It supports both Safari and FireFox 3. Besides synchronizing the bookmarks, the Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer also syncs the username/password acrossing different computers/browsers.

Back to My Mac

This feature never works for me. It could be I’m using a modified Linksys router instead of Apple Airport. However, I can use either Chicken of the VNC or LogMeIn. Both of the applications/services are free and works across platforms (Mac OS X / Windows / Linux).

iLife

iLife integrates pretty well with MobileMe. For example, iPhoto can publish photos to MobileMe Gallery and iWeb can create simple web site and publish to MobileMe. However, I don’t use any of these features at all.

iWorks ’09

iWorks can utilize MobileMe for online sharing documents. I don’t have a copy of iWorks 09 so I do not know too much about this feature. However, alternative solution could be Google Docs. I have been using Google Docs for quite awhile to replace MS Office. It works pretty good for simple document editing. With the help of Google Gears, Google Docs can be worked standalone offline.

Other Applications

There are a lot of Mac OS X applications are utilizing MobileMe for data backup and sharing. It’s a nice touch but I don’t think it’s really important for daily usage.

Conclusion

By using Google Apps (Google Mail, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sync for Mobile) and some 3rd party solutions (Flickr, Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer, Spanning Sync, LogMeIn), I can replace MobileMe by paying nothing.

What about you? Are you going to give up your MobileMe account? Please comment below.

Emoji (a.k.a. Emotion Icons) is a special character set for the Japanese SoftBank iPhone 3G. Originally, all the non-Japanese iPhone 3Gs are hiding this feature. Until iPhone 3G firmware 2.2 released, there are a couple hacks to enable this feature:

Jailbreak

You can find out the details at iPhone Hacks.

Hack w/o Jailbreak

1. Click here to download the vcard file.
2. Import it to your Mac’s address book or send the file to iPhone by email.
3. Goto Preference > Settings > General > Keyboards > International Keyboards > Japanese Keyboard > Enable Emoji

3rd Party Application

You can enable Emoji by installing one of the following 3rd party applications.

Frosty Place (老地方冰果室) [App Store] is one of the oldest methods to enable Emoji on non-Japanese iPhone. It is a US$0.99 Chinese native iPhone application for a Chinese blog/forum. The author didn’t advertise this application can enable Emoji.

EmotiFun! [App Store] is a free application that mainly usage is enabling Emoji on your non-Japanese iPhone.

Typing Genius [App Store] is a US$0.99 iPhone typing trainer application. It can improve your typing speed on iPhone’s soft keyboard and enable Emoji!

After installing the 3rd party application, remember to perform the following steps to enable Emoji!

Goto Preference > Settings > General > Keyboards > International Keyboards > Japanese Keyboard > Enable Emoji

Happy Typing!!!

Update:

Apple is not allowing Emoji on non-Japanese iPhone. They are cleaning up the AppStore and not allow author selling application to enable Emoji. The only method to enable Emoji now is jailbreak iPhone or using the address book hack.

On the Acer Aspire One, there are 2 SD slots.  After installing Windows 7 Beta, the slot on the left can read SD card but it does not work with Windows ReadyBoost.  The slot on the right won’t be able to read any SD card at all due to missing driver.  Don’t panic.  You can find the necessary driver in the download section of this blog.  After installed the driver (no need to reboot), put in a 1-2GB flash card into the left slot (I prefer the left slot because the flash card can fully insert into the Aspire One and you won’t notice it’s existence).  Windows 7 will ask you what to do with the card and you will choose to use the card for Windows ReadyBoost.  The drive properties dialog will appear as following:

[smartads]

In Windows Vista, there are only 2 choices in this dialog: Do not use this device or Use this device.  In Windows 7, there is 1 additional option: Dedicate this device to ReadyBoost.  I use this option because I won’t be using the SD card for anything else (there is a right slot for the other SD card and there are 3 USB slots for Aspire One!!!).

Click OK to close this dialog and Windows 7 is ready to go with better performance!