I am still testing out OS X 10.5, and in the process need to ensure that once I convert my laptop I will still be able to sync my Nokia E70 with it.Out of the box, OS X 10.5 does not sync, but a simple install of the official Nokia iSync plugins adds the functionality back.  So far the calendars, contacts and todos sync without any big problems.

One todo from the phone, that was set to not have a due date, was imported with a 2015 date, but that is not a real issue.

• Download the iSync plugin from Nokia.
• Install it
• Relaunch iSync

This should work with any of the phones listed on that page.   

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On Wednesday night, I traveled to Chapel Hill to get a head start on the drive to CED’s annual Tech Conference. The conference was great, but that is another story. While sitting in a friend’s yard, we were interrupted by the Carrboro police looking for someone who had called 911.

My friend Blake Watters, knew immediately it was him. His Blackberry 8820 has a great feature, it allows your to accidentally call 911 while the phone is locked.  When in key lock mode, you get three options:

1. Unlock Phone
2. Emergency Call
3. Cancel

I guess some brain trust at RIM decided that instead of accidentally calling your brother or mother-in-law and leaving a garbled message on their voicemail, your phone should be able to accidentally call the police by sitting on your phone.

The best part is that since the 911 dispatcher has access to the triangulation information from the cell towers, they are able to find your withing a couple of hundred feet. The officers were understanding but I could imagine a time when they would not be so interested to learn about the technical reason you made a call to 911.

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I wanted to thank the nice people at AT&T and their PR firm for sending me both an iPhone and a BlackBerry 8820 to test out. Currently, I am putting the two phones through their paces and I promise a full report on the pro and cons of both phones soon. They are giving my Nokia N70 a run for the money but I have not made up my mind yet. Stay tuned…

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This article was originally published in the Oct. issue of Greater Wilmington Business
Unless you have been hiding under a rock all summer, you have been well aware of the public relations machine behind the launch of Apple’s iPhone. With all the focus on the iPhone and iPod, it sometimes looks like Apple is not in the personal computer business any more. October will mark the launch of the new Macintosh operating system (OS), Leopard, which promises to improve to include some pretty interesting and useful new features. All indications are that users will not face the types of problems that have confounded Windows Vista upgrader and the new version should run on most modern Apple hardware without additional RAM or other improvements. Traditionally, Apple OS upgrades have actually made older Apple computers run better.
In honor of the release of the new OS, I have compiled some reasons that now is a good the time to purchase a Macintosh computer.
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Originally Published in the September Issue of the Wilmington Business Journal (http://www.wilmingtonbiz.net/)

A remote access VPN connections is sort of like a cell phone. At first, people said “why would I need one, I have a phone at home?” Once you are able to access your work computer from a remote location you will find yourself saying “how could I imaging living with out it.” Connecting to your office network remotely can be incredibly helpful when you travel or simply forget to send that email before you leave for the day.
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Originally Published in the August Issue of the Wilmington Business Journal (http://www.wilmingtonbiz.net/)

The “information super highway” was once the common way to describe the internet. Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska became fodder for late night comedians when he said the internet “is not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.” But however you envision this global network of connected networks, it is important to know that data is handled by a number of computers and can be read unless it is encrypted.

The founders of the internet did not see any reason to protect the data flowing around the networks because all of the information was for education and government uses. Today the internet is a very different place and digital data is often very private. Internet connections also now have the bandwidth to allow us to access company files, applications and servers when outside of the office or to link offices together to share resources. A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is designed to allow data to be shared securely over the internet by encrypting the information as it travels. There are a wide range of options for VPNs and this article only scratches the surface, but should serve to illuminate some of the reasons why you would want to utilize some method of VPN in your organization. (more…)

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Originally Published in the July Issue of the Wilmington Business Journal (http://www.wilmingtonbiz.net/)

I have made some funny spelling mistakes in my life, but unfortunately none of them have led me to owning a company with market capitalization of $160 billion.

The name “Google” originated when founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin misspelled “googol,” which refers to 1 followed by 100 zeros, while registering a domain name for a website. Since its creation in 1996, Google has become the dominant search tool on the Internet, and with the addition of advertising revenue, it has become an economic powerhouse. In addition to becoming an outlet for advertising sales and web search, Google allows employees to spend up to twenty percent of their weekly time working on new products. Google also has been buying successful web sites, and they now offer ancillary products that do not directly relate to online search, including an online office suite that competes with Microsoft Office.

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Originally Published in the June Issue of the Wilmington Business Journal (http://www.wilmingtonbiz.net/)

As this is my first article (for the business journal), I wanted to make a good impression on my editor and get it in early. Unfortunately, my computer crashed, or I accidentally deleted it, or my dog ate my hard drive. Actually, none of this really happened to me, but it did happen to the magazine Business 2.0, which is published by Time. They recently had a catastrophic hardware failure that caused the complete loss of the June issue. Lucky for them they had a paper copy, but page layouts had to be redone from scratch.

If you have ever lost a computer file, then you know how important it is to back up your work. If you have never been there, done that, consider yourself lucky—in today’s digital world, data loss is as inevitable as death and taxes. Therefore, you must have a backup strategy in place to guard against these would-be catastrophes.

For a backup strategy to be effective, it must be regular, complete and verifiable. If your backup strategy ignores any of these three components, you are asking for trouble.

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