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So as you are no doubt aware by now – I have an iPhone and an iPad and a Windows XP environment within Virtualbox on my Ubuntu server to back them up and maintain them.

How does this all fit in with Apple’s new release of IOS 5 and their new iCloud structure? The quick answer is that Apple never planned for it…. as a matter of fact, they never even planned for Windows XP to be around to support it… so for those of you who hoped you could interconnect all three together (as it’s so well advertised) – you can “almost” forget it.

The reason I say almost is because, although Apple is on record as not supporting Windows XP with the iCloud, I managed to actually find a “bit” of a work around for it. And that is what I am going to share with you today.

The workaround information is courtesy of a You-Tube video out there if you are interested…which I’ve embedded below. It can be found at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bwc-fioJB7o

And I give them full credit for it. If you want the steps written down for “easier access” I include them here along with a few other links and suggestions.

The only thing that connected with the iCloud on my system was Outlook Express ( I usually use Thunderbird, but Apple only syncs with Outlook. ) make sure that it us installed and configured to work with your mobile.me email before proceeding. Otherwise the solution will hang looking for something to sync with. You may or may not have other Windows applications that might work with iCloud, but I did not and so I can’t confirm if they will work or not.

Some Important Pre-Requisites

You will need a RAR unarchiver like WinRAR. WinRAR IZARC, which is free to use/evaluate for 30 days and can be downloaded here: www.izarc.org

You will also need a special editor, called the ORCA MSI editor. It’s free, but hard to find. You can find a copy here: www.technipages.com/download-orca-msi-editor.html

Once the prerequisites are installed you are ready to proceed…

How to configure XP to work with the iCloud

Download iCloud for Windows from the Apple site me.com/move and ignore their cautions about needing Visa or Windows7

Right click on the package you downloaded in the previous step and extract all files using WinRar. You should have 6 or so files.

Depending upon your version of Windows (32 or 64 bit) right click on the appropriate version of iCloud.msi and select “Edit with Orca”

A Window will open. Left Click on the “Launch Condition” in the left hand column

Then in the Right column click on the second line that says “VersionNT>=600 [ProductNameLoc” requires that your computer is running Windows Vista or newer”

Then click on “Cut Row” and then hit save ( looks like a little floppy ) and exit the program.

Now you are ready to install iCloud on your XP machine. To install it, just open the iCloud msi file that you just edited.

And that’s it – everything “should” work… at least in my case my email did – LOL. Good luck – let me know how things turn out!

I originally sent this out as an email to my friends, but I’ve done so much research putting this all together… and the thing is so freakin’ amazing that I thought I’d better post it here as well…

Everyone who has looked at the history of Apple – in particular the Mac have learned about how Steve Jobs went to the  Xerox Parc laboratory in Palo Alto California and learned about a piece of hardware called a “mouse” and a user interface that used graphical windows that could be moved, closed, opened, re-sized, etc. Essentially not using a Command Line as everyone was back then with the Apple II and the IBM PC. The result was the Mac….

Here’s a great dramatization showing that event. www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u70CgBr-OI from a movie I really love… “Pirates of Silicon Valley.”

Here’s an actual news expose, which shows almost the same thing…. www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYkZUu9MUxs&feature=related

Steve Jobs loves to quote Picaso, who said: “Good artists copy, Great artists steal….”

Both of the above sort of infers that Apple might have stolen the idea, but in reality, according to Marc Bernstein (currently in charge of Xerox Parc) Apple shares were exchanged in return for the visit and demonstration…. and the rest, as they say, is legend and history.

Well I was reading one of my ZDNET news feeds today, about how the newspapers or news in “Print” is being slowly transitioned over to tablets and in doing so, may still live on. One of the amazing things, that I had not seen before (that I can recall – some of the people in the video look eerily familiar ) was an effort by the Knight-Ridder News organization to try and visualize what and where the future of newspapers were going.

In 1994, note the year, they put together a video simulating how people could use a piece of technology that they called The Tablet and showed what it might look and work like…. The similarities are beyond stunning!

I had a tablet computer some time around that time. It actually was a combination book/tablet in that the keyboard could be removed and just the tablet part could be used with a pen. I think it was called the Concerto.

It was no where near as thin or light and weighed a ton! It also wasn’t color! Nor was it any where near as capable as what is shown in the concept video (ie this technology didn’t exist back then, the functionality that you see is completely simulated).

There is no doubt in my mind that this was in fact the birth of the Apple iPad…. some 16 years earlier. Watch the video, it’s 13 minutes long (worth every second) and be amazed…..

What I find particularly sad, is that Knight-Ridder was bought by The McLatchy Company in 2006 and was absorbed/disappeared. Somewhere, either before, or after that time. The tablet vision seems to have been lost by them. If you take a look at their website news site: www.mcclatchydc.com you will see something very similar to what was envisioned in 1994, but it is essentially a web page like every other web site. That being said, they were still way ahead of the pack, as the World Wide Web/Internet Browsing didn’t really exist back then – so I give them some points for at least seeing and delivering some future… But as for Tablet Newspapers….. what a pity…

They actually made an iPhone App, but it is pretty boring, it looks like it was designed for the original iPhone. It is just a list of news articles that one can click on to read, how sad that somewhere along the road, that after all that effort and research their vision and dream was lost. What an advantage they might have had…. similar to Xerox actually. Funny that….

Still I have to thank them for coming up with the idea, and I am sure Steve is too…..

Enjoy!

 

 

Well I just did a troll through my Spam Trash for the past 6 months or so, and I must apologize to at least 5 valid comments that I found in it. I am so sorry!

Unfortunately, due to the fact that I am not as active on the site as I would like to be AND that there is a LOT of garbage out there, I have to crank the security on this site way up.

As a result many of your comments, as innocent as they appear to me, don’t get through to my ok-ing them. I’ve pulled what I thought were the most valid of the bunch out of the cesspool and it is possible that there are a few other’s that I have missed. If I did, I again apologize.

This all has to do with the garbage out on the web these days, the spam robots out there are ferocious! When I first set up this site, it was literally buried by them. I would get hundreds of garbage replies a day and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t keep up with manually deleting the stuff out there. My only recourse was to tighten things up as much as possible.

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When it uses iTunes…. unfortunately

Don’t get me wrong, iTunes does a great job of keeping track of music, pictures and any app’s that you may have installed from their store…. but it’s the little things that it ignores.

You know, like configuration files!

Here is the set up…

I have an iPad and an iPhone and my machine runs Ubuntu Linux.

It was just recently upgraded to Ubuntu Natty Narwhal.

To “sync” my iDevices with iTunes i run a Windows XP environment inside of Virtualbox ( an emulator program that lets you run a different computer inside your regular computer. )

Here is a long and very painful story made a lot shorter… and if it sounds confusing, it’s because it is…. I’m still scratching my head over much of it.

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Actually it’s more like amazement and frustration than sadness…. and I’m talking about “The Source”. Or what used to be called, in Canada, Radio Shack.

I did a quick drop in to the store today, to check out a piece of technology that they “used” to be good at. Door/proximity alarm systems…. they used to have oodles of stuff like that. Of course they used to have oodles of things “technical” and geeky…. but not any more and it’s getting worse.

A bit of background, my wife’s office is moving, and they can’t see the front door  ( which is a little odd, but there you have it ) so she asked me to find a mat or some time of system that would ring and alert them as to when someone had entered the premises. To me this is a n0-brainer, there are TONS of things out there that will do that for her. Heck Radio Sha…. errr the Source used to have one in every store and tons of them in the back…. I told her I’d check them out and get back to her.

So I dropped into my local y0u-know-what-by-now, and went to the back where all the cool things used to be…. it’s a LOT and I mean LOT smaller than it used to be… every time I go in there it seems to shrink….

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