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

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!

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.

After quite a few “issues” with the upgrade to Natty ( many things no longer worked as they should have – and this is yet another rant/reason as to why Linux isn’t ready for “regular users”! ) I finally got, or so I thought, everything working together. Or so I thought.

My iPad was due for a backup after putting a lot of new apps and information on it and so I flashed up my iTunes within Windows within Virtualbox within Ubuntu and after a very Very long time. A backup – I use that word lightly now…. was created. Note that the iPad connects to the computer via a USB port, this is important for later….

After which I was notified that a minor update for my iPad was available. So I said “sure”…. such a short word to lead to such a long and painful process….

iTunes does an odd thing when it does an update, it appears to first wipe out what is on the iPad ( the Operating System )before installing the update ( instead of overwriting )…. at least that is what it looks like from my end. Anyways all went well until the time came to install the new and improved “minor” fix.

Virtualbox, although it saw that the iPad was connected, refused to mount it ( make it available ) so that it could be actually used by iTunes…. matter of fact it refused to mount anything via USB at all except for my USB connected printers!

This took hours to track down and fix. From what I was able to discern, Ubuntu in it’s “non-commerical”  wisdom decided to replace the usual Virtualbox with Virtualbox-OSE. I’m still not sure what the difference is, nor do I care, but I stumbled across several other articles about how the OSE version won’t let you use USB connections…..  umm… but….. sigh…

I finally gave up and purged everything Virtualbox from the system ( sudo apt-get remove –purge virtualb* ) after which I went directly to Oracle’s ( used to be Sun for those in the know ) Virtualbox website and downloaded their latest non-OSE version of Virtualbox.

It too complained about not being able to support USB devices unless I added myself to the virtualbox group ( which I had previously done, but it may have been deleted by either the upgrade or the purge… sorry not sure about that one ) AND that I install something called an Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack. Which is a completely new thing for me…. but I did and it worked!

Unfortunately…..

Remember that bit I mentioned about wiping the software before installing the minor upgrade? Well, once I got iTunes back up and running and looking at the iPad it said… and I paraphrase with sarcasm added …. “So sorry, but your iPad has to have it’s original software reinstalled in order to work with iTunes….. sigh.

So I did that, and then it automatically went into a Sync mode  and started reinstalling everything that was missing from my last backup and after several hours….. I had my iPad back….

Well….. sort of. As it would seem that all of the configuration files – like those for connecting to my WiFi. My email logins, all my news feeds that fed all my different programs etc etc etc. Were all MISSING! I have to redo all of that, and remember all my news sites from memory…..

Oh and before I forget, it took ALL of my apps and placed them one by one on the iPad…. All the folders that I had them organized in were gone as well….. It took me three hours just to recreate and shrink down stuff back into folders! All my news feeds….. well I may never get all of them back!

So, I don’t know why I was able to connect with my USB cables “for a while” using something that supposedly wouldn’t let me connect at all. And why Apple in it’s wisdom does updates the way it does boggles my mind.

But I can guaranty that there are a LOT of people out there who will be as “ticked” and as shocked as I am when they one day discover that the SYNC that iTunes does only Syncs what Apple thinks is important – the apps and doesn’t do a thing to protect your system from loss of configuration data! They really gotta fix that!

I’ve also done a fair bit of searching trying to find an app or any other utility that will let one backup EVERYTHING on the iPad/iPhone/etc. And so far, I haven’t found one that I would dare to try – kinda sad isn’t it

I’ll let you know if ever I do, and if you find or are using something that works for you – let me know – PLEASE!

As it should happen, I’m in a position right now to spend some money on a new toy.

To be specific, I’ve been torn between a new laptop, a kayak, and an iPad. Of the three my heart was leaning towards the iPad, but it had a major problem (for me) it came with no hard-drive and expandable storage. Now for most people this shouldn’t be an issue. The iPad is really a consumption device more than a  “work tool”, but I was feeling claustrophobic thinking about how limited my options might be in future.

A laptop can always be expanded easily just by popping on a USB drive, a Kayak…. well it’s got every river, lake, stream, sea, ocean in the world if I want it. It was just the iPad…. could I “live” with a measly 16 or 32 GB knowing that there would be no way to expand it easily for storage purposes? It has no SD slot, nor no easy USB ports…

I decided to see what was out there that would work for what I wanted ( unlimited storage space. ) I first decided to look at Cloud storage services. This is essentially other companies who offer storage space on the Internet that can be accessed by one or more machines. The data is secured by passwords and or encryption and backed up by the company itself. One of these I’ve talked about previously dropbox.

My problem was that while dropbox is great for temporarily sharing data I found it beyond cumbersome when it came to easy access and in most cases to use the data you had to transfer it all over to the machine you were working on before you could use it. This can be a real drag to a limited machine ( in my opinion).

What I wanted was something that looked and acted like a disk drive to the computer and data could be accessed when wanted, but not necessarily stored permanently within the computer itself… and I found such a beast. It’s called ZumoDrive and it works really well with Windows, Mac’s, iPhones, iPads AND Ubuntu! It sounded like a match in heaven…. Watch the video to find out more…

After installing it on 2 windows machines and 2 Ubuntu machines I am able to access any data within the ZumoDrive on any machine and it really does act and work like a normal disk drive! Problem solved!

So now I’ve decided an iPad2…. unfortunately I have to wait until the end of the month to order one (I’m not in the US. ) I just have to try and not buy any other toys until then…. By the way if you like what you see you can sign up for up to 2GB of free storage to check it out, and if you use this link here, and I’ll give you a little a bit more -> Click Here

Well that’s not quite the end of it…. by complete serendipity, I was given another solution by a friend of mine, which will work quite well for sharing media ( like songs, pictures, movies, etc). It’s called AirStash. This is another cool device that goes on my “want” list… The neat thing about this device is that it actually acts like a networked drive using your WiFi connection and SD Cards but you aren’t dependent on the Internet. Some examples on the website show using it in the car while traveling. This video will give you more info on it – the only thing that doesn’t seem clear is whether it can be accessed by other operating systems….. still it’s on my want list for my iPad ….

No deals available that I could find but I’ll let you know if I find one!

So check both of these solutions out! I think you’ll be impressed

I recommended that she just forward the email to her current email address, but her preference was to keep it completely separate from what she was currently doing. So that meant that she needed an on-line email notifier on her desktop. Something that would tip her off when she had new mail, but otherwise be out of the way.

As I mentioned, I quickly discovered that normal Gmail Notifier programs didn’t work with the “Apps” Gmail ( why they made them different is beyond me – but there you have it. ) It took a fair bit of work ( installing, testing, removing, etc., ) but I finally found just the solution. It’s called B2 Gmail Notifier, from b2labs. The price is also “just right” as in Free. There is one little issue though, the website will ask for an email address before you can download. That being said “any” email address will do, and it isn’t tied to any other requirement, so if you feel uncomfortable giving your own email address, make one up! ( Perhaps after they read this it will change, but as of this writing you can get away with a phony one. )

Don’t let the version number throw you. It’s currently listed as an Alpha Release ( really early in it’s testing/evaluation ) which means user beware in most cases, but it’s been around a fair time with hardly any negative comments and lots of praises. I suspect they are using it more to make a buyer beware ( downloader beware? ) statement than anything else. If you are at all unsure back up your data first.  Anyways, I downloaded Version 0.24 Alpha.

Now if you notice you will also have to have installed Adobe Air and  if you aren’t sure make sure you download and install Adobe Air first. Why the world needs yet another Web Based programming language is beyond me but… According to Adobe …

The Adobe® AIR® 2 runtime enables developers to use HTML, JavaScript, Adobe Flash® software, and ActionScript® to build web applications that run as standalone client applications without the constraints of a browser. Adobe AIR and the Adobe Flash Platform unleash the creativity of designers and developers by providing a consistent and flexible development environment for the delivery of applications across devices and platforms.

If you haven’t downloaded and install Adobe Air, make sure you follow the instructions and do that first ( and yes I’m sure that there will be other programs that this will be useful for in the future. ) As you will see on the B2 Gmail Notifier page there are extra animations that you can download, but you get three to start with so check those out first ( my favorite is the monster that peaks out when you get new mail – it’s one of the defaults . )

Now then there is a trick to setting up the account to make it work – it isn’t intuitive, and it’s the one thing that I don’t like about the program ( NO DOCUMENTATION! ) Here is how you set it up to work.

1. In the email URL enter your apps email address: The would be http://mail.google.ca/a/example.com Where the “example.com” is replaced by the web address used to set up your gmail app account.
2. In the user name enter the entire email address and not just the user name ( which is all you would usually enter ) that you use to log in. So again, the user name would be User.Name@example.com instead of the User.Name that you would use when you log into the website “User.Name”  being replaced by the appropriate name that you would have and again “example.com” being replaced by the web address used to set up the gmail app account.
3. Thankfully the Password is just the same as the website password ( thankfully no surprised there! )

When you run the program I recommend clicking on the box to automatically load up the program every time you reboot your Windows machine – that way you won’t have to “remember” to do it all the time. Select the animation you want to use when you get new mail ( you can also turn off animations and sounds if you want – but I’ve found that it is a great visual and aural reminder if you leave it on – and it’s not at all obnoxious. ) You can even customize the sounds and create your own animations if you are up for it.

There will be a small Google email icon ( usually blue ) which you will see in your systems tray at the bottom, once the program has been run. It will turn red if there is new mail ( and putting your cursor over top of it will tell you how many new emails are awaiting your attention. ) If you use  the animation and sound effects, then the sound will trigger the first time new mail occurs and the animation will trigger every half hour or so until you have checked your mail. The animation can be closed without affect the reminders and it will pop up again later, which I found to be a bonus.

All and all a great little program that does the job better than most other packages that I’ve found, and it does it well. I highly recommend it  and hopefully my hints above will help those who are having problems getting it to work properly the way I didi. Once it is configured properly, it works like a charm.

I highly recommend giving it a try!

I’ve seen this slowly in development/testing for a while, I just didn’t know it was out already…  The problem seems to be that the gang at thebeamz.com put it into their new product listing but forgot to put it into their store listing! Hopefully they will correct that shortly. Until then you can always go here -> thebeamz.com/shop/category/new/.

I’m still not sure what the difference is between the 4 and 6 laser beam models, but once I find out I’ll let you know here!

Suffice to say I’m still enjoying my Beamz and having lots of fun playing with it ( possibly to the detriment of my writing “other” articles – )

As there seems to be a lot of interest, and I’m getting a lot of hits, because of the Beamz, I’ve now made a category called My Beamz. Where you can find any and all articles that I’ve written about this great little device.

Don’t forget, if you are planning to purchase a Beamz, use the code I managed to get for it. It will give you free shipping AND another 10 free songs when you register your Beamz and include that code!

Till Next Time!