The Mac Experience in Business & Home: Help, Tips, Discussion & Radio Show Notes

Eddie asked “is there a way to sync the birthdays in my iPhone contacts with the calendar?”

You have to go to iCal prefs and select show birthday calendars and then resync the iPhone. Then in iTunes, you’ll have the Birthdays calendar available to check off. Resync and you’re in business. Screen shots included below.

1. Check off show birthdays calendar under ical>preferences.

2. Sync Your iPhone.

3. You will now have a Birthdays calendar to choose in iTunes under info.

4. Now just sync the phone again and you are all set.

David Singer, a friend from high school, has released his new solo album and it rocks.

East of the Fault Line

The first song, Amaranthine, has these lyrics available from iTunes free:

In part, in time, you pick up some habits
from your high school friends.
You sit in the attic planning crimes,
it’s setup this way by design…

Assuming he means bad habits here.

Joan, thanks for calling in. Here are the links we discussed on the air tonight:

Syncing photos to your iPod from your Windows PC

How to restore an iPod to its factory settings

Updating your iPod’s software

Also, the iPod assistant is worth a shot if none of these help out:

http://www.apple.com/support/ipod/five_rs/

Let us know how it’s going!

You can now take a 20 minute guided tour of the iPhone here on Apple’s website. This device is mind-bogglingly cool. Watching this makes me want one more than ever.

iPhone arrives on June 29. iPhone features an amazing mobile phone, is the best iPod ever created, and puts the Internet in your pocket with desktop–class email, web browsing, searching, and maps. And iPhone makes it all easy to use with its revolutionary multi-touch user interface. iPhone syncs with your PC or Mac just like an iPod, so organizing your content now will help you start calling, texting, emailing, surfing, listening, and watching even faster when you get your iPhone. Here are a few suggestions to help you get ready:

There are so many different ways to set something like this up. This final installation of this blog series if going to mainly focus on what I’ve experienced so far, and what I plan on doing with my network.

So, my network at this time includes:
Airport Extreme
Airport Express
Cable Modem
Epson R200
LaCie 250GB External
Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro
Core Duo Macbook
tv or Mac Mini eventual purchase

As you may have noticed by now, I’m pretty serious about this project. I have been ripping DVDs every day since the tv was initially announced back in September under the code name “iTV”.

I had no idea where I would end up when I started, but now that I am finished with Parts One and Two, I know what I need from here. I will share with you know some things to consider.

At this point, you are either finished with, or well on your way to having all of your media ripped into Quicktime format, and assembled into a massive iTunes Library. You will start to get an idea of how large your Library will be, and should be planning accordingly regarding a means for storage (more on this in part 3).

Right now, we are going to focus on organization - getting all your music and video in the same library, and properly tagged.

Since you have no doubt heard by now that the tv has been delayed, I thought this would be an excellent time to share some tips that will make your impending digital home theatre experience all the more sweet. As an added challenge, I will try to subtitle each entry with a Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers song. So, here we go!

In this installation, I want to tackle content. Apple offers movies on the iTunes Store now, but who wants to pay for iTunes-compatible versions of movies they already own? Who wants to wait for all the legal battles to be fought so that they can finally download their favorite films on iTunes? Not this Mac addict.

Have you ever longed for finding similar tunes based on your favorite artists & songs in your iTunes library? It’s only a click away as Pandora’s free web-based music player allows you to do just that!

Created by the Music Genome Project , Pandora offers continuous musical suggestions based on a vast library of song titles that are rated as a as a match for each station (artist or song title) you input into the player. Pandora also allows you to rate & skip songs, which assists in guiding a playlist fitted to your particular tastes while also allowing you to save stations so you can browse different styles of music without leaving the player. If you hear a song you’d like to own, direct links are available to Apple’s iTunes store, as well as Amazon.