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It’s been somewhat of a bummer to have an iPhone 3G with no 3G service since July. I’m happy to say that AT&T has recently installed some 3G towers nearby, giving me nice 3G coverage pretty much everywhere of significance around town.

So I just went through the easy process of jailbreaking my iPhone to tether it to my macbook pro via pdaNet to test the speed of the local network. It works like a charm.

Almost 2mb downspeed and 285 kb/s up speed. Pretty nice indeed! I’m sure sprint users are still waiting for evdo towers to be installed up here and I’m glad I’m no longer one of them. Thanks AT&T.

I might post instructions for setting up tethering on a mac later on. If you can use google, you should be able to find instructions yourself.

I find it somewhat funny that accessing your mac through a dynamic dns service while out and about is now being described as ” ‘Back to Mac’ without .Mac”. I guess not many people knew you could do this sort of thing long before Apple introduced the Back to Mac feature in Leopard.

I’ve been using pretty much the exact set of instructions that lifehacker.com lays out in their article for several years and it works very well. I won’t duplicate their instructions, so click the link above if you also would like to not have to pay apple $99/yr for the few features of .Mac that you may like. I recommend using AFP over FTP to access your files. It’s just a better experience overall and allows you to do things like drag and drop files straight from Expression Media (formerly iView Media Pro) archives while your AFP volume is mounted. Check their directions for port numbers to use for AFP.

I know I know, if you want to be really cool these days you need to be sporting an iPhone, not a dying device created by a dying manufacturer lacking in innovation. But if you’re like me, you might be lucky enough to have Sprint send you a free Palm Treo 755p to keep you as customer–something I can hardly complain about.

I’ve been using Palm devices for years now, this being my fourth device (Palm Pilot, Samsung i330, Treo 650, 755p) and feel quite at home on the interface. So for the time being I’m quite happy with my Treo.

Using DUN (dial-up-networking) to access the internet through your Treo has been around for quite some time for Palm with much thanks to folks like Shadowmite, so I’m not discussing any all to new. What I would like to show though is the easiest and most reliable method for getting your macbook online by “tethering” to your Treo. There are ways to do this using Bluetooth, like I said, you will have mixed results. Connecting through USB really is the best bet.

What you’ll need:

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Concerning Upgrading Your OS

I had a chance to play with Leopard last night while helping my photographer friend get his brand new 24″ iMac setup. He’s new to the mac world and he will soon be happy to be converted.

I really like most of the new features and the new look and feel, but I’m not going to just willy nilly install the new OS while crossing my fingers and hoping it will work with all of my software. One poster on macrumors apparently did just that:

I’m so screwed. I am also having this problem and I have both work and class work that needs to be done this weekend.

All I have to say is “HA” and read up before you install. As for me, it sounds like most people that do a clean install, meaning they wipe their hard drive and do a clean install of OS 10.5 Leopard have reasonably good success using Adobe CS3 apps (minus the pro video apps read here for more).

So lesson learned is: PLEASE, don’t upgrade your operating system without first reading up on how it’s going to potentially affect your workflow in the immediate future and making sure you have a good backup of all of your important data.

If you’re just too excited and can’t wait to install, then I’ll be sure to catch your crys for help in the comment sections of various blogs in the near future. Someone has to be the guinea pig right?

Tinkertool

One of the first things I install on any mac I use is Tinkertool. It’s a freeware app that allows the user to customize several features in osx without screwing up osx like other apps tend to do. All of the check-box options that Tinkertool enables can be simply disabled by unchecking the box. Best of all, it’s free.

If you use a lot of proprietary Apple software (iWork apps, iMovie, etc . . . doesn’t work with pro apps), Apple tends to handle images by linking the original file inside of any file you save instead of embedding them in the file (like say microsloth word). This is great news if you have accidently misplaced any images or video files or if someone else made the file and you want something used in the file for a differnt purpose. Control+Click on the file you created. You will see a list like this.

Select “show package contents” and a window containing all of the media you have associated with that particular file will appear. Snag whatever you need, but make sure you copy and then paste any media you need out of this folder or you will break the link to the original file. Also, when you save a file in say Keynote, make sure the check boxes that apply to copying theme images and audio and video in to the file are checked.

You can thank Mark G. for telling me I should start giving mac nerd tips on my blog. I thought it was a great idea and hopefully you will find some of them helpful. If not . . . well, go use a PC.