• Install Dropbox on as many computers as you need
• Store your application data and preferences in the Dropbox rather than their original locations
• Make symbolic links to the Dropbox so that the system finds the files as usual
• Watch in wonder as your work, settings and preferences update themselves across all your computers.

I’ve found it especially useful to do this with the /Library/WebServer/Documents folder in Mac OS X. I tend to work on web projects in there, so that I can preview them as I go simply by pointing my browser to http://localhost/ . (By putting them in the webserver folder, you gain the benefit of a PHP processor without having to upload the files anywhere.)

In more detail, then:

1. Firstly, get a Dropbox account. It’s free for up to 2GB, plus you’ll get a bit of extra free space (as will I) if you use this referral link. Download the software and install it on all your Macs.
2. Download and install SymbolicLinker. This step isn’t strictly necessary, as it’s easy enough to make symbolic links from within Terminal, but I find it invaluable to have this as a service from within the Finder contextual menu.
3. Now the fun begins. Make a folder called Documents, somewhere within your Dropbox. (To avoid confusion you might want to put it inside some other folder first; doesn’t matter.) Move your entire set of web files into there, complete with folders.
4. In a Finder window, right-click / control-click on the new Documents folder, and choose Make Symbolic Link. (If you haven’t downloaded SymbolicLinker, this option won’t be there, and you’ll need to do this in the Terminal instead).
5. Open a new Finder window, navigate to /Library/Webserver . Make sure there’s nothing in there that you want to keep (your web files should be safely in the Dropbox by now, after all) and delete the /Library/Webserver/Documents folder.
6. Go back to your Dropbox. Drag the file named Documents symlink over into /Library/Webserver, and rename it to just Documents. You should now find that going to http://localhost/ will point you to the files stored in your Dropbox.
7. Go to your other Mac(s) and repeat steps 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6 . Done!

You now are in the extremely useful position whereby any web work you do at home on the iMac, say, will be synced over to the Macbook in the blink of an eye, ready to demonstrate to anybody. Just remember to connect the Macbook to the internet for a moment before you take it out of range, to give Dropbox the chance to update itself.

I recently discovered I’d finally come to the end of my iPhone 3G contract because the Carphone Warehouse rang me up to offer me a new tariff. I resisted upgrading as I’m waiting for the next iPhone to come out, so they put me on the £15-per-month O2 Simplicity tariff with a £7.50-per-month internet bolt-on, and told me my iPhone would continue functioning exactly as before. They were either lying or uninformed: within 20 seconds of the phone call ending, my tariff switched over and I lost the ability to use visual voicemail or MMS. The data bolt-on wasn’t there either.

Fortunately, it’s all now fixed, and for even less money per month. Here’s what you need to do:

• Contact O2 by dialling 2302 from your iPhone. It needs to be O2, not a reseller, as only O2 staff have access to the tariff you need.
• Tell them you’ve reached the end of your contract and you’d like to move onto the iPhone Simplicity tariff. This is not the same as the normal Simplicity tariff, and it’s not advertised on their website. It’s only £20 per month, is on a one-month rolling contract (perfect if you’re holding on for the next update) and allows your iPhone to keep all of its features. You’ll know when it’s changed over – again, mine was instant – because visual voicemail will suddenly be unavailable.
• Set up your (non-visual) voicemail, and think nostalgically about what it used to be like when voicemail was always like this. Get someone to ring you and leave a message. Then connect to your voicemail and listen to the message as usual. This will trigger the system to set up your visual voicemail, and you’ll magically have it again within a few minutes.
• Next, send a text message to 1010, containing just the letters MMS. You’ll get a text message back telling you they’re setting up MMS for you. A few minutes later, a shiny bright O2-themed picture message will arrive telling you it’s all set up.

There you go – same functionality as before, but at a substantially lower price and with no contract tie-in. And it feels good.

One small other note – when I did this, I also lost the ability to receive push notifications while I was outside of the house, but it came back again within a day or so. It may have just been coincidence – after all, there was a Boxcar outage that day, and perhaps nobody said anything to me on Facebook – but you never know.

A while ago, I was doing some work for an organisation who were in the middle of choosing a new logo. They’d narrowed it down to two different options that had been mocked up by an unnamed designer (thankfully, I don’t know who it was). Knowing that I’d be producing some publicity for them, I put together quite a few designs based on the colours and elements within both logos. In the end, one was chosen and the other discarded.

Only, the following week, I saw the discarded option on the packaging for some Nintendo Wii accessories. A couple of weeks after that, in a stationery shop (as opposed to the moving kind) I saw a clipboard whose entire design consisted of just this image. And it keeps coming back to haunt me; recently I saw the same image in the background of a website for a printing company.

Please don’t take this as a criticism of any of these services/products; I presume the image involved is from a stock library, and that they’re using it entirely legitimately. What I object to, though, is a designer claiming to have produced this as a bespoke logo, for an organisation who would have no way to tell that this wasn’t the case.

I was prompted to write about this because I recently experienced almost exactly the same thing, again. Once more I was working on some material for an organisation who’d already had a logo designed by somebody else. I tracked down the font that they’d used – and, lo and behold, it turns out that the graphical element of this logo was nothing more than an abstract character from the font itself. Furthermore, an entire poster had been designed using a graphical pattern that just consisted of these characters.

Again, perhaps this was entirely legitimate; the font, after all, is available on a Creative Commons license. But again, my problem is with a “designer” (and yes, those were quotation marks, darn it) who implicitly claims to have produced these things, as a bespoke idea, for a client who has no way of knowing otherwise. More than anything, it’s an honour thing.

I’m experiencing something similar to that other great realisation we all go through: the fact that other people tell lies on their job applications, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I’ve never lied, or even particularly exaggerated, anything on a job application or a CV, and I’ve gradually found peace with the grudging acceptance that this puts me at a disadvantage compared with those who do. I guess this is similar.

But I don’t have to like it.

I was reminded of this when, the other day, I spent about 20 minutes attempting to set my Casio digital watch. It’s a great watch and I love it, but attempting to work the damned thing pushes me to the brink of insanity. I can design magazines, make websites and wire up a home theatre, but – even with the instructions in front of me – I have met my match in the good folks at Casio. It occurred to me (perhaps because I’d just been reading The Apple Blog) that so-called “normal” people, who’ve never willingly touched a computer, have been managing to operate these confounded wrist-mounted contraptions for decades now. So what’s going on?

I think most commentators are guilty of framing the level of “simplicity” of a device such as the iPad as though it says something about the skills or intelligence of those who are inclined to use it. To my mind, the Casio effect gives the lie to that. People in general – yes, even the proverbial “grandma” – are not on the whole too stupid to interact with technology. It’s a matter of inclination. They’re not unable to do it; there’s just little incentive to force themselves into a mindset in which to learn what’s going on.

A watch is utterly useless unless you’ve forced yourself to set it to the right time. And telling the right time is useful. That’s an incentive. But where’s the incentive, to someone who’s managed so far without it, to learn to use a computer operating system? And having learned, where’s the incentive to actually do so?

That’s the justification for the iPad. It’s for those contexts where you don’t want, for whatever reason, to use a computer. That’s why I can completely imagine using one myself – to show holiday photos to my parents, to find pictures of lemurs on Google Images, to read newspapers, and to find out the answer to the perennial question: “Who’s that bloke, and what have I seen him in before?” I don’t want to boot up a computer when I’m lounging around in the evening. I don’t want my wife to notice that I seem to be starting up the computer yet again. I don’t want to be notified about software updates or asked to restart my machine. During the day at the desk, yes – but not during the evening on the sofa.

Sadly, I have to admit that, for financial reasons, I probably won’t be acquiring one myself. But I can entirely see why somebody would – and it’s nothing to do with their age or technical skill.

I do most of my web styling in CSSEdit, and most of my browsing in Safari. These are both about as standards-compliant as you’ll find, as they both use WebKit to display their loveliness, so I don’t normally think much about cross-browser compatibility until I’ve finished most of the work and come back to do the tweaking, testing and fixing. So, I’d recently finished working on a site and went over to test it in IE7, and a lot of it looked inexplicably stupid. Titles overlapped each other, indents looked frankly random, and so on.

The solution? Put this at the beginning of the CSS file:

* {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}

Simple huh? Like I said, very well-known, but easily forgotten.

Explanation: Each browser makes default assumptions about how to display various elements. So, in the absence of any other instructions, an h1 will be bold, a certain size, have a certain margin and padding, and so on.  When making a stylesheet you override these assumptions with your own instructions. But here’s the thing: different browsers can make different assumptions from each other. So unless you’ve explicitly stated the value of, for example, the margin underneath a heading, each browser will display it according to its own rules and you can’t assume it will look the same.

By putting that little snippet at the beginning of your stylesheet, you’re defining a rule that applies to everything. In other words, you’re overriding every assumption about (in this example) margins and padding, for every element. It will immediately change the look of your page, of course – because margins that were there by default suddenly won’t be any more. But from there it’s an easy matter to go through and add them back again. And hey presto: in my case, the layout was fixed for IE in about three minutes.

I tried flicking the switch a few times, waiting a few seconds between each. I’d rebooted the computer. I’d looked through the Jolicloud settings/admin area to see if there was anything that might be controlling it, or might give me a clue as to what the problem was. Finally, I was at the stage of examining the underneath of the computer, seeing where the screws were and how big they were, reasoning that I could probably get a replacement wi-fi module second-hand from eBay, and planning to dismantle the thing tomorrow to remove the offending item and determine its model number.

My wife then asked whether I’d turned the computer off and on again.

I hadn’t.

It worked.

I really must learn to be less technical sometimes.

In the spirit of “please turn this stuff into some other stuff,” I was sent a very large PDF document so that I could use some of the images in it in a web design I was working on. It’s not too tricky to extract the graphics from a PDF — I found a tip here, for example — but then I ran into a problem. Each picture I extracted had its colour and contrast almost irrevocably strangified. I tried a bit of fiddling around in Aperture but it was clearly going to be a long and laborious process.

It seemed clear enough that the problem related to colour profiles, which are something I try to avoid learning about whenever possible. (To be honest, my calibrated iMac screen, InDesign’s PDF export, and every litho printing shop I’ve used work so well together that colour accuracy has never been a problem.) All these pictures had been converted for CMYK printing, rather than the RGB I needed.

But the solution turned out to be pretty straightforward if you have Acrobat Professional and Photoshop:

• First of all, open the PDF in Acrobat Pro.
• Choose Advanced – Print Production – Convert Colors.
• In the Document Colors window that appears, look for anything that mentions CMYK; if it’s there, that’s your problem.
• Select it, choose Convert from the Action drop-down, and choose an RGB profile in the Destination Space box. (I used Adobe RGB 1998).
• Click OK and let it do its thing, then save the PDF. It won’t look any different at this stage, because Acrobat Professional had been converting the colours to display them on your screen anyway.
• Now open the PDF in Photoshop.
• When the Import PDF box appears, choose images (rather than pages).
• Select any or all of the pictures you want, and the pictures are imported, correctly displayed, and ready for you to enact your nefarious schemes upon them.

Immediately after installing Snow Leopard, but before recovering any of my data or settings, the Drobo started flashing to tell me there was something wrong with my newly-purchased Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB disk. It was all working fine as far as I could see, but Drobo informed me that trouble was a-brewin’. I took it on faith (something I’m not normally inclined to do, but then this kind of warning is sort of the whole point of a Drobo.)

So, I went to the Western Digital website, typed in my disk serial number, and ordered a replacement. I had 30 characters to type in the problem (yes, 30 characters – I ended up settling for “My Drobo says it’s bad”) and lo and behold, a replacement was shipped right to me, without my having to send the faulty one first or even provide any evidence that anything was wrong with it.

New disk arrived, I stuck it in, and used the packaging to return the faulty one. I never had a moment’s down time, never lost a thing, and never even bothered wondering what exactly was wrong with my original disk.

Downsides include the fact that the WD drive broke down in the first place, and the fact that I had to pay the postage to send it to a returns address near Heathrow Airport. But I’d forgive both of those a thousand times over, because the whole thing was sorted out so easily. And I never lost a thing.

I don’t know what WD customer service is like in the rest of the world, but if you’re in the UK I would seriously recommend the Drobo + WD combination.