How to share a link to your iTunes Ping profile with others

iTunes 10 was both announced and launched yesterday (1st Sept 2010) and one of the new features Steve Jobs showed us was Ping.

Ping is the new social networking side of iTunes that lets you follow artists and friends to see what they are listening to, tracks they are buying, concerts coming up etc. Sounds great but how do you get your friends to find and follow you? This bit should be simple but in a very un-Apple-esque way it isn’t.

Fortunately you can just copy a link to your profile and send that to friends via email/twitter/facebook/etc.

First you need to launch iTunes and then click on the Ping icon underneath store:

How to enter Ping in iTunes 10

You should now see your own personal profile page. All you need to do here is right click (ctrl-click) on your name at the top and then select “Copy Link” from the drop-down list. This copies a link to your profile onto your clipboard that you can paste into an email, tweet, etc

The link will look similar to:

http://c.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZConnections.woa/wa/viewProfile?userId=92779645 [This is my profile link btw]

and will open your web browser and should then automatically open your iTunes and navigate to your Ping profile page for others to easy hit the follow button.

Change iPhone home screen wallpaper to blank/black in iOS4


Having just updated my iPhone 3GS to iOS4, one of the new features is the ability to set a custom home screen wallpaper, problem is the upgrade defaults to setting the home screen wallpaper to the same as your lock screen wallpaper.

I might be alone on this one, but I really don’t want anything distracting behind all my iPhone app icons and Apple haven’t given you a way to revert back to a black wallpaper. You could simply cover your camera lens and take a dark photo and set that or instead, just click and hold on the image below to save it to your camera roll and set that as your homescreen wallpaper, problem solved.

iPhone homescreen plain wallpaper (blank black)


iPad WiFi vs iPad 3G

The iPad provides yet more proof that Apple can do no wrong, as following on from the iPod and the iPhone it has managed to create a sleek, sexy gadget that has tugged on the heart and purse strings of millions around the world. The iPad is available in a number of slightly different versions, with the most basic offering Wi-Fi connectivity and 16GB of onboard storage space. You can buy versions with higher capacity storage, but the most significant difference between the base model and the high end editions is the inclusion of 3G connectivity. Read more…

Active Desktop Recovery error desktop.htt object doesn’t support this action


I had a recent issue with one of my work servers, a DELL NAS PowerVault 745N running Windows Server 2003 Appliance Edition. It wasn’t a serious issue, just the wallpaper background of the windows desktop was showing the following error:

Active Desktop Recovery error desktop.htt object doesn’t support this action

There was an option to click to restore your active desktop, but this was unable to restore the active desktop but eventually I found a solution that involved tweaking the registry a little:

1.Go to Run, type regedit and hit enter
2.Go here HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Desktop\SafeMode\Components
3.Select the value DeskHtmlVersion
4.Select the Decimal radial button
5.Change the value of 272 to 0
6.Most of the time it might take a few seconds for your background to appear, if not you might need to restart your computer.

HTTP 403 error on site hosted on OS X Snow Leopard

I suddenly started getting http 403 errors on my self hosted [with native apache installation] site that worked perfectly until Feb 5th 2010. The errors showing up in the access log looked like:

[Fri Feb 19 02:05:25 2010] [crit] [client 127.0.0.1] (13)Permission denied: /Users/username/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable, referer: http://127.0.0.1/

I’m not sure what changed, perhaps an OS X update from Apple, but after restoring all /private/etc/apache2/* files and the my /Users/username/Sites/ folder via TimeMachine to a date when things were working it still wouldn’t play ball.

Eventually I came across the soultion, it seems the chmod levels of the default folders had changed so doing the following in Terminal:

chmod 701 ~
chmod 705 ~/Sites

Solved everything…phew

iPhone 3.0 and BMW iDrive, it’s all still working


bmw_iphone3.0

As many of you may know, historically Apple updates have had a tendency to break BMW iDrive communicating with iPhones to sync contacts and make/receive calls.

Apple’s latest update, iPhone 3.0, is launched today (17th June 2009) and I thought I’d let you all know that I’ve had iPhone 3.0 up and running on my iPhone 3G a little early. I’m happy to report that over the last 7 days the iPhone has been working flawlessly with my BMW iDrive, all contacts have been syncing and calls received and made without any issues.

So rest assured you can update your iPhone software to iPhone 3.0 and continue to drive safely with your iPhone fully connected to your iDrive.

iPhone30BMW