There is a solution for some users if they are willing to take a few risks and modify the stock Apple OS. You can theoretically jailbreak your iPhone (if not already) and wirelessly tether the iPhone’s 3G connection so you can use surf on the iPad through the phone.

MiWi is an app (downloaded through Cydia for a one-time $20 fee, they also offer a free 3-day trial) that can setup your iPhone as a network access point (it will create a new “wireless device” that is available when you are using an iPad, laptop, etc.). Here’s a Wired article detailing the functionality of this “hack” (ironically the first thing that popped up on Google when I was trying to get to the MiWi home site). Now when you surf on your iPad, it routes the data transfer signal through your iPhone. Speed does not appear to be significantly degraded– you can easily still get up to 1 M/s download, so even streaming music or videos shouldn’t be a problem provided you have a strong connection to a tower (and you’re not in a location where 50,000 people might be trying to access that tower!)

If you go this route you just have to be careful about data transfer. MiWi keeps track of it for you, and you have a couple of options for visualizing it. Data transfer is key because new iPhone customers are likely on a tiered data pay structure– they have monthly transfer caps of either 200 MB ($15) or 2 GB ($25). I (and I assume many early iPhone adopters) am grandfathered in with an “unlimited” AT&T plan (which will eventually turn out to be like Comcast’s version of “unlimited” but for now you can’t beat it)– these individuals should be salivating at this post by now. Regardless of plan, you can obviously run up a few hundred megabytes very, very quickly browsing, so you might want to up your iPhone data transfer cap if you are at the bottom end their plans. However, this $10 bump would still be much cheaper than buying a whole new data plan for the iPad.

While I was enamored with 1Password (and still am) the biggest hurdle to it’s adoption is that I own a PC and a Mac (remember?). Syncing the password database between computers is therefore a necessity, and syncing across operating systems (XP/7 to OS X and vice versa) even moreso. This was certainly doable with KeePass and KeePassX, although KeePassX didn’t support a global auto-type hotkey. A password storage system is rendered virtually useless if every single time I have to log into a different web page I have to bring up the KeePassX window; copy my information to the clipboard, bring the focus back to FireFox, and type it in. Well, good news! An updated (albeit currently unsupported) version of KeePass (based on v0.4.1) adds auto-type functionality!

So now that we have auto-type everywhere, how to sync so we can use our KeePass databases everywhere we go? Well it’s very easy.

1.) If you aren’t using Dropbox yet, start. Go to Dropbox (click this link if you plan on following this tutorial, it’s the balloflightning’s referral!), set up and account, download the software, and set it up so both (or however many you have) machines are synced. Create a folder somewhere in your Dropbox scheme (by default under Documents -> My Dropbox) called “KeePass.”
2.) Download and install KeePassX (Mac) here. Download and install KeePass Classic (Windows) here. Note: We need to download the “classic” version because KeePassX still uses the old .kdb format instead of the new .kdbx. While we can set triggers in the new Windows version to automatically pop out a .kdb version AND a .kdbx every time we edit a password on that computer, we can’t edit .kdb’s on the Mac and automatically import them into KeePass on the Windows box. And that makes syncing unfun.
3.) On the Windows box (you can do it the other direction, too, but I found the Windows KeePass interface to be a bit more intuitive) open KeePass and create a new database. Set a “master password” and repeat. Don’t let this password suck too much; after all, you’ll be MINIMIZING the number of passwords you have to remember– at the very least you can do a good job coming up with a solid password that gives access to– well– everything else. Use a key file, too, if you’d like, but I find it unnecessary; it’s always something you can add later.
4.) Click “save as” and save the .kdb file to the directory you previously created within your dropbox scheme. Temporarily close KeePass on Windows and open KeePassX on the Mac. Browse to the newly created (and synced) database file and click open. Enter password. Try creating a few keys. Save. Close.
5.) Re-open the Windows version. Now you should only be prompted for the password (no browsing needed) and you should see your KeePass passwords in Windows. Congrats; you’ve done the heavy lifting!

A few notes; this will work between a PC/Linux or Linux/Mac as well. The same general steps apply although you will need the KeePass repo for your Linux flavor or you can compile from source. If you are a Linux user, I figure you probably don’t really need directions on how to do that. Second, KeePass (and therefore KeePassX) don’t automatically update the database while the program is running. Therefore, when you are adding keys be careful not to add different keys on different computers while both are still open. Dropbox handles conflicts well but you will lose some keys depending on what was open and what was being edited at the time. As a rule of thumb, when I first started migrating to KeePass I never had it running on more than one computer at a time. Once you have a stable database, it’s fine to have multiple instances going at once (it will typically ask to open in “read-only” anyways).

You can turn auto-type on and off by doing the following:
Windows: Tools -> Options -> Advanced tab -> Auto-Type button (lower right).
Mac: KeePassX -> Preferences -> Advanced

Some final notes to get auto-type running flawlessly on your computer. As a general practice, I had two lines to the comments of every key.

Auto-Type-Window: *balloflightning.com*

This aids KeePass/X in finding the window you want to auto-type in. I’ve found great success with the Firefox add-on “Hostname” which puts the domain name of the current web-site in the title bar. It may add a bit of clutter to your windows, but it provides you a surefire way to make sure KeePass/X is only auto-typing in the proper Firefox window/tab. The ‘*’ are wildcards, signifying KeePass/X will find whatever window has XXXXX balloflightning.com XXXXX in it. Obviously, you change the hostname between the ‘*’ to whatever key you are storing (i.e., paypal.com, ebay.com, etc.)

Auto-Type: {USERNAME}{TAB}{PASSWORD}{ENTER}

This is the custom sequence for the target window. {USERNAME} and {PASSWORD} are the stored username and password, {TAB} is… well… tab and {ENTER} is also self-explanatory. In some cases you may be forced to modify this (for example, I have to add a {TAB} after {USERNAME} every once in a while because the websites have a “click here to remember me” form.

Some people will find that in OS X, tabbing will result in certain portions of forms (checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdowns, etc.) being skipped. This creates a bit of a problem here because the sequences will then not match between Windows and Mac. Solution?

1.) Open System Preferences
2.) Go to Keyboard & Mouse
3.) Select “All controls” for full keyboard access

For a Firefox-only solution, you can also add / change the accessibility.tabfocus Firefox option via about:config to one of the following: 3 to be able to tab to form controls or 7 to be able to tab to everything

I had tried to sync my GMail account once-upon-a-time, but decided it wasn’t worth the potential hassle. What hassle, I don’t remember– but in any event, I remember it was extremely easy to get it up and running using POP. However, this time around I decided IMAP was the way to go. Over the last few years I have slowly devolved into someone who uses GMail as my big e-mail cloud in the sky– that is, I want to be able to access an identical account (same inbox, sent, drafts, etc.) from anywhere (Macbook, PC, office, iPhone). IMAP should give me that ability.

Well, once I set up Mail to play nice with my Google account I noticed signficant slowdowns. I mean really, really slow. Like sending an e-mail that said “hello world!” took five minutes as the Apple pinwheel spun frantically. It seems like this a common occurrence with Mail 3.x and Leopard/Snow Leopard but there seem to be very few answers. I did end up finding one in the dusty corner of the internet.

It appears that Apple Mail has an issue with big attachments. I mean really big attachments. Like 20 MB big. Get rid of them, and it solves the problem. How do you do it? Well, there are two ways…

The easy way (tested by yours truly):

1.) Delete your IMAP account from within Mail by going to “Mail” -> “Preferences” and then clicking the little minus button below the account names. NOTE: I’m pretty sure this is foolproof with IMAP, but please, please make sure you are not deleting your e-mails from the server when you download them to your computer, because if you do that and then delete this account, well, you’ll lose your e-mails.

2.) Go into finder and delete the folder ~/Library/Mail/IMAP–/ or thereabouts.

3.) Go back into Mail, click on “Mail” -> “Preferences” and then the plus icon. Create your IMAP account as you did previously (make sure “create my account automatically” is unchecked or you will end up just creating a POP account with the default settings). This time, unclick “bring this account online” at the end of the creation process.

4.) Go back into “Mail” -> “Preferences,” click on your GMail – IMAP account, then click on the advanced tab. Uncheck “compact mailboxes automatically” and MOST IMPORTANTLY set the offline viewing preference to keep “all messages but omit attachments.”

5.) Set account to “online” and Mail will re-download all your e-mails; however e-mails and e-mails alone– no attachments. Everything should be running at Mach speed again.

Now, this way has one main drawback. You aren’t storing any attachments on your within Mail; if you want to download them, you have to do so as the e-mail comes in. This isn’t a problem for me, since I download the attachments I feel are important to whatever folder they are needed in by default and therefore don’t need another copy clogging up my inbox. However, if this is of crucial importance you can try the next step (at your own risk).

The hard way (I haven’t confirmed this works, but this would allow you to keep most attachments offline; only the ones over 20 MB are deleted– courtesy of bebopper):

1.) Quit Mail (Force quit if you have to)

2.) In Finder, click “Go” -> “Go to Folder.” Type the following folder path (replacing with your GMail User Name): ~/Library/Mail/IMAP–/.OfflineCache

3.) Look through the cached messages in this invisible folder and see if there is one or more larger than 20MB.

4.) Drag the offending large messages to the Desktop or Trash. Restart Mail, and Mail should stop hating you.

Both of these are essentially band-aids, so hopefully Apple will get its act together and figure out exactly what is going on. This seems to be a problem that has arisen in later incarnations of 10.5 and into 10.6, so it’s something that should be of pressing importance to the development team as we speak.

We could not complete your iTunes Store request.
An unknown error occured (-4).

There was an error in the iTunes Store. Please try again later.

Apparently, Rich Hauck has the solution.

1. Quit iTunes
2. Navigate to System/Library/Extensions and delete AppleMobileDevice.kext (you may be prompted to enter your admin information)
3. Restart iTunes

Directions are also official via Apple Support.

There are two reasons I want to partition this drive. One, Time Machine has no feature that allows you to bound the size of the backups. Therefore, it will keep adding incremental backups without removing older data until it runs out of room on whatever drive you are using. Considering I only have a 160 GB hard drive in my Macbook; wasting 1 TB of space is pointless, and partitioning a portion of the free space for Time Machine allows it to be “bounded.” Secondly, by partitioning the drive with two file formats, I can easily attach the drive to my network (via Airport Extreme, for example) and have it be accessible from all my computers. Therefore, simple Windows backups using SyncBack can be done using the same disk as no-touch backups using Apple’s Time Machine.

So how do you set up two partitions on an external USB drive– one for Time Machine and one for using with a Windows box?

0.) NOTE: FORMATTING PORTIONS OF HARD DRIVES WITH DATA WILL ERASE SAID DATA. IF YOU ARE A NOVICE AND HAVE DATA ON AN EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE YOU WOULD LIKE TO PRESERVE, I WOULD RECOMMEND MOVING IT TO ANOTHER LOCATION OR USING A DIFFERENT HARD DRIVE FOR THIS TUTORIAL!

1.) Plug your USB external hard drive into your Mac.

2.) Open Apple’s “Disk Utility” — this can be found in the Utilities folders within the Applications directory.

3.) On the left hand side, you will see the hard drive you wish to partition — you will likely see the manufacturer name (HD, not necessarily enclosure) — match the manufacturer and size. Select this drive (the top level, not any sublevels within the drive).

4.) Select the “Partition” tab on the top of the right side of the utility window.

5.) In the “Partition” tab select the number of partitions that you want from the ‘Volume Scheme’ drop-down menu. If you are planning on using a two-partition scheme like me (one for Mac, one for Windows), select “2 partitions.”

6.) Select one of the partitions by clicking on one of the “boxes” underneath the dropdown menu. They will likely be named “Untitled X.” When a partition is selected it will be bounded by a blue border and you will notice that both “Name” and “Format” are available.

7.) Start with your Mac (in my case, Time Machine) partition. Select a name, size, and choose either Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for a partition that you will use with Time Machine or use as a boot volume. Select Mac OS Extended (No Journaling) if you wish to use this partition for Mac media or data storage.

8.) Select the other partition by clicking on it. For a Windows partition, select “FAT” from the drop-down menu.* The name is not case-sensitive (i.e., must be in all CAPS) and cannot contain spaces. I typically will name this “WINEXT” or “WDWIN.” Something short and sweet in case you need to browse to it through a shell.

9.) Select each additional partition (if any) and then name and set the format.

10.) Click “Apply.”

Voila! You now have a drive that Time Machine can use for Macbook backups, but you also have a partition for media/data file storage on your other boxes as well!

*NOTE: Some people have e-mailed and asked “why FAT? NTFS is more awesomer!” Well, I agree that NTFS is the better file standard; however, as of 10.6.1, OS X still did not have the capability to write to NTFS drives; so FAT is the preferred solution here because it would allow you to write/edit the secondary partition from your Mac if needed.