An easy way to encrypt your Gmail, from the Ontario Canada Privacy Commissioner (PDF) – http://bit.ly/uJlpQ

It links to a white paper titled “If You Want To Protect Your Privacy, Secure Your Gmail”. It’s a guide about setting up the FireGPG Firefox extension, or using Thunderbird with Enigmail, right?

Well, no. The paper, apparently co-authored by Google Canada and the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, explains how to connect to Gmail using an SSL-encrypted connection. This of course is to “encrypting your Gmail” what locking your mailbox is to writing your secret love letters on postcards.

As if the public wasn’t confused and uninformed enough about security and privacy issues relating to email, we now have big companies and government agencies muddying the waters. There is a big difference between “encrypting your Gmail” and “encrypting your connection to Gmail’s servers”, and the paper doesn’t make that distinction clear.

If you *really* want to encrypt your email, check out this Instructables article.

(Thanks to @vigeek for the heads up.)

Update: After plugging it into my computer, the little black box became an iPhone again. It still ruined my lunch hour, though.

Update 2009-02-26: I’ve added the steps to set up synchronization using Google Sync to the post.

Update 2009-02-14: Google now provides wireless synchronization capability directly. The instructions for setting it up are here.

I’ve been using a great free service called NuevaSync to wirelessly synchronize my Google calendar and contacts with my iPhone. It’s essentially a proxy to Google’s contacts and calendar services that allows you to synchronize them with any device that supports the Microsoft ActiveSync protocol, including the iPhone and Windows Mobile devices.

When the service first launched, you could only synchronize with Google calendars which you had read/write access to. Recently, however, they have enabled syncing with read-only calendars. This includes services which publish an iCal feed which you have subscribed to in Google Calendar. And since Facebook Events provides an iCal feed, you can subscribe to it in Google Calendar and have the events show up in your iPhone calendar.

Add your Facebook Events to Google Calendar

The first thing you need to do is subscribe to your Facebook Events iCal feed in Google Calendar. In the Facebook Events page, click on the “Export Events” link. It will display the link to the iCal feed. Right-click the link and copy it to the clipboard.

I’m assuming you have a Google account. If you don’t, you’ll need to get one. Open up Google Calendar and click on the “Add” link under “Other Calendars” on the left-hand side, then select “Add by URL”. Paste in the link you copied earlier and click “Add”.

Set up synchronization

Now you need to choose whether to synchronize using Google Sync or NuevaSync. The free version of NuevaSync allows you to sync up to eleven calendars, whereas Google Sync only allows five. For $25/year you can upgrade to the premium version of NuevaSync, which adds push e-mail (for Gmail, AOL or IMAP) and up to 50 calendars. More details about NuevaSync’s services are available here.

Note that your existing calendar and contacts will be erased when you set up synchronization. You can sync your address book with Google Contacts through iTunes to ensure that all your current contacts will be retained when you set up sync. You may be able to do the same with the calendar by syncing it with Outlook and syncing that with Google, but I haven’t explored this.

Option A: Set up Google Sync

The instructions to set up synchronization with Google Sync are here. Once you have completed that, go to http://m.google.com/sync on your iPhone, select your device from the list, and select the Facebook calendar, along with any other calendars you wish to sync.

Option B: Set up NuevaSync

First you will need to create an account on the NuevaSync site. Once you have done that, just follow their instructions for setting up synchronization on your device.

Once you’ve got your iPhone set up to synchronize with NuevaSync, go into the calendar setup on the NuevaSync status and setup page and check the box next to the Facebook calendar link. Your Facebook events will appear on your device shortly.

Alternate method: Subscribe to the iCal feed directly from the device

For most people, the method I document above is the best way to have your Facebook events show up on your iPhone’s calendar. The events will also show up on your Google Calendar, and it uses push synchronization to update your phone, which should improve battery life. If, however, you prefer not to sync your Google Calendar with your iPhone, or you already sync your iPhone with a corporate Exchange server, there is another way to do it. With the release of iPhone OS 3.0, it is now possible to subscribe to a calendar feed directly from the device. This blog post gives a great overview of the general process. For the Facebook event feed specifically:

1. Visit the Facebook Events page
2. Click “Export Events” at the top of the page
3. Copy the URL and send it to yourself in an email
4. Open the email on your iPhone and copy the link
5. Go into Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Add Account… > Other > Add Subscribed Calendar, paste the link into the Server text box and tap Next
6. Change the description to “Facebook Events” (or whatever you like) and tap Save

FriendFeed is great and all, but sometimes you just want to enjoy some interesting links and status updates without a lot of conversation. So, I thought I’d try an experiment. First I created a Yahoo! Pipe to pull in Robert’s Twitter stream and filter it. For now it’s just discarding any tweet that contains an @reply, but I may change that at some point. Then I used Twitterfeed to send new entries in the output of the Pipe to a new Twitter account I created.

I give you… Scoble Lite.

Let me know what you think — either in a blog comment, or on Twitter or FriendFeed

You know how during a high-profile court hearing, a bunch of reporters and photographers hang out in front of the courthouse waiting for the accused to emerge? And when he comes out, flanked by his lawyers and family, face hidden with his jacket, the press give chase?

You can probably see where I’m going with this. Get together a few buddies, put on suits, and go view the trial. Then, just before Mister-Innocent-Until-Proven-Guilty makes his hasty exit, spring the trap. Make sure to have another friend with a video camera on hand to capture the expressions on the reporter’s faces when the defendant’s doppelgänger reveals himself. Instant YouTube stardom!

I can’t have been the first person to come up with this idea. Anyone know if this has been done?

My experience with it so far has been less than positive. One of the features of their search engine is to display images next to their search results. When I do a search on my own name, one of the images is of a gentleman who has just finished, uh, manually pleasuring himself. And this is with “Safe Search” turned on. See for yourself. (NSFW) This image has since been removed.

According to an article in The Register, I’m not the only one whose search results have been given the pornographic treatment. A VP at Cuil is blaming “heavy traffic” for the problem. All the same, I think I’ll stick with Google for now.

On my left bicep was the logo for a ridiculously named metal band—”The Lysine Contingency” or something—written in a blackletter-style typeface.

When I woke up I had to look at both arms, just to make sure that I hadn’t really gotten tattooed. And then I realized I had slept for eleven hours and that I was late for work.

So I’m sitting here on my coffee break trying to figure out how to fit this all into a Twitter status update.

*knock knock* Hello?

Oh, hello, alternate reality self. What’s up?

Hey Ryan, you have a blog and you never write in it. You could totally turn this into a blog entry.

Good call, man. Thanks!

PS: I did a Google search, and of course there’s actually a metal band called The Lysine Contingency! Awesome!

I found a knowledge base article at Adobe’s site which recommends setting the default browser in the Program Access and Computer Defaults dialog in Vista. Here are the steps:

1. Select Start > Default Programs > Set Program Access And Computer Defaults.
2. Click Continue in the Security Alert dialog box, if it appears.
3. Select Custom, and then select your preferred browser under Choose A Default Web Browser; click OK.

The problem I had was that Firefox wasn’t showing up as one of the options under Choose A Default Web Browser. The fix for me was to download the Firefox installer and reinstall over top of my existing Firefox installation. After doing that, Firefox showed up in the list.

Note that I had to close Firefox and reopen it after changing the setting for it to take effect. (Before I did that, clicking on links in twhirl had no effect.)

The bag has a pocket for an MP3 player, which is handy, but accessing it to pause it or change songs is kind of a pain. To rectify this, I purchased the iPod remote. It’s a wired remote for the iPod that has a clip on the back, just like the one on the iPod Shuffle. My plan was to clip the remote to the strap on the bag for easy access.

This worked well enough, except that any time something pulled on the cord the remote would fall off. The problem is that the nylon strap is too rigid and smooth for the clip to get a good grip on it. Time for some surgery.

Cutting a nylon strap with a knife is a bad idea because the nylon will start to fray. You can fix this by melting the nylon where you cut it. But what if you could cut… and melt… all in one step?

All the hash smokers in the crowd will be familiar with Step 1 here. Tip: don’t use the good silver.

Once you’ve got the knife good and hot, carefully press the tip against the strap where you want to make your cut. In hindsight, marking the strap where I needed to cut it would have made things a little easier.

Oh, and avoid breathing the fumes. They probably aren’t good for you.

Time to attach the remote!

The finished product.

Hope you’ve found this useful or entertaining somehow. Be sure to tune in next time, when I’ll be building a lathe from a vacuum cleaner and a bicycle. So long!

Are we… We’re live? We’re on?

*straightens tie*

Hello everybody! Welcome to my inter-net web-site! I’d like to tell you about something that’s been on my mind.

I like drinking decaffeinated coffee. People always say “What’s the point?”, but I like the taste of coffee, and caffeine doesn’t agree with me so good. It makes me a little… jumpy.

The problem is, sometimes when you ask for decaf, the waitress/server/barista will pour you a cup of regular coffee by mistake. If I’m getting drip coffee I might notice them grabbing the carafe with the brown handle rather than the orange handle, but that’s only if I’m paying attention. If I’m purchasing a decaffeinated espresso beverage, as is my wont, the magic brown powder typically comes out of one of two grinding machines which, from my vantage point at the cash register, appear to be identical. And once the beverage arrives, there’s no way to tell whether it is decaffeinated or not — until you drink it.

I believe the tall decaf Americano I consumed this evening may not have been decaf after all.

Sooooooooooooooo let’s write a blog post! It’s only been what, almost three months since the last one? Much has happened since then. I was telling you about being on tour. Good times. Oh, hey, remember how in that post I talked about weird coincidences that had happened, and how there was one that I couldn’t remember? Well, I remember it now.

We were on our way into Revelstoke when we were stopped by a flag person who informed us that the highway between Revelstoke and Golden had been closed due to mudslides. It was getting late and we were planning on stopping in Revelstoke for the night anyhow, so that sealed the deal right there.

When we checked into our hotel room we turned on the local news-ticker channel to find out what was happening with the highway. You know the channel, where it’s just scrolling text with ads for area businesses and the audio portion is a retransmission of one of the local radio stations. So we’ve got this channel on and suddenly we hear, “Are you in a band? Are you on tour?” We just stared bug-eyed at each other. It was just an advertisement soliciting artists for some local folk festival, but it felt like CSIS had tapped into the TV in our hotel room to broadcast a message directly to us.

Other tour highlights: the amazing food and hospitality at the Ironwood Stage and Grill. Ditching the band to hang out with the grandparents and catching a flight to the next show — that’s rock star style, baby. Driving the scenic Crowsnest Highway from Lethbridge to Hope.

Alas, all good things must come to an end. Jay Dunphy and the Religion is no more — at least, that particular incarnation. Between that and Annie Nolan and the Ringtones being on permanent hiatus, I am presently bandless. (Or is it “disbanded”?) But who’s got time to play in a band when I’ve got unpacking to avoid? Yes, that’s right, I’ve ditched my boring suburban dirt-cheap student-model two-bedroom basement suite with roommate for an exciting near-downtown more-expensive one-bedroom character apartment (without roommate, obviously).

James Bay is a study of opposites: retirees and young professionals, well-to-do and down-and-out, character homes and highrises, locals and tourists. On one of the first nights in my new place, as I’m unpacking boxes, I’m watching a group of men in their 20s play street hockey in front of my building. Vehicle traffic requires the players to frequently give way. “Car!”, they call out, and a car passes by. “Bus!”, and the bus rumbles past. A clip-clopping of hooves approaches, and — “Carriage!” — as a horse-drawn buggy and its amused passengers make their way through.

Furnishing my apartment has been more of a chore than should reasonably be expected. I’d like to say the universe is conspiring against my efforts to visit IKEA, but it’s really just been poor planning on my part. And why I’m fixated on purchasing furniture from IKEA as opposed to, say, a store that isn’t a ferry ride away, I have no idea.

I’m blaming my friend Jenny. She’s a bit of an IKEA nut. (She recently blogged about this story about the “Hostel IKEA” event in Oslo where 150 people were invited to spend the night on the mattresses in their showroom. She was jealous.) She’s in Ireland right now but I’ll be able to blame her in person when I go to visit next month.

Well, the caffeine is wearing off. Perhaps it’s time to hit “Publish” and call it a night. Tomorrow will be a busy day. I’m going furniture shopping. And maybe a side trip to Starbucks.