A google search of the problem shows that I’m not alone. There seems to be as many solutions as there are people posting so in case it’s of any use, here’s what has worked for me every time.

1. Select all of the tracks you wish to group, right-click, and from the context menu select “Get Info”.
2. On the “Info” tab, enter a single space in the “Album Artist” field.
3. On the “Options” tab, set “Part of a compilation” to “Yes”.
4. Click “OK” to make those changes.
5. The album should now be grouped properly, and you’ll see something like this:
6. The only problem is now iTunes thinks that the album’s artist is ” ” and so isn’t listing it as “Various Artists”, so with the tracks selected, right-click and from the context menu select “Get Info” again.
7. This time on the “Info” tab, remove the single space from the “Album Artist” field.
8. Click “OK” to make that change and the album should now be grouped properly and listed as Various Artists.

This was screaming out to be screen-scraped and developer Tyler Hall has stepped up to the plate with Sosumi – A MobileMe Scraper. Using Sosumi is literally a case of including the class in your PHP, instantiating it with your MobileMe username and password and calling its locate method which returns an object containing the current latitude, longitude and result accuracy, it’s as simple as that!

At the moment I’ve got a cron job on my server hitting this every five minutes and logging to a database. If the data hasn’t changed since the last logged entry, a counter is incremented and timestamp_last is set. A very simple Google Map displays these locations as points on a map but I’ve got loads of ideas of stuff to play about with, such as:

• Plot the reported accuracy of each location as a circle on the map, more Google Maps fiddling.
• Modify which points are mapped based on time and date ranges through the webpage, some PHP + AJAX experience.
• Store locations of common places I visit, then for each point logged (taking into account the accuracy range) I can programatically work out where I am.  Could then auto-generate “Richard is at work”, “Richard is at home”, etc… reports for my blog/twitter/facebook etc… =).

Bit sad I know, but it seemed too good for a total sync-monkey like myself and I’ll never pass up an opportunity, however contrived, for a PHP mash-up!

The ‘delivery report’ function is not supported on our network. If you’d like to receive delivery reports, you can enter *0# followed by your text message and then send the message as you usually would.

Which I must admit is pretty clunky to have to remember each time but it does the job I suppose.

After a bit of digging around I’ve found a list of codes for other networks and countries which I’ve posted after the jump…

If you have any updates please let me know in the comments and I’ll add them to the list:

Belgium
Proximus *R*
Base *N#

Brazil
Claro *N#

Croatia
T-Mobile *r*

Germany
T-Mobile *T#
Vodafone D2 *N#
O2 *N#
e-plus *N#

Greece
Vodafone *#
Wind *0#

Hungary
T-Mobile *A#

India
Voodafone *NOT#

Israel
Orange *NM#

Poland
PlusGSM (Polkomtel) XYZ

Portugal
Vodafone *NOT#

Qatar
Qtel *N#

Romania
Orange *NM#

Serbia
MTS *!#
Telenor *!#

Sweden
Telia *KV#
Comviq KV#
Telenor ##

Switzerland
SWISSCOM *N#

Turkey
TURKCELL *N#

UK
O2 *0#
Orange RCT
T Mobile *0#
Orange RCT
Vodafone – No code exists for Vodafone
Virgin *0#

US
T–Mobile *noti#

Nothing has changed on my DNS-323 config-wise and my Mac Mini’s Time Machine still works fine, using exactly the same network share as my MacBook and the same username and password so I’m more than a little confused by this!

There are literally hundreds of google search results pointing to forum posts discussing this but they all seem to suggest the same thing; after trying the obvious (Use Disk Utility to repair the drive, done… Power off the drive and mac and restart them both, done….) just reformat your drive. I really don’t want to do this so I’m going to keep trying. Will report back my findings, but has anyone out there resolved this issue without a reformat?

Maybe this is the reason Apple turned off support for ‘unsupported’ network volumes afterall? I really hope not.

I have two Canon cameras; a dSLR 40D and a compact IXUS85, both of which I used to take pictures of our recent snow and both of which it turns out store their photos in a folder called “100CANON” on their respective memory cards.

I didn’t really think anything of it when I plugged both cards in my USB reader, the first folder copied to the desktop fine. Then when I went to copy the second, I got the following dialog:

Being used to various Windows platforms in the past and at work, I just clicked ‘OK’, assuming that I’d end up with a single folder on my desktop containing both sets of files. I knew there wouldn’t be any filename conflicts as my 40D produces .CR2 raw files and my IXUS85 .jpgs, but once the operation had completed, I opened the folder and found no sign of my .CR2s! The copy had in fact done exactly what the dialog said; it had replaced the old folder with the new one! The original CANON100 folder containing my CR2s had gone completely, no Trash bin, no nothing!

After some furious web searching, this actually turns out to be quite a contentious issue in Mac-land and has in fact been a ‘feature’ of OS X’s Finder all along. The web is full of horror stories of people losing gigs of carefully organised mp3s, photos, whatever, when they decided to copy an indentically named folder from their usb key, expecting the contents to merge with their existing collection.  Due to the fact that OS X treats all files and folders as objects, this behaviour makes sense, it’s just not what I initially expected.

Luckily, Apple do provide an application to merge folders called FileMerge as this MacWorld tip from 2006 points out. To use it you’ll need to install Xcode, and it is intended to be used for comparing files, but as the article points out, it can also be used to compare folders and will happily point out any discrepancies between the contents of the two and allow you to merge them.

So I guess the lessons I learnt from this are;

• Never ‘Move’, always ‘Copy’ and check my files are where I want them before deleting the originals, and
• Use FileMerge to merge the contents of directories.

Fortunately, I didn’t lose too much, the flurry of snow balls flying about at the time meant I was quite reluctant to bring my 40D out from under my coat!

1. First, configure Time Machine to use “unsupported” network shares by typing the following into a console window:
   defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
2. Now, under normal circumstances you’d expect this to just work, as long as you have mounted the network share you wish to use as a backup destination, it should now appear in the “Change Disk…” listing in Time Machine Preferences, but try to run with this and it will sit “Preparing” for a bit then fail with a “The Backup Disk Image could not be mounted.” error message.
3. Start Time Machine off again trying to backup but this time watch your network share.
4. You will see that a file is created in the following structure:
   ComputerName_MACAddress.tmp.sparcebundle, copy this filename. Once the backup attempt fails, this file will disappear so try again if you don’t manage to catch it. It appears that Time Machine has a problem creating this file and so the whole thing bombs out. So, let’s give it a helping hand and create one for it!
5. Open Disk Utility on your Mac. Click “New Image” and use the following settings, in the following order:
   1. Save as ComputerName_MACAddress (that you copied above, minus the “tmp” part)
   2. Set whatever you want as the Volume Name.
   3. Skip over Volume Size for the moment.
   4. Change Partition to “No Partition Map”.
   5. Change Image Format to “Sparce Bundle Disk Image”.
   6. Now set the Volume Size, select “Custom Volume Size” and set it to the maximum size you want to use for your backup volume. Don’t worry if you don’t have the hdd space as this is a maximum size only, it won’t immediately create an image file that size. For example I created one set to 900gb which resulted in an image file around 200mb initially.
   7. Create the image.
6. Now copy this image file to your original backup destination network share.
7. Start Time Machine off again, and this time it shouldn’t fail.

As I type I’ve now got both my MacBook and Mac Mini backing up to a single network share on my DNS323 “toaster” NAS, I’ll report any problems.