NickMoline: I should have known it was you... RT @TheRaj: Dude. I think I just took down GMail. I knew I shouldn't have hit Refresh...

See original: I should have known it was you... RT @TheRaj: Dude. I think I just took down GMail. I knew I shouldn't have hit Refresh...

NickMoline: RT @GoogleCode: SOAP Search API retiring on Sept 7; off to Hawaii. http://bit.ly/xvgbL

See original: RT @GoogleCode: SOAP Search API retiring on Sept 7; off to Hawaii. http://bit.ly/xvgbL

NickMoline: +1 RT @thinkgeek: Will the elevator ever work!? RT @billprady Submit your #bigbangtheory spoiler questions today -- I will answer the dull

See original: +1 RT @thinkgeek: Will the elevator ever work!? RT @billprady Submit your #bigbangtheory spoiler questions today -- I will answer the dull

Yesterday I retweeted a post by ReadWriteWeb concerning Yahoo's announcement that they are closing down GeoCities this year.

This was particularly sad news for me because GeoCities was where my first website was hosted.

For the second year in a row, my wife and I participated in Earth Hour. At 8:30 I hit the main breaker in our apartment shutting everything down for an hour. During that time we read together by candlelight and reflected on just how much energy we use on a day to day basis. It was amazing to us how quiet it was without the ambient hum of electronics running, serving our whims, and it was humbling to think how hard it seemed to read by candlelight and how much we rely on technology for every aspect of our lives.

Back in August, I posted a how-to on keeping your iPhone (or iPhone 3G) and Mac in sync with Google Calendar all the time over the air, it basically required using both Mobile Me and Spanning Sync with an Always On Mac to make sure your iPhone was kept in constant sync with both your Mac and Google Calendar.

At the time, it was the only solution available to make this possible, now however, Google has made it all so much easier, and cut out all of the cost, in fact, I'm sure Apple is not too pleased about how Google has made it possible to have two way over-the-air syncing with iPhones for free, thus making their $99/year Mobile Me Service all but unnecessary to most people.

Without further ado, here is how to keep your Mac (which no longer needs to stay online 24/7), your iPhone, and Google Calendar all in sync for Free.

So I upgraded to the 2.1 software this morning on my iPhone. There aren't any new features, but the array of fixes that Apple promises with the new update are much needed, if it turns out to work.

• Increased Call Stability
• Better Battery Life
• Faster Backups
• Faster interface

I'm reserving overall judgment, but so far it seems to be working just like Apple said it would.

I wish I was posting this as a follow up to an announcement, but actually it's a suggestion to Amazon on how they can make more money, sell more Kindle books, and make more people happy.

I love Google Apps for Domains, I use it for all of my domains, I've even setup holodeck3.com with the Partner edition so that my users can get @holodeck3.com email accounts and services through them. Google does a lot, for free, and they do it well. I'm also a Mac an an iPhone user. I am never without my iPhone, and only rarely without my laptop.

Google has, over time gotten a lot better at providing me with services I need in order to keep my world more in sync. I was glad to be in the early adoption crowd of users for IMAP on GMail, and the first person among my group of friends to get IMAP support on my Google Apps for Domains accounts. This has helped a lot as my iPhone is now what I use for email when I'm away from my laptop, and in fact I find myself not going to the computer quite as often when I'm "off duty" because of it.

I love Google Calendar and prefer to have my calendar events in Google as opposed to simply a local Calendar on my computer or phone, however when I am at my computer, using iCal is so much easier then using Google Calendar (and having to keep yet another browser window open), and then of course there's the little matter of keeping my calendar on the iPhone so I have my events easily at hand. Google has long allowed you to subscribe to a Google Calendar using iCal's ics format, but this was one way, only allowing you to read your Google calendar in iCal, not make changes to it. Until very recently the best way to keep iCal in sync with Google Calendar is to use Spanning Sync, a $25 program (use this link and you can get $5 off!), that keeps your calendar in iCal in sync both ways with your calendar on Google.

In the latest in my ongoing series of Major websites experiencing outages, GMail has been down for at least the last hour. Google's Mail service is excellent and over all I've always been pleased with it.