The Life of Lew Ayotte » iphone

How to sync your iPhone to a new computer without losing data

Lew — Sat, 14 May 2011 17:00:06 +0000

If you found this post, useful, please consider donating 1$ to help fund my and my wife’s adoption… click here for details.

My old laptop was at its end-of-life, it’s had over heating problems and lately the hard-drive has been failing. It’s been good to me though, pretty much daily use for 3 years straight (and a few beatings). So I got a new laptop, with Windows 7 installed — the old one had Windows XP. I looked everywhere to find out how to sync your iPhone to a new computer without losing data but I came up pretty short.

Here are the steps I took (the easiest steps) to transfer all my data and keep my iPhone synced to my new laptop without losing data and having to re-organize everything.

Transfer your iTunes library to your new computer

Apple actually has a pretty good knowledge base article on transfering your iTunes library to a new computer. I performed the “Home Sharing” option, it worked out well. If you do it, run it at night when no one else will be using the internet… this import will pretty much saturate your network connection. I had about 28GB of data to transfer, it was completed by the time I got up the next morning.

Sync your iPhone to the new computer

When I hooked up my iPhone to the new computer, it warned me that it would erase everything. I did not like this at all… my iPhone setup is just the way I want it and I did not want to have to deal with losing all my data. So I looked all over the internet to find out the best way setup a new computer to handle syncing an iPhone.

I found this incomplete documentation for doing what I needed, except it didn’t go into nearly enough detail. I suspect it was because I was moving from Windows XP to Windows 7, but even if your username changed I think you would still have trouble. His documentation focuses on the “Library Persistent ID” but when I changed just that ID, iTunes didn’t recognize anything from my library. I think this is because the “Library Persistent ID” is tied to the other file’s ‘Persistent ID”, so you’d need to change all their IDs too. But I found an easy way to deal with this. This is what I did:

These are the steps from the video above:

Locate your iTunes music folder (can be found in Edit -> Preferences in iTunes)
Close iTunes
Backup the iTunes Music Library file and the iTunes Library file
Get a copy of your old computer’s iTunes Music Library file
Open the new iTunes Music Library file and the old iTunes Music Library file
Perform a Find/Replace on the old iTunes Music Library file — I used Notepad++to do this.
1. In the old file search for the Music Folder (e.g. file://localhost/C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/layotte/My%20Documents/My%20Music/iTunes/iTunes%20Music/)
2. Replace with the value from the new file (e.g. file://localhost/C:/Users/layotte/Music/iTunes/iTunes%20Media/)
Save the newly created file contents into the new computer’s iTunes Music Library file.
Open the new computer’s iTunes Library file, put some random characters in it and save (this causes it to be corrupted).
Open iTunes.

iTunes now recognizes the corrupt file and rebuilds your Library with the new persistent ID from the iTunes Music Lirbary file. After that, you will be able to check the button without being prompted to Erase and Sync your data.

If you found this post, useful, please consider donating 1$ to help fund my and my wife’s adoption… click here for details.

Close iTunes

Review: Sleep Cycle

Lew — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 13:00:10 +0000

A couple weeks ago I heard about this app called Sleep Cycle. Sleep Cycle is a bio-alarm clock that analyzes your sleep patterns and tries to wake you when you are in the lightest point in your sleep cycle. The app only costs .99$. It was actually the first app I have ever purchased. I purchased Sleep Cycle for two reasons. First, I definitely believe in the power of waking up at the right time. Two, I thought this was a pretty innovative app and was worth a try for a buck.

If you know anything about sleep, than you know we sleep in cycles. We move in and out of a dream states and a deep sleeps. An average cycles is about 90 minutes long. The theory goes that if you wake up during your deep sleep, you do not feel as rested. If you wake up when you are in the lightest point of your sleep cycle, you will be able to wake up and get out of bed much easier. I find this to be somewhat true, depending on how much sleep I actually get. Usually I sleep about 6-7 hours each night… I usually go to bed late and get up early.

One thing that I really like about this app is that it keeps a historical record of your sleep cycles for each night. The first thing I do in the morning is look at my previous night’s sleep. Check out my graphs for this past work week:

[[Show as slideshow]]

If you look at Thursday, you will see some weird spikes around 2:30AM and 5:00AM. Those were when Gus woke me up to drink some water and then woke me up to go outside (because he drank too much water, I assume).

As much as I love this app, I think there are two major flaws.

The app is a basic alarm clock, which is great. The way it works is, if you need to be up by 6:30, then you set the Sleep Cycle alarm to wake you up by 6:30. It monitors your sleep cycle and when it feels you are at the most “awake” point in your cycle, it will wake you up. However, if you are in a deep sleep it will wait until 6:30 to wake you up. This is fine, the problem is that you only have a 30 minute window. So it will wake you up anywhere between 6:00 and 6:30. The problem is that the average sleep cycle is 90 minutes. There have been times when my cycle dropped to deep sleep right before the 6:00 mark and it woke me up at 6:30 while I was still deep asleep.I think it would make more sense to make the “alarm” window 45 minutes or 90 minutes… or customizable.
I only use this app Monday through Friday because I generally do not need to be up at a certain time on the weekends. However, I would still really like to know what my sleep cycle was like on the weekends. It would be great if I could just set it to track my sleep, then whenever I woke up and I could see what happened through the night. Currently the only way to accomplish this is to set an alarm for later than you would normally wake up. Here is an example of what the graph looks like when I woke up on my own:

I guess those two are not really major flaws… they are more like, major feature requests. Some other feature ideas would be:

Ability to customize the alarm sound from the iPhone’s music collection.
Enable the recording device to record whenever it detected noise. So when I am in my dream sleep, I can click to see what I may have said through the night.
It currently allows you to share your stats by email and Facebook, should add an option for Twitter.

Well, that is about it, overall I really like this app and have already incorporated it into my daily routine. I do not think it will help me get more sleep, but hopefully it will continue to help me wake up easier.

Notable Tech Posts – 2009.12.06

Lew — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 20:00:16 +0000

10 usability crimes you really shouldn’t commit

Design WordPress theme scratch

10 useful code snippets and plugins to spice up WordPress avatar

How to create a simple API with PHP and MySQL

Star Wars HTML and CSS a New Hope

10 ways to make WordPress more useful

10 front end techniques to improve your site usability

The ultimate toolbox for iPhone development

Premium free fresh WordPress themes year 2009

10 WordPress security plugins to keep your blog safe

jQuery slider tutorials and plugins

Notable Tech Posts – 2009.11.22

Lew — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 17:00:48 +0000

13 useful jQuery plugins for Twitter

PHP and MySQL with Paypal

Top rated jQuery plugins

9 most common IE bugs and how to fix them

Google page speed may be a ranking factor in 2010

25 places to become a Photoshop expert

Facebook Programming API Friends

20 Do’s and Dont’s of effective web typography

8 tips concerning domain names

Google maps geocoding

6 jQuery chart plugins reviewed

Show your demos like a champ iFrame jQuery CSS3

20 easy to use jQuery text effects and animations

How to accept credit card payments on your site without a merchant account

Practical PHP performance

jQuery for absolute beginners video series

20 jQuery plugins worth implementing into your themes

WordPress SEO mistakes

WordPress hack automatically output the content in two columns

21 prototyping mockup wireframing tools iPhone app development

Buddypress themes skinning

The ultimate toolbox for iPhone development

12 accessibility pitfalls to avoid

10 WordPress hacks

Boxed In (iPhone Game) – Complete Walkthrough w/ Screenshots

Lew — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:00:19 +0000

I downloaded Boxed In a few weeks ago when it went “free”. I got a little stuck on level 44 and went online to find a hint. There were not very many out there, so I figured I’d make a walk-through for each level of the game. So I posted all the screen shots here, separated by level. Just click on the level you want help with and you’ll see the screen shots in the order of which box I moved.

[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

Speck Candyshell Review

Lew — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:30:32 +0000

Check out Speck’s website for more information about their cases and other products.

I purchased mine from TechNGnet at Amazon.

iPhone Giveaways

Lew — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:18:13 +0000

If you’re interested, I know of 3 places giving away 199$ Apple Gift cards to purchase a new iPhone 3G S.

QuickPWN is giving away one gift card (ends today) – http://www.quickpwn.com/2009/06/win-a-free-iphone-3g-s.html

SquareSpace is giving away one gift card every day until the end of the month – http://www.squarespace.com/iphone

Trackle is giving away one gift card every day until the end of the month – http://www.trackle.com/about/iphone

If you know of anymore, post them here.

Thanks.

Free iPhone? Why Not…

Lew — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 02:22:24 +0000

This post is just for fun…

Ok, I know I’m a retard…

My wife has been thinking about getting an iPod… recently the subject of the iPod Touch and now the iPhone has come up. The problem, there is no way on God’s green Earth that we’re going to pay 500$ for an iPhone!

So I remembered that I worked with a few guys who went to one of those free iPod sites and it actually worked. So I found a free iPhone site and am giving it a try. They offered two methods of getting the iPhone, one was to sign up for a bunch of services and earn enough points to get the free iPhone. The second was to sign up for one service and get 10 people to do the same. I chose option 2 and signed up for Blockbuster for 10$ a month. And since we don’t have cable, we’ll watch the first season of Lost to catch up on anything we’ve missed and then I’ll cancel it at the end of the month.

Now, I’m soliciting y’all… click here (my referral link) and sign up for something like Blockbuster, Gamefly, or Netflix. If it works, great, if not, I’ll watch the first season of Lost and a couple movies for 10$ this month :).

There are other “rewards” too… I’m going for the 16GB iPod… They all require either 1 Level A offer completion or 50 points worth of Level B offers only the referral number changes. (I don’t know what the point system is like, I only signed up for the referral system).

Here are all the options:
16GB iPod – 10 referrals
8GB iPod – 8 referrals
599$ Apple Card – 12 referrals
580$ Cash – 11 referrals
490$ Cash – 10 referrals

Anyways,
Lew