Managed to get the Treo to send email yesterday by setting a Use Authentication check-box in Outgoing Server settings.

Tried setting an authentication checkbox for Incoming Server settings and it times out trying to connect. No doubt there’s one more tiny little thing that has to be done or set and the whole thing will work fine. Drrrrrrrrhhhhhhh.

Somebody asked me yesterday where her iPod music might have gone. Turns out her laptop had been repaired by the manufacturer and returned as new with the original software on it but no music on it, nor iTunes.

She had stored her original iTunes music on her C drive, now clean(s)ed. This meant that she had to download and install iTunes. No problem there except that there was obviously no music on it. As soon as she put the iPod in the dock, populated with many hours worth of music ripped from her own CD’s and a substantial amount of music purchased from the iTunes Music Store, iTunes sync’d the iPod to its view of what music she had on her PC ie nada, squat, zero and everything was gone from the iPod.

The only way to avert this problem is to store your iTunes music onto an external USB drive so that music isn’t lost on ‘cleansed’ PC’s and therefore the same music can then be reintroduced to any new version of iTunes. Though the purchased music, from the iTunes Music Store, probably won’t work as the combination of the freshened up PC and the new version of iTunes will convince iTunes that it is now a different new PC and the purchased music is not transferable. Digital Rights Management is a wunnerfull thing.

There must be many people that are going to run into this problem when they purchase a new PC or MAC and they lose half of there music. Hell to pay. And the iPod/iTunes combination is one of the better working devices.

Quote of the day

‘I fear the words “I have a cunning plan” are rapidly marching towards this conversation with ill-deserved confidence’ Edmund Blackadder

Found a great synchronisation tool called Vice Versa – http://www.tgrmn.com/ - which does file synchronisation/replication/comparison. And it works. That doesn’t mean that I’ve tested it, not even thoroughly.

I wanted it to make a copy of my iTunes folder onto an external drive. I know there are various bits of functionality in XP that allows you to do that and – yikes – in a CMD window you can always try the emulations of the old DOS XCOPY command with its horrendous command line options, but it is a bit clunky.

With Vice Versa you can pause and continue at a later time, and also throttle the bandwidth so that you can still play games, effectively, in the foreground. The file comparison was very quick showing the source drive on the left and what needed to be copied to the destination drive in the right hand pane. The destination pane also showed the items that were not on the source drive. This allows you easily to see which items are not synchronised between drives.

This was the trial edition which’ll work for 30 days and then it is $59.95. There is a free version but which only sync’s a single folder and no sub folders. Not a lot of use.

I Have been trying to get a PalmOne Treo 650 to download email from BT Openworld via T-Mobiles GPRS. This sort of functionality barely works (Oh yes it does, I was just being a klutz).

I can connect using GPRS and it appears to even connect to BT’s pop3 server but no email is downloaded. Tried to send email and got a ‘550 Relaying denied’ error message. Spoke to T-Mobile who were keen to help but the poor guy was convinced I had an HTC MDA, a PDA unleashed a couple of years ago by a Taiwanese company. Finally got him convinced that it was a Treo. I think the problem there is that the Treo is not actually one of their range of phones. He said I should try a pop3 server called ‘mail.btinternet.com’ and an smtp server called ’smtp.t-mobile.co.uk’. Tried them with no luck. ‘mail.internet.com’ was unlikely to work as ‘internet.com’ servers are used by BT Internet customers whilst BT Openworld customers connect to ‘btconnect.com’ servers. I think.

Spoke to British Telecom and the guy tried telling me that they didin’t support the device. I said ‘yes you do’ as it was, as far as he was concerned, just a standard device. He suggested ‘pop3.btconnect.com’ and for smtp ‘mail.btconnect.com’. Aaah the server names sound promising. Needless to say no luck.

Had a look on the web and saw how to get email with a Blackberry using T-Mobile. This one suggested ‘email.btconnect.com’. Did that work?

Ged-ouda-here.

And just for completeness the Treo does recognise some providers and its hard-wired mail servers for BT Openworld were ‘pop3.btconnect.com’ and ’smtp.btconnect.com’ (these worked). That’s 3 different pop3 servers and 3 different smtp servers. I am so glad that communication between this lot is so good otherwise we would be in trouble.

I will get this working.

(I did get this working, read entry ‘Treo Email’ for the full shocking story)

Quote of the day

‘Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace’ Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Is my PC hosed?

I am starting to get a sinking feeling about this as the PC has started running slow again. There is obviously another process running which is chewing up mill something awfull. I had a look around and found about 1500 temp files in the iTunes folder and each was about 37Mb. When I tried deleting them a window popped up with an estimate that it was going to take 20 minutes to delete them, which was on the conservative side as it was taking at least 5 seconds to delete each file.

Booted into safe mode and the PC ran much faster and the deletion of the 1500 temp files was done in seconds. I have heard a rumour that temp files in the iTunes folder are as a result of downloads from P2P sites such as Grokster and Limewire etc. Have used Limewire, in fact the last time I used it was when I originally got the virus, which I convinced myself I had got rid of. No more downloads from P2P and back to using newsgroups.

Better get prepared for a reinstall when the laptop returns with a new battery. Start uninstalling applications in the hope that one of them will take the virus with them. Probably happen when I uninstall the very last application.