Sunday 17 October 2010

Exporting call logs, text messages and other info from a Blackberry

I need a way to extract the record of calls I've made and received on my Blackberry. It would also be handy to be able to archive old text (SMS) messages and other info. In addition to providing a good record of the time and duration of your calls, it's also nice to have an archive of your text messages going back over time.

After searching for a while, I came across a couple of ways to do this. The first way is an app called SBSH Historia which you can buy on Blackberry App World for a couple of €€/$$. This looks like a neat app, and very professional, but I didn't need to pay for it in the end as I found a way to do it for free using the Desktop Manager software on my Mac and a Java app called ipddump I found on Google Code.

Here are the instructions for how to do it on a Mac. The Windows procedure is broadly similar.

Tuesday 23 March 2010

Carriage return in Excel on the Mac

If you are entering text in a cell in Excel in Mac Office 2008 (or other versions), hitting the return key will move the focus to the cell below. To enter a carriage return inside the cell when typing, hit ctrl-option-return instead.

Wednesday 10 February 2010

Photos appear blank in iPhoto on the Mac

At home I've got an iMac (2009 version). We run iPhoto on it to manage our family photos - the photo library lives in a shared directory - both of us have separate accounts on the computer but we want to share the same photo library. Occasionally we run into a problem where you can see photo thumbnails in iPhoto, but when you double-click to open the photo, it goes blank and you just see a black screen where the photo should be.

After some searching I managed to find a few other people who'd run into the same problem. The solution is to rebuild your photo library in iPhoto. Exit the application, whilst holding down the command and option keys on the keyboard, restart iPhoto. You will see a prompt asking which parts of the library you'd like to rebuild. For me, examining and repairing iPhoto library permissions is what's worked.

If you want to know more you can find an Apple support article here.