If it's Tuesday it must be MacWorld

Tuesday the 5th. MacWorld 2009. The last show with Apple in attendance and the first without his Steveness at the keynote helm. The internet runneth over with gushings on why SJ is not doing the keynote, ranging from: "he hates you and he doesn't want to speak to you" to "he died seven years ago man. There was a picture of him in Newsweek without any shoes on so it must be true".

Despite all that the fact is that it's all down to the Schillmmeister on the day, but what will he be introducing. After the high of the iPhone last year and before that er, the iPhone, what can we expect to see?

Ranking in order of how shocked I'll be if it happpens and in reverse order:

Mac Mini. New shiny and revised. It may come in a new form factor (think TimeCapsule in aluminium) or it may stay the same lovely mini. Whatever, like Christmas 2009, it's coming. Faster, bigger drives, DVi and new DisplayPort.

Snow Leopard. More sneak previews, not the real thing.

New iMacs. Faster processors, more better, but essentially just the same.

MacBook Pro 17 in. Joins in the unibody fun. Plenty of rumours on this but no shouts of surprise from me if this one fails to appear. The 17in shows al the hallmarks of joining the ranks of the unloved products in Apples lineup, though Steve uses one apparently.

And in the no way corner:

iPhone nano. Yeah right, just what apple need to cannibalise iPhone sales with a cheap feature poor copy. Nope.

NetBook. Rumours of web site stats showing browsing by an unidentified Apple product with a screen size betwen that of an iBook and an iPhone. Maybe somewhere in Dr Applesteins lab it exists but  not at MacWorld.

iHoover. Cleans as it sucks as it cleans. Available in silver or beige.

Beatles on iTunes. No seriously.

We'll see on the day. Oh and one more thing... nah, just kidding.

Hello 2009

OK, so that was a long one. Surely anyone should come back from that extended Christams break fighting fit and ready to go. (cough, hack, sneeze). I need a holiday.

OK so what happens next? Well firstly I have decided. No really really decided that this blog will henceforth be daily. Even if it's only a few words. I'm out and about every day so I really should have more to say about the life of an itinerant Mac fixer upper, even if I edit out all the stuff that will loose all my clients! Lets see how we go. Even if nothing happens I'll try to put up a small snippet of Mac info that may be useful to someone somewhere.

So, what happened recently. Well a rare trip to the local pub just before Christmas found me coincidentally meeting one of the four people that I actually managed to follow on Twitter, which was interesting. Out of a randomly assembled group of four people, all four turned out to use Macs in their work. Several beers later and some interesting plans were mooted. Keep em peeled between now and Easter for stuff happening in the podosphere* as a result.

The DHM mobile failed to make it though the holidays, detonating its engine in Devon on New Years eve, so the hunt is on for a new, estate sized, dog carrying diesel car. This one will get stickered with the DHM logo to within an inch of its life.

OK, enough for a Monday morning. Happy New Year to all.

* I claim this. It's mine.

Get your contacts out of AOL the easy way.

If you've been an internet user for a long time, you will probably remember a period in the mid nineties when every delivery of mail contained a few bills, maybe a letter; and around 26 small cardboard enveloped containing AOL set up CD-ROMS. Thankfully it seems that the shiny plague has past, but the legacy of 10 years of intensive marketing is that a lot of internet users started out using AOL services.

While AOL can, and has, served as an easy and safe introduction to the web and e-mail, most users eventually graduate to other more flexible (and open) providers for their mail. Now, AOL doesn't like t loose it's hard won customers without a fight, so they work hard to improve their service, offer features that help users and generally make AOL on line such a great place to be that only an idiot would want to leave, oh wait, no, actually what they do is make it so hard to move your data away from them that grown men have been known to break down in tears. I mean how hard can getting your e-mail contacts, that's YOUR email contacts out of an AOL address book. Well, funnily enough, almost impossible is the short answer. Well it's a business model.

Anyway, our windows cousins have a couple of options in the form of applications that will collect your AOL data for you, but short of running windows on your Intel Mac, OS X users are out in the cold here.

Luckly, there is a sneaky beaky way of getting at least some your data out of AOL and into a more usable form, and here's what you do.

Your first port of call is social networking site Plaxo. You will need to set up a free Plaxo account. Who knows you might even like it there. Once set up, Plaxo offers the insanely useful option of importing your AOL contact list. This is a good thing. 30 seconds later, all your AOL contacts will be safely Plaxo'd.

Plaxo, being a good web 2.0 citizen is all about sharing, and they DO offer the option to export contacts. In the almost universally accepted csv format. (Catch up Apple). In the contacts section is something Plaxo call sync points. Here you can sync data with all common mail apps such as gmail, yahoo mail and apple mail (via address book). You can also do a simple export into a csv file.

And that's it really. 1) set up Plaxo account. 2) Import data. 3) sync to Apple address book, or wherever.

Really AOL, it's not that hard. You can't keep customers by chaining them to an account. Personally I can't see any reason why a Mac user would want to use AOL apart from the fear of loosing years and years of contacts. And now you don't have to worry about that.