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.

World Wide Words

Streaming video, it's the darling baby of the internet, or maybe it's HD movie downloads, or flash animation. Whatever it is it seems to be pictures, moving pictures. However there's something else that I've been enjoying on the web and it is infact words.

There are many ways to get words from the web, some cost money but most are surprisingly free. Starting with the most expensive, we have audio books, principally from Audible.com who have an enormous selection of titles to choose from, covering tech titles, sci-fi, biography, in fact anything you can find in dead tree format you can probably find on Audible. It's not however what you would call cheap. Good value, but not cheap.

Luckily for the more "cost concious" amongst us there are many other ways to get an audio fix for free, without resorting to Limewire or other dodgy file sharing shennanigins. Apples iTunes offers easy access to the world of podcasting, spoken word episodes on pretty much any subject under the sun. Rapidly graduating from the obvious (Apple casts, Dr Who casts etc) it's easy to find plenty of meaty subject matter to keep the ears and brain happy on car journies to and from DHM customers. I can heartily recommend the Astronomy Cast, you will never learn more about our universe so easily.

But podcasts are not iTunes only spoken word trick. This one has been a feature of iTunes since the beginning and is almost univerally ignored. See the little "Radio" tab in the left hand side bar? Click it. You will find radio from around the world. I myself am partical to radio stations from Americas deep south, mostly for the between song ad breaks. Slip into a world of second hand car salesmen, corner cafés and other Americana.

Finally don't forget the feeds from actual radio stations. The good old BBC offers its Radio 7 service, where you can access a weeks spoken word content in one go.

Don't be seduced by the lure of the movies. Let spoken word into you online life.

Mind you, on the movies front, big props to the BBC, who have, with little fanfare made their iPlayer service available on the iphone by encoding content into quicktime rather than the desktop versions flash based content.

iPhone mania - the update

OK, so that was hard. Thanks not only to the expected supply issues but also O2's almost totally opaque business upgrade policy and computer systems, it seemed like I was never going to battle through!. However, big kudos to the nice folks at the O2 shop in Stroud, Glos, who texted me when they had stock come in (unlike Cheltenham, who took my details several times and threw then directly into the pit of despair). Not only did they still have phones when I arrived at the store they diligently upnpicked all of O2's best efforts to roadblock my upgrade and I left the store with two 8 gig phones (one for me and one for Mrs Dr Happy Mac).

One quick session with iTunes later and both phones were up and running. So, do we join the ranks of the converted? Of course we do. It is quite simply the phone I have alwaysw wanted. It does the basics better than my old (!) Nolia n95, I can call, be called, look up contacts text etc, all more easily than before. I love the visual voice mail and once it's done with being a phone I can listen to my music and podcasts. It's also fantastic to hold with great hand feel and weight.

Family DHM have just returned from a field in Oxfordshire, having road tested our new tent and the iPhone was a real boon, pulling my mail from out of the air, allowing us to book cinema tickets for a rainy afternoon and even plotting my route to an emergency on hols call out via the google maps app. Battery life is a bit short though, but then my n95 was shocking like that too.

I could go on, but I guess the internet is full enough of glowing iPhone reviews. The main thing is, I got one. As could be guessed the low points of the experience were all about the O2 service (not you Stroud guys). Lets hope now the rush has died down that people are getting a better first impression of Apple and its products. It's worth the hassle.