Nicholas Pike

Was looking at the feed details for http://blog.npike.net in Google Reader, and now instead of a few lines of text with integer counters, we get nice bar graphs too!

Wish I had a “before” screenshot, but here’s what it looks like now:

On both my Macs I used the iChat Sound Theme for Adium – it gives you a nice “water drop” sound when a new chat window is created, as well as nice short notification sounds for incoming and sent messages.

The iPhone uses 2 out of 3 of these sounds already in its SMS program – the “whoop” every time you send and receive a new text message.  But curiously Apple left out the “new message” sound called invitation. (Listen here: invitation)

So I took the liberty of converting it to the proper format for an iPhone SMS sound.  (Using this will require a jailbroken phone)

It currently isn’t possible to add additional SMS tones to the stock ones Apple provides, but you can replace the existing ones with custom ones!

You can get the custom invitation SMS tone off my website here: sms-received6

I recommend you backup the existing sms-received6.caf before replacing it with mine.

You have a few options for adding this file to your iPhone..

• MobileTerminal (do it on the iphone itself)
• SFTP client (upload the new tone from a computer)

Either way, you’ll want to navigate to the following path, and rename the existing sms-received6.caf to something else (sms-received.bak) – you will also need to be logged in as root:

/System/Library/Audio/UISounds

.. and then replace it with my custom one above.  (If your doing this with MobileTerminal on the iPhone itself I recommend using wget to suck it down).

Note: After replacing the existing SMS sound with the custom one, the “New Text Message” sound list in Settings.app will still show “Electronic” has the 6th available tone.  Select this tone to use my custom ringtone.

1. SafetySuit
2. July For Kings
3. AC/DC
4. The Police
5. Saosin

If your like me, you leave your work computer on when you go home.  Most of the time its just easier and faster to leave it turned on then to suffer through a cold boot the next morning.

Your also probably slightly forgetful – every now and then I forget to close my Twitter and IM clients before leaving work… which allows it to sit there all night long eating my precious Twitter API requests.

Changing your Twitter password once you get home works, but is a little drastic.

I use a Windows batch file that is scheduled to run every night at 6PM on my work computer that kills both the process for my Twitter client (Twhirl) and my IM client (pidgin).

Here’s a quick tutorial.

• First you want to create a new file in your favorite text editor, call it anything you like.  I named mine “nightly.bat”
• Paste the following into the new file (assuming you are using Twhirl as your Twitter client)

taskkill /F /IM twhirl.exe

• Save this file anywhere you like, I saved mine to “My Documents”

• Navigate to your windows control panel
• Open up “Scheduled Tasks”

• “Add Scheduled Task”

• Click Next..

• Click “Browse” and select your batch file

• Setup when to run your task, with a name.  I called mine “nightly”, and set it to run “daily”

• The next screen lets you configure the exact time to run, and what interval of days to run it on (I selected 6pm and weekdays)

• All done! Click “Finish” and your good to go.