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I use both DynDNS and OpenDNS on my home network since I don’t have a static IP address and sometimes need to access my home network from outside the LAN. I use OpenDNS to provide DNS service for my home network since I’ve found that the OpenDNS DNS servers seem to be more reliable than my ISP DNS. OpenDNS also gives me the ability to manage sites that I may want to block from my children such as porn and phishing sites.

For my home network, I use a Linksys WRT54GL router that runs Tomato open firmware. If you don’t know what Tomato firmware is you can find out more information by following the above link or here is the description taken from the Polarcloud website:

Tomato is a small, lean and simple replacement firmware for Linksys’ WRT54G/GL/GS, Buffalo WHR-G54S/WHR-HP-G54 and other Broadcom-based routers. It features a new easy to use GUI, a new bandwidth usage monitor, more advanced QOS and access restrictions, enables new wireless features such as WDS and wireless client modes, raises the limits on maximum connections for P2P, allows you to run your custom scripts or telnet/ssh in and do all sorts of things like re-program the SES/AOSS button, adds wireless site survey to see your wifi neighbors, and more.

One of the nice features of Tomato firmware is that you can enter up to two Dynamic DNS (DDNS) providers in the GUI interface of your router. Why would you want to do this? Well for me, I use it so I don’t have to have a DDNS client running on one of my computers (all the time) to update my IP address to the DDNS provider if and when it changes.

For me, Tomato firmware works perfectly since I use both DynDNS and OpenDNS and the firmware supports both service right in the GUI. No host based clients needed here. Tomato supports other DDNS services, but these are the two that I use and will reference in this post.

So to setup two DDNS services on your Tomato based router, this is what you do.

First, you need to create accounts for both service at each respective web site. You need to do this because in the router GUI you will need to supply a username and password for each service. You will also need the Hostname that was setup with DynDNS and the Network name (if you have multiple dynamic IP networks setup in your account) for OpenDNS.

Once you get all that setup, logon to your routers web configuration, usually by going to the IP address of the router in your browser of choice. Once logged on, you should see a menu on the left side. There you will want to click on Basic | DDNS which will bring up the DDNS setup GUI.

I’ve already filled my DDNS information into my router and this is what it looks like.

As you can see, I’ve blocked out some of the information such as my IP, username and DynDNS hostname. Also, you can see there are two Dynamic DNS settings that can be set here.

For my first service I’ve used DynDNS and you can see that a username, password and hostname is needed for this configuration. I don’t use wildcards or MX records, but you could if needed.

For the second Dynamic DNS service I’m using the OpenDNS service. Again, you need to provide a username and password for the basic configuration. But since I have more than one dynamic IP Network setup in my account with OpenDNS, I need to provide the Network name of this network as well. If you don’t provide this information, you will get a status of Invalid Hostname in the result block. But if you don’t have more than one network setup in your account, you won’t need to put anything in the Network (optional) Block.

Once you enter all your information here, click the save button and you should be on your way to using Dynamic DNS services with your home router.

A few posts back I explained the process of upgrading a WordPress install using an Automatic Upgrade Plugin from Techie Buzz. While the new version of WordPress (2.7) now includes an auto upgrade feature, you still need to upgrade to version 2.7 before you get this feature built-in.

So I am here to say that I’ve successfully upgraded three WordPress installs to version 2.7 using the Automatic Upgrade Plugin from Techie Buzz. The upgrade process went smooth and no issues were encountered by using this plugin.

The real question I have is how well will the built-in upgrade feature work in WordPress 2.7? Or, will we still need an additional plugin to perform our upgrades?

Only time will tell…

As you may know, Google Gmail gives it’s users ample space to store mail messages with disk space hovering around 7GB these days. And even though the Gmail web interface shows the total amount of space used you may still wonder how much space is being used by mail archived to Labels.

To view this information you will also need to setup the OSX Mail.app to retrieve Gmail via IMAP. I have my Gmail account setup in Mail.app so that I can use the account within OSX and so that I can use the Mail.app on the iPhone to receive, view and send emails with Gmail.

Once you have your Gmail account setup in Mail, all you need to do is either Control-click or Right-click the Gmail mailbox in Mail and choose “Get Account Info“.

Once the Account Info window is open you will see your Gmail account Quota Limits which will show the message count and size of each of the Labels as well as the total space allocated and how much is being used.

As you can see, I have a bunch of Labels setup in Gmail but within this window you can also sort the information by Label name (Mailbox), Message count or Size. The color bar graph is also a nice visual indication of how much of Googles disk space you’re currently using. As you can see, I’m not using very much even though my total message count is over 7000 and Currently used is 330MB.

Now, go give it a try!

I’ve had the original iPhone 2G for going on nine months now. I really didn’t plan on getting the 3G model until the other day when I took a look on eBay to see how much people were selling the 2G models and the sale prices. Final selling prices were well over $300 and even $400 dollars which really surprised me. So I decided to get the upgrade and sell my 2G on eBay to recover the price of the new iPhone.

So the journey began yesterday when I listed my iPhone on eBay. I’m not a big eBay user but I’ve got almost forty sales and purchases under my belt. I’ve sold high dollar items like my old PowerBook G4 this past spring after getting a new MBP. So I’m not too worried about getting a good sale price for the iPhone. I’ve listed the auction for five days and as of right now I have no bids. No biggie, they’ll come in. The big question for me was which 3G to buy.

The first choice was deciding which size I wanted? The 8GB or the 16GB model? I really don’t use my phone much for the iPod features as much as I do the web, email and social networks like Twitter. So space was not an issue.

After thinking about for a day or so I decided to get the larger 16GB iPhone since I feel it will have a better resale value if I ever sell it. Which is very probable.

So after deciding on the 16GB model, the second choice was which color would I choose? As you may have seen in an earlier post, I’ve recently bought a Flip Mino. I got the black model of the Flip but after using it I’ve noticed how bad you can see all the finger prints and dust. I took my experience with the Flip and did some other research as to what the iPhone community thought about to two colors.

After reading many forum posts and blogs I almost had my mind made up. The last thing I wanted to do was to see the iPhone in person. So instead of going to the local Apple store as I did for the first iPhone purchase, I decided to go to the closer AT&T store. I think it was a good choice since when I arrived, there was only one other customer in the store. I spent a few minutes comparing both black and white and decided to go with white.

Prior to this point I had two concerns; the first was how do I get all my data and settings off the original iPhone and onto the new one. And second was; how do I prep my old iPhone to be sold on eBay?

After a little reading I found an article on iPhoneHacks.com that explains how you can use the same iTunes backup of the old device and restore it on the new iPhone. So this is what I did to tackle the first concern.

1. First I synced the old iPhone to iTunes which like we all know takes forever to complete a backup. I did this earlier in the morning before I left home because I had planned on stopping by the AT&T store later that day. For those of you that use SMS a lot and want the most recent conversations saved and transferred then you might want to do a backup closer to the time you purchase the new iPhone.

2. Next I went to the AT&T store (since it was closer to my home) and purchased the new iPhone. One thing I could have done was turn the old iPhone off prior to buying the new iPhone since an in store activation is required but if was no big deal. For the heavy SMS users this might prevent any missed messages.

One thing I did not like was that the box had to be opened in store to activate. That blew any “unboxing” shots that I may have wanted to take. They also plug the iPhone into their POS (Point of Sale) Windows PC for some reason. I don’t know if they do all that at the Apple store but it kind of bothered me.

Once I left the store my iPhone was activated and could be used.

3. After I got home I hooked up the new iPhone to the MBP and was prompted to either setup the iPhone as a new device or do a restore from backup. I choose the restore option but was prompted that the iPhone could not be restored since it had an earlier software update. My old iPhone was running version 2.0.2 and the new iPhone came with 2.0.1 software.

At that point I went into the iTunes prefs and disabled all devices to auto sync. Just in case it tried to sync before doing the software update and restore.

After the software was updated I was able to do a complete restore to the new iPhone from the old iPhone backup.

4. During the restore process I noticed my old phone still receiving emails. This was due to the phone being connected to my WiFi. So I turned off WiFi. Problem solved.

5. Once the restore was complete, which took some time, I verified all the iPhone sync settings in iTunes were correct (from screenshots I took earlier). After all were verified I performed a sync, which also took a long time to complete.

6. After the content sync was complete it was time to verify all the settings and data restored properly. Everything looked good with the exception of two items.

One was that visual voicemail was not setup and therefor did not restore my saved messages. This may have been my fault. Maybe if I would have gone through the setup prompts, the old messages would have been restored. If anyone knows please leave a comment. I’ll have to research that one later.

The only other thing that needed setup was the passcode required by policy for my employers Exchange server.

Once those two items was straightened out, the iPhone was back to the original state.

The second concern I had was how to erase all personal data from the old iPhone prior to selling it on eBay. After more research I found another article on iPhoneHacks.com that explains how Apple includes a secure reset and erase of all data in the 2.0 software.

To do this you go to Settings > General > Reset and choose Erase All Content and Settings from the list of options. This is supposed to do a secure write over all data and reset the iPhone to factory new setting, ready to be activated (or jailbroken) and synced. The process can take up to two hours to complete so you may want to plug it into the USB power adapter.

So here I am, new iPhone all restored and synced up, using the mobile WordPress app.

I have to say, I was concerned that the rounded plastic back of the 3G iPhone would bother me as I really liked the aluminum look and feel of the 2G. But after using it for a few hours it actually feels really nice in my hand. The iPhone 3G seems to be a tiny bit wider than the 2G as well but not noticeable.

I was also unsure about the color white but it doesn’t bother me and I’m getting used to the refreshing change from all those other black cell phones out there.

So in conclusion, I’m very pleased with the new 3G iPhone design and upgrade process. And with a little planning, you can reduce the pain factor to very low.

Now let’s see how well the new 3G speeds work out.

Gone are the days of upgrading WordPress manually. Thanks to Keith Dsouza of the Techie Buzz web site, you can now upgrade your WordPress blog with a few simple clicks of the mouse, all from the wp-admin console with the help from WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin.

The plugin installs just like any other plugin, in the wp-content/plugins folder on your WordPress install on your web server.

Once activated you will see the following message at the top of the Dashboard when an upgrade is available:

Once you click the link you will be presented with some dialog that will guide you through the upgrade process as show by the following screenshots. The dialog is broken down into three sections describing, what task has been done, the task status and what task needs to be done next.

Here you can see that some old WordPress files are backed up and ready for download to your system in case something goes wrong. The next step is to backup the database.

Here the WP database has been backed up and is ready for download. Next will show options for uploading the latest WP files.

I always choose to let the plugin get the latest version from wordpress.org.

The latest files have been successfully downloaded and unzipped to my web server. Next we go into maintenance mode for the site which is a very nice feature to let your readers know things are OK and why the site is down.

Now the site is in maintenance mode and you can verify by clicking the link. Next we de-activate all plugins, but not Auto Upgrade of course.

The plugins are de-activated and next the upgrade begins.

The upgrade install is complete but here you can check if a database update needs to be completed. The link opens a new window with the WP database upgrade button.

Here’s the Database Upgrade button.

We see that the WP database upgrade is complete.

Here we see that the plugins have been re-activated which was the next step after the database upgrade.

We’re almost done. Here we can see the WordPress upgrade has been completed and the plugin wants to do a bit of house cleaning from all the zipped and unzipped updates.

All files have been cleaned up and the upgrade is complete.

While there seems to be a lot of steps to complete a WordPress upgrade using this plugin, the alternative of doing a manual upgrade takes a lot longer to complete.

I’ve been using this plugin for some time now and I’ve had no issues. But, like anything, you may want to do a manual backup of your WP files and database prior to first using this plugin, just in case it doesn’t work as advertised for you. After you test and find it works… go for it. It’s truly a time saver. Easy button anyone?

In this How To I’ll show you a method of removing the DRM protection from purchased music from the iTunes music store. I have not tried this on any other DRM protected media but I don’t see why it would not work.

In order to remove the DRM protection from purchased music in iTunes you will need iMovie HD 6, which is a free download on the Apple web site. Once you have iMovie HD 6 installed on your system, follow these steps to remove the DRM:

1. Open iMovie HD and create a new project. The project name can be what ever you’d like since the project can be deleted once the process is complete.

2. Select the Media tab in iMovie and then click on your iTunes Library in the Audio browser window at the top of the interface. You can search for the song to make it easier to find.

3. Once you’ve found the song you want to convert, drag it to the audio time-line at the bottom.

4. iMovie will now import the file.

5. After the import is complete you need to add an image to the time-line or else the project will not export. To do this click the Photos tab above the media browser and select an image from either iPhoto or Aperture. The photo does not matter as it’s only used to allow the project to export. Disregard the Ken Burns Effect pallet as it will go away once the photo is rendered in the time-line.

6. Now the project is ready to be exported. To do this, click the Share menu and choose Quicktime. In the Compress movie for: drop down, select Expert Settings and then click the Share button. This will open the Save exported file as… window. From here you can choose where you’d like the exported file to be saved, I use the default Movies folder in my Home Folder. You’ll want to select the Export: drop down and choose Sound to AIFF as the export format. All other settings can be left at default. Then click Save and the project will save and compress the project.

7. At this point you can browse the Finder to the location you’ve saved the file and drag the .AIFF file into your iTunes Library.

8. Once the file is in your iTunes Library, you can change all the file info to match the Artist, song title, album and so forth. You can even drag the album art from the original file in iTunes out to your desktop and then drag the same file into the newly created DRM-Free file. You’ll also want to convert the new file to AAC by selecting the file and control-click or right click the file and choose Convert Selection to AAC in the context menu.

9. At this point the original song file has been stripped of it’s DRM and converted back to an audio AAC file that can used by GarageBand to create a ringtone for the iPhone.

Stay tuned for a How To on creating ringtones in GarageBand.

Disclaimer: The sole purpose of removing the DRM from purchased iTunes music in this How To is to allow the file to be used to create ringtones for the iPhone. These files are not being redistributed in any way.