Category: how-to

Dropping iCloud

John

I decided this week to drop iCloud, so I needed to find new solutions for syncing Contacts, Calendars, Tasks/Reminders, and Notes across my devices.

I’ve ended up with the following:

Contacts

I moved my Contacts to my main Google account and I sync them with Outlook on my laptop via GO Contact Sync Mod, with my HTC phone via the built in Android People App, and with my iPhone and iPad via Exchange ActiveSync (instructions).

Calendar

I moved my calendar to Google Calendar. I sync GCal with Outlook on my laptop via Google Calendar Sync, with my HTC phone via the built in Android Calendar App, with my iPhone and iPad via Exchange ActiveSync (instructions).

Tasks/Reminders

For my tasks I’ve moved to Wunderlist (link). It’s very simple (which means slightly limited), but free and available on Mac, Window, iOS, Android, and online. There’s no ability to create recurring tasks currently, but if I have a recurring task I make a recurring event on my calendar anyway.

Notes

I’m a Microsoft Office user and I love the flexibility of OneNote. I started using the mobile OneNote apps a while back and it has become my go-to notes app everywhere. OneNote ships with all Microsoft Office 2010 suites and there’s a free WebApp at SkyDrive.com. Android and iOS (iPhone, iPad) versions are available free. (Notes: 1). The first couple versions of OneNote for iOS were horrible, but the current one is quite usable. 2). The mobile apps are free unless you want to sync more than 500 notes).

Windows Automatic Updates (Free Reboot Included)

John

Do you ever get tired of your PC rebooting all on its own because it updated and decided it would reboot now instead of waiting for you to tell it to? Every once in a while I would  unlock my laptop to sync my netcasts for the morning commute and see that none of my apps were running. For the most part I never lost work and usually my nightly download of Tech News Today had finished downloading before iTunes closed and the PC rebooted, but it’s still annoying.

For those who are also annoyed by this you can drop a key in the registry so that Windows Update will never force an unattended reboot if a user in logged in.

You need to dig down to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows and add a new key named WindowsUpdate. Under WindowsUpdate we need another new key named AU. Under the AU key you need to create a new DWORD Value named NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers. This Value needs to then be set to 1.

So you will end up with the following: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU and a DWORD key named NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers with a value of 1

Remember, playing in the registry can be dangerous and just because I did something doesn’t mean it wasn’t stupid and/or dangerous.

Thanks to Paul Thurrott, Editor-in-Chief of the SuperSite for Windows at winsupersite.com and the author of many fine tomes including the Delphi 3 SuperBible.

You can read Paul’s guide for fixing this here.