Syncing google contacts on iOS

matt — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 04:11:59 +0000

I use my google account to keep my addresses synced up between all my devices. I realized that I was creating contacts on my iPhone or iPad and they weren’t showing up in my address book on my mac or in my google account. A simple google search didn’t seem to turn up what the issue was, and then after poking around a bit I realized what was going on. By default, when you connect your google account to your iOS device, it appears that it creates new contacts on the device, and not on your google account.

It was pretty easy to fix. Just go to the Settings app…

Tap on Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Then scroll down to the Contacts section.

Tap on Default Account, and make sure it’s set to your gmail contacts account, not ‘On My iPhone’. Contacts should now sync to your gmail account immediately when you update or add them.

Easy way to combine pdf files into one

matt — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:08:46 +0000

This is a bit of a techie post, but I wanted to document how I do this since it seems to come up once or twice a year and I always forget the steps.

I had to submit a form via email to get reimbursed for my flex spending account and had to include scanned copies of my receipts. I wanted to send this as one file, but couldn’t remember how to combine the tiff files that my scanner software generated into one file. If you do a google search, you end up finding little utilities for windows or a tutorial of how to use Adobe Acrobat to accomplish this. Using a mac or linux machine, this is pretty straightforward with some free software.

You need ImageMagick and ghostscript installed. For the mac, the easiest thing is to use the wonderful Darwin ports to do this. To do this with ports is easy:

$ sudo port install ImageMagick ghostscript

Then, if you have tiff files (or other formats) from your scanner you want to convert them to pdf. This is easy using the ImageMagick convert tool. For example:

$ convert filename.tiff filename.pdf

The convert command determines the format based on the file suffix, so this will convert the tiff file to a pdf. It really is a swiss army knife of tools and this is just one of the most basic things you can do with it.

Then, take the multiple pdfs and combine them into one using ghostscript:

$ gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=combined.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf

Tada!

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Syncing google contacts on iOS

Easy way to combine pdf files into one