If you are familiar with Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and you would like some ringtones/message tones for your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch running iOS5, you can download these 21 ringtones and 96 Message tones (some of which make great ringtones on their own) that I have compiled:
DOWNLOAD MONTY PYTHON RINGTONES 2.0 (14.84MB total)
UPDATED TO 2.0 ON DECEMBER 4TH, 2011 to remove duplicates, redo some clips for quality and add more tones. There were 105 tones total, now there are 117.

If you are unsure as to what Monty Python and the Holy Grail is, and don’t have the money to buy the movie immediately (even though you should) you can always ask Siri about it, because she knows her Monty Python quotes:

The Year We Make Contact in Uranus

The song we will be using for this example is quite possibly the greatest science fiction anthem ever written, entitled “The Year We Make Contact in Uranus” by electric violinist extraordinaire, Erich Meatleg. The song does not yet show up in popular lyrics sites so we will be adding the lyrics from a blog post by the artist.

 
 
Step 1) Purchase and download the greatest science fiction anthem of all time.
Step 2) Select the lyrics from this page and copy them.

Copy these lyrics

Step 3) Once the song has been downloaded into your iTunes library, right click on it and select “Get Info”.
Step 4) When the information window is open, click the Lyrics pane on the right, and past the lyrics to your new favorite song into the window. Be sure to format the text so that each line is not too long, that way each line will fit the width of your iDevice and not run off the side of the screen.
Step 5) Enjoy, and memorize all of the lyrics to this anthem, in hopes that you may some day impress your friends in Karaoke.

For those with a lot of songs without lyrics that you want to automatically update, see this post on the Cult of Mac website:
http://www.cultofmac.com/automatically-add-lyrics-to-all-songs-in-your-itunes-library/58650

Yesterday I visited an Apple Store here in Japan and asked about the rubber, dome-shaped tips on the end of them. I knew that they didn’t sell them but I wanted to ask anyway. As soon as I asked one of the specialists on the floor, that asked me to wait a minute, and they dashed back into the employees only section of the store. After I had browsed through the store for few minutes, the specialist returned with this bag of six tips that he handed me for no charge:
I thanked him profusely and went home happy that I had asked. I don’t think this is Apple’s official policy as it isn’t listed anywhere, I think the specialist was just being nice. Also, for the record, I made no mention of the fact that I had a business account with Apple or that I am a certified Apple consultant. They just treated me like a normal customer.

I am not certain if this baggie with the SKU numbers are the numbers for ordering these replacement parts; for all I know the specialist could have taken an empty random bag and given me six rubber tips out of a jar. If you are a small Apple repair shop, you might ask about ordering some parts from Apple with these SKU numbers:
(1P) P/N: 605-1916
(9D) : 0942 1V

If you are a normal user of the headphones and you find yourself, like I was, in need of some rubber tips, if you don’t have an Apple store in your area, perhaps you could ask your local Mac repair center to look into ordering these parts. Hopefully, Apple will just start selling replacement tips for a few bucks a baggie and no one will have to fret and ask like I had to.

Now, you may have all of your TV shows in the TV Shows section of iTunes, and the easiest get them there is to use the built-in iTunes method. When you add a home-ripped TV Show into your iTunes library, by default, it is imported into your Movies section. Usually, you must go to the Movies section, select a bunch of files that you want to classify as TV Shows, right click (control click) and Get Info, then in the Options section you can choose the Media Kind that iTunes should classify the file as, and in the Video section you can name the Show and the Season.

While this works fine for organizing TV Shows within iTunes, if you use Front Row (which accesses your iTunes library) the TV Shows can sometimes show up in the Movies section like in the following example. Here, episodes of the TV Show Beauty and the Beast are found in the Movies section of Front Row:

The solution I have found is to use one of Dougs AppleScripts for iTunes called Set Video Kind of Selected. Dougs AppleScripts are an invaluable resource for the Mac community. Here is how to use this script to fix this problem in Front Row:
1) After downloading and installing this AppleScript, go to iTunes and Navigate to your TV Shows Section.
2) Then, click on one TV Show, and then use Command(⌘)+A to select all of the TV Shows.
3) Now, click on the AppleScript Scroll in the menu bar (highlighted in red) and click Set Video Kind of Selected .
4) In the window that opens up, double click Video Kind, then TV Show, then click Done.
5) You will see a Done! window, and after clicking Thanks! you will be able to check Front Row to see that the problem has been solved. In the last image, you can see that when I scroll down to BE… in the Movies section of Front Row, it no longer displays my clients Beauty and the Beast shows in the movies section.

Thank you Doug for all of your hard work!
This has been tested on 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard.

For our example we will use a Berkly education podcast found at:
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php
On the right side of this image, I have highlighted the RSS icons for some of the audio podcasts available on this page.

When clicking on one of these icons, Safari will take you to a feed page that looks like this:
On the right side of the page you can find an “Actions” menu. This menu will have several options, one of which is “Subscribe in iTunes”:

After subscribing, iTunes will begin downloading your podcasts according to your default settings.

Don’t forget that if you want to change your podcast download settings, you can do so in iTunes. First click on the Podcasts section in your sidebar, then look for the “Settings” button in the bottom of the iTunes window.  A window will come up that will allow you to set the default downloading and deleting behavior for all podcasts that you are subscribed to, as well as the behavior for individual podcasts.  To change the  downloading behavior for individual podcasts, just choose the name of a podcast from the drop-down  menu where “Podcast Defaults” is highlighted.

Software used for this tip:
Safari 4.0.4
iTunes 9.0.2
Mac Os X (10.6.2) Snow Leopard

First, open your System Preferences and click on the Energy Saver options.

Then locate the schedule button in the lower right part of the window.

From here you can choose the times and the days of the week to startup, wake, sleep, restart and shutdown.

Syncing with Google

Syncing over your Local Network

Another method of syncing calendars and other data across Macs is called BusySync.

Busy Sync allows you to share calendar information effortlessly across your local network.  And it can also be used to sync your Macintosh with your iPhone/iPod Touch via iTunes or MobileMe. Click on the video icons for BuyMac’s instructional videos on how to do that.

BusySync has a per computer price of $20. You can also purchase BusyCal, which is like “iCal Pro”. BusyCal is a more fully featured calendar application with all of the BusySync features for $40 per computer. Using either BusySync of BusyCal will allow you to edit your Google calendars on  your iPhone/iPod Touch and sync it back to your Macs, so if your business is heavily reliant on Google Apps this could be a very valuable program to have. One advantage of using this company over using just CalDAV syncing is that they have a great reputation for customer support.

Spanning Sync is a third party solution that has worked similarly for quite some time. With Spanning Sync, everything works as it should, you can edit your calenders on your iPhone/iPod Touch as well across computers. Several computers can be synched with one account.  Spanning Sync requires a yearly subscription of $25, or a lifetime membership for $65. Why use this instead of the free built in CalDAV support on the mac and Microsoft exchange support on the iPhone/iPod Touch?  Spanning Sync makes this argument on their site:

How does Google CalDAV compare to Spanning Sync?

1. Cost
   Google CalDAV is free, and what could be better than free? Simple: something that makes you money, which is exactly what the Spanning Sync does with our Save 5+Make 5 program.
   Several people have already made over $1,000 just by including their personal referral code in blog posts, Twitter tweets, and comments. Brian Dusablon is one of those people, and here’s what he had to say:
   It’s pretty easy to get four referrals, and if you get five or more, you’re at a profit already. [Within eight weeks] I hit $1,000. I’m donating half to charity, and I’m buying a Drobo.
   We think saving money is great, but making money is even better.
2. iPhone Support
   Calendars synchronized using CalDAV become read-only on iPhone. One of our customers recently rolled out 700 iPhones and 200 iPod touches. This lack of iPhone compatibility makes Google’s CalDAV solution a non-starter for them, and for anyone else looking for bidirectional sync between iPhone and Google Calendar.
   Calendars synchronized with Spanning Sync are editable on Google Calendar, iCal, and the iPhone calendar, and changes made in any of those places will show up on all three (after syncing your iPhone using iTunes).
3. Customer Support
   Sync is inherently complex, but when problems do crop up they can usually be solved quickly with just a little customer support. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t provide any. They’ve even said publicly that it’s “not feasible” for them to respond to individual requests for support.
   At Spanning Sync, we provide support our customers have called “tremendous”, “excellent”, and “stellar”, regardless of whose software is causing the problem: Google’s, Apple’s, or ours.
4. Contact Sync
   Spanning Sync syncs not only calendars but also contacts, including contact photos. Click here to see a video. And of course contact sync works great with iPhone, just like our calendar sync.

Spanning Sync also supports existing iCal calendars, read-only Google calendars, MobileMe sharing, and true Mac-to-cloud “push”, none of which are supported by Google CalDAV.

If you are using CalDAV on your iPhone/iPod Touch properly, that is, if you set it up as a  Microsoft Exchange account, then you can edit the events on your iPhone/iPod Touch.  If your iPhone/iPod Touch is simply subscribed to the CalDAV account in the calendar app, then it will be read only and uneditable like Spanning Sync suggests.

This tip has been tested in Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) and Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6).

My iPhone is set to Japanese so “コピー” on the left equals “Copy” and “ペースト” on the right is “Paste”.