CantRemembrances

hola, amigos. s’up? i know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya, but I’ve had a lot of stuff goin’ down.

i’ve had an issue with Notes on my iPhone. sure, i could use a content service like Evernote — which i did — but an even simpler tact for us Mac folks is to keep a couple long-lived Notes around and just edit them. lists n’ shit. you know the deal

anyway, so every once in a while Mail.app will have a sync conflict, and every once in a while i’ll click [Sync Later], always by mistake. now what i noticed is that there was a one-to-one (or nearly) relationship between the times i made that mistake, and Notes that would appear on my iPhone … that i couldn’t delete

• i’d delete them, then they’d reappear after sync
• there was no trace of them in Mail.app. i explicitly flushed my Trash a couple times, but to no effect
• you’d figure that the the mobile Notes would have singular authority & ownership, but nope. i’d delete them, they’d come back, and they kept getting older and more annoying
• the friendly Genius Bar staff had no other advice to give besides doing an explicit iTunes re-sync via Advanced | Replace information on this iPhone | [x] Notes, but to no effect

now, i know that this isn’t a particularly technical post. however since i couldn’t find any reference to anyone else having this problem — at least based on the keywords i was using — i figured i’d drop a few of them and describe the solution:

• view the Note, select all, and delete
• the mobile app auto-deletes the empty Note
• voila!. it’s gone for good

there. now you know what i know :)

i just installed Prowl, and it’s a handy little beast. it allows me to route my locally-issued Growl notifications to their Apple Push Notification server, which then routes them to the Prowl iPhone client. it all makes a simple, sweet, and extremely versatile combination

the hierarchy of preferences is somewhat distributed however …

• the Prowl site will explain all the installation stuff. the first level of preferences is configuring the Prowl plug-in to be your default Growl notification route. it’s good that the Mac plug-in allows you to choose a pass-through notification method so that you will still see the events locally
• then there’s the iPhone client preferences, under Settings. they explain in the FAQ that you need to change your settings, then start up the Prowl client to commit them to the server. confusing, because your changes don’t take effect until that commit, so it’s just a matter of knowing. also, the Settings only allow you to disable Sound while the app is running (which is a nice feature)
• it took me a further read to figure out that i needed to disable the background push Sound & Vibrate feature through the general Notification Settings. you can tweak the Prowl app so that it’s seen and not heard

i’m a big fan of TwitterFox because it’s equally simple & straightforward. i chose Scalaris as my Mac Twitter client of choice for the same reason — i don’t needs one of the feature-rich hefty ones

eventually i’ll be updating my AWS health checks to use the prowl Ruby gem. very thoughtful!

thanks to @laughingsquid for the tip on Prowl. i’m looking forward to a further geometrical increase in information overload!