It turns out that it is ridiculously easy to send Growl notifications like these

from Ruby - all it takes is a few line of code using the ruby-growl gem.

And the kicker? It can automatically be forwarded to the iPhone or the iPad using a excellent little app called "Prowl" .

So now (as you can see above) any action on our RFI reader (soon to be RFID reader lock) will show up as alerts on the iPhone.

I had to set up a Belkin wireless router today - and when it came to encryption I started off using WPA - all ok on the PC's I sued, but the Mac's, iPhone's and iPad's in the house refused to authenticate.

In the end it turned out that I had to use the extremely long Hex password - and from then on everything worked.

We have a lot of books - and over the years we have tried to keep track of some of these in various versions of databases.

The current favourites are Bookpedia on the Mac's - and iBookshelf on the iPhone, mainly because both of them can read barcodes using the built in cameras, a very handy feature.

This of course means that I would like to export data from iBookshelf on the iPhone and import the same data into Bookpedia, and as both support .csv files to do this, everything should be ok - not so.

The export file from iBookshelf looks like this :

As I really want to learn Ruby On Rails - and as I have chosen to build a "dashboard" for our home monitoring system (and not wanting to do it in Flash - as we have both iPhones and iPads) I found a ruby gem called "acs_as_dashboard" to start off with (version 0.4.0 for those that are interested).

But after wrestling with it on and off for 2 days and still not managing to get the application up and running I managed to find a downloadable demo called "acts_as_dashboard_example" - downloaded it, and it worked immediately!

One of the more positive improvements easily experienced with the iPad is iTunes syncing - I just timed a 1.3 Gb movie being transferred from my laptop to the iPad in 70 seconds - several times as fas as for the iPhone.