We've come along way from the simple smily :) to a full suite of useful characters.  Starting with iOS5 your iPhone, iPad, or iPod is now capable of sending and receiving emoji characters.  To enable them, follow these steps:

1. On your phone tap Settings
2. Select General
3. Select Keyboard
4. Tap International Keyboards
5. Tap Add New Keyboard... 
6. Scroll down and select Emoji

Now that emoji is enabled, you can access it from your on-screen keyboard by clicking the International Keyboard icon (Globe) at the bottom of the screen.

 Read more from Apple HERE

There are basically three conditions where you may need to reset an application or phone to resume from an error or lockup.

I.  App Not Responding - Home Button Works

In this case, the app you're using may have stopped responding or locked up.  Or, it may simply be stalled on the "Updating..." screen endlessly without ever continuing or even failing.  If pressing the home button returns you to the home screen from where you can see the icons for your apps try this:

1. Double-tap the Home button.
   
   
2. From the app switching ribbon at the bottom of the screen, hold your finger on the icon for the offending application until it wiggles.
3. Click the red circle in the upper-left corner of the app's icon to force it to close.
   
   
4. Press the Home button to return to the home screen.
5. Re-launch the app.

II.  App Not Responding - Home Button Not Working

In this case, not only has the app stopped working, but pressing the home button has no effect.  In this case:

1. Hold the Lock (Top) button on your phone until the "slide to power off" option appears.
2. Release the Lock button.
3. Hold the Home button until the application closes.
4. Re-launch the app.

III.  Phone Not Responding

If nothing else works and the entire phone is unresponsive:

1. Hold the Home and Lock buttons at the same time until the Apple logo appears.
2. Wait for the phone to reboot.

Matt Yoder's "Death Envelope" presentation from Defcon 16 presents a simple option.  You give a tamper-evident physical envelope (or USB key) containing your passwords to someone you trust with instructions to open it only after you pass.  Ideally, this could contain only your master password to whatever scheme you use for organizing your passwords.  I use LastPass, but there are other good alternatives like 1Password, KeePass and others.

An idea i like is to use Shamir's Secret Sharing.  If you recognize the name, it's because he's the "S" in "RSA".  In this scheme you distribute pieces of the key among friends, family, attorney etc.  Then, a pre-defined number of key pieces (but not all) are required to re-construct the master key/password.  The upside here is that a number of your trusted key holders would have to conspire to access your info pre-dirt-nap.  The downside, there's some math involved in reconstructing the key from just a few pieces.  But, that's a one time exercise that surely they could get through.

A third option is the Dead Man's Switch.  You periodically receive an email from a service.  When you stop responding (presumably because you've gone to the great crypto farm in the sky) the service can send instructions and passwords via email to your designee(s).  There are paid services that can set this up for you or you could configure something on your own.

In life, it's important to remember to use different passwords for everything.  That way if one of your passwords is compromised, the damage is limited to just the site it was stolen from.  Make sure your passwords are complex enough to not be easily guessed and follow standard password best practices.  Of course, making your passwords hard to guess can also make them hard to remember.  That's why I use LastPass.  But, a system like this means that your master key is the "key to the kingdom".  Breaking this one key then gives an adversary access to ALL your other passwords.  Accordingly, this master password (better yet a pass phrase) should be complex and secure to the point of paranoia.  Pretty much every password management program comes with generator that can generate unique, strong passwords.

She's perfectly happy to watch on the LCD television in the guest room, but the problem is that the only device in there is the AppleTV and it won't stream from the Mac Mini / Plex Server that's located in the family room.  The initial attempt at a solution was to get another Mini DisplayPort to HDMI cable so she could access Plex from her laptop and display it on the LCD television.  While this works, it's a bit clumsy and requires taking over her MacBook Pro while she's watching anything.

Roku to the Rescue

In my quest for finding a device that would stream from the main Plex media center, it looked like a Roku was the way to go.  For $80 at Best Buy I picked up the XD model that streams 1080p.  It was dead simple to hookup; AC and HDMI.  Create a free Roku account.  Install the Plex "Private Channel" and voila!  Access to the Plex library with a simple remote control and fairly intuitive user interface.

The only issue (and it's not a Roku issue) is that Movies that we ripped from our DVDs as Video_TS folders will not stream.  This is the same issue we get when using the Plex app on iOS for the iPad or iPhone.  Apparently it has to do with licensing MPEG2.  It looks like the "solution" is to convert those Video_TS rips to MKV files.  We've got about 500 movies on the Drobo, so that's no simple undertaking.  I found a script online but it's not working for me... looks like from the comments that MacTheRipper may be the reason.

I'm still working out whether I'll convert them onesy-twosy with the MakeMKV GUI or try to write my own script.

I've been asked several times lately about my home entertainment setup.  About six months ago we ditched Dish Network and went to a mostly subscription-free solution.

I'd been toying with the idea of cutting the cord for a while, but it seemed like there wasn't a fully-baked solution out there that would satisfy my needs.  I tried MythTV and was somewhat impressed, but it was difficult to install and required a lot of manual configuration.  I realize strides have been made since my early attempts.  There are now Live distros that are pretty much ready to go to get you up and runing quickly.  Still I'd say it's best left to Linux tinkerers.

Prologue

Skip this part if you're only interested in the details of the "new" setup.

I saw an ad for Direct TV telling me they could save me a ton of money on my television subscription.  I ran the numbers and, sure enough, it looked like I would save significant money during the first year.  But, after the introductory period it was going to cost me about $5/month more than what I was paying for Dish.  Was the up-front savings worth the hassle of changing providers, getting new equipment installed and setup and teaching the wife how to use it?  I thought not.

Instead, I called Dish Network and told them about the offer and asked if they were willing to offer me anything similar.  I was told that they were willing to reduce my $88/mo bill to $83/mo… not exactly what I was hoping for.  I thanked the rep for her time and told her I'd be better of switching to Direct TV.  She transferred me to a "customer retention specialist".  The "specialist" said she could reduce the price of my HDTV add-on package from $20/mo to $10/mo if I signed a new 2 year contract.  Again, this wasn't much of a deal so I told her I wasn't going to sign a new contract and I'd weigh my options and call back.

I took to Twitter and expressed my surprise at the lack of competitiveness from Dish Network.  Within a few minutes I received a direct message from a Dish Network rep telling me they'd love to keep my business and to send her my account info to see what they could do.  I sent her the account info, the details of the Direct TV offer and the history of what I had been offered from Dish.  She replied that I had already received the best offer they could provide and that I'd spend more money in the long run with Direct TV.  "Maybe" I said, "But I'll save $600 in the first year so it's going to take a while".

Disgusted, I called Dish Network's Customer Service and asked to cancel my service.  They asked what they could do to keep me as a customer.  I told them they'd already failed at that and I was tired of discussing it.

Now what?  It seemed it was time to see if we could make this "Internet TV" thing work.  I made a list of all the content that we had saved on our Dish DVR as well as the scheduled programs that we had so that we could see what we would be missing and how we could go about getting it again.

What We Had

We already had two AppleTVs, both the current model and the previous generation.  The newer AppleTV is great because it gives us access to all our iTunes media as well as the iTunes Store for renting TV shows and movies, and NetFlix.

The old AppleTV was running XBMC and Boxee to get access to various content plug-ins, but honestly we rarely used it once we got the newer version.  Beyond that we had a DVD player and an XBOX360.  The XBOX also gave us access to NetFlix.

What We (Thought We) Needed

Television Shows

Returning to the list of content that we had given up, it was obvious that we needed an antenna since the vast majority of the programs that we watched and recorded were on broadcast television.  This was a good thing and an easy win.

I used these plans to build an HDTV antenna.  It's not the prettiest in the world, but we hid it out of site and it worked like a dream.  We used it until I discovered that we already had a rather large OTA (Over-The-Air) antenna mounted in the rafters of our garage (who knew?).  I rerouted some cabling to distribute the signal to our 2 televisions and we were back in the TV game… except.

Except that we were now slaves to the program schedule.  If we wanted to watch something we had to actually be home in front of the television when it aired.  By giving up our DVR we could no longer time-shift recordings and it had been many years since we had a VCR hooked up.  And after growing accustomed to HD, there was no way I was digging that VCR out of the closet.

My search brought me to Elgato's EyeTV One.  It's a USB dongle that accepts an OTA HDTV signal and lets you watch television on your computer.  The included software was quite good and includes an on-screen guide with search capabilities and, most importantly, the ability to act as a DVR with smart schedules to record the shows we wanted to watch.

This lead us to the next hurdle.  Watching TV on my 15" MacBook Pro was not quite the same experience as watching it on the 50" Plasma.  We needed a way to get that content back on the big television.  I purchased a cable kit from MicroCenter to take the Mini Display Port and the mini TosLink outputs on the MacBook Pro and combine them into an HDMI connection that could be hooked to the television (or AV receiver).  Now we were really back in the TV game… except.

Except now I had to leave my laptop hooked up to the television with cables hanging everywhere like it was on life support.  And, whenever we went out I couldn't take my laptop with me because that meant disconnecting the antenna and possibly missing some scheduled recording.

What We Really Needed

Obviously we needed a computer dedicated to the task of being the home media center.  I knew it wasn't going to be a beige (or black) box with noisy fans sitting in the living room.  The logical answer was the Mac Mini.  There's a wealth of information online from folks who have successfully used the Mini as the heart of their home entertainment center.  This is where I should have started all along.

I decided to look for an Intel 2.53GHz Mini, found a suitable one on Craigslist and purchased it for a great price.  I wiped the drive, installed Snow Leopard, installed the EyeTV software and hooked up my display converter.  And finally, we really were back in the TV game.  The EyeTV interface is fairly intuitive and is built for the 15-foot viewing experience providing on-screen guide information and DVR controls.

That solved our OTA television needs, but there was still some other content we wanted that wasn't available on our AppleTV using NetFlix.  To get more content we turned to Plex.  Plex is a fork of the XBMC project that was originally built for Mac OS X, but has since been ported to other operating systems.

Plex is simply brilliant.  It has a built in media manager for organizing the movie and TV shows that you may already have in a variety of file formats.  But it also supports hundreds of plug-ins that allow you to get content from a variety of sources like ABC, Hulu, YouTube, FoxNews, CNN, ESPN, etc.  It's amazing how much quality content is available for free.  I regularly use the plug-ins for watching Revision3, ESPN3, and PokerStars.TV.

Sports

Which brings us to sports.  Major sports fans will likely have a more difficult time with dropping subscription televesion service.  Obvsiously you can still get broadcast games with your OTA antenna, but you won't get the events from ESPN, ESPN2, FoxSports Net, Speed and the like.  As I mentioned previously, the AppleTV has MLB.TV which allows you to watch all MLB games for $99/year.  The caveat here (and it's a big one) is that if you live in a major market, you won't be able to watch any games from your home team.  No home games.  No away games.  I'm sure there's away around this restriction if you're dedicated, but it simply wasn't worth investigating for me.

Movies

The movies category is pretty well covered with iTunes (AppleTV) and NetFlix (AppleTV or Plex).  You can rent the latest releases on iTunes for about $3 - $5 each.  Once you rent a movie, you'll have to wait for it to buffer for a few minutes before you can begin watching.  The amount of time it takes to buffer depends on your Internet connection speed.  For older movies, NetFlix can't be beat.  There's a mammoth library of content that can be streamed that's included in the $9/month subscription price.

And, of course, you can still watch your own DVDs.  While we could use the DVD player on the Mini to play DVDs, I chose instead to rip our entire DVD library to have each movie available digitally (and indexed with cover art by Plex).  For ripping I used Mac The Ripper.  I didn't need to convert or shrink anything, so it was pretty straightforward to just rip each DVD into it's own folder with Audio_TS and Video_TS subfolders that Plex can scrape and index.

This excerise presented the next challenge.  The 320GB hard drive in the Mini wasn't going to be able to hold copies of all our DVDs.  Oh, hey, what about that Drobo that I won in a Twitter contest and never got around to using before now?  Yeah, this would be a good time to unbox that.  I hooked the Drobo to the Mini using FireWire 800 and slapped a few 1TB drives in it and now along with plenty of storage space we also have data security in the event of a hard drive failure.

Bringing It All Together (aka "Wife-Proofing")

The piece of the puzzle that was missing was some way to bring all the components together into a relatively user-friendly setup that the wife would operate while I was out of town without calling me for tech support or to complain that it was simply too complicated.

Cue Remote Buddy.  At first glance $30 (€19.99) for remote control software seemed a bit excessive.  However, I can say that after downloading and installing the free 30 day trial it was clear that there was no way in hell I was ever going to not use it.  The ease-of-use and customizability provided more than justify the price tag.  If you venture down the Mac-Mini-as-media-center road, I can't recommend Remote Buddy enough.  You will not regret buying it.  Besides being preconfigured to control all the applications you'd want to use, it allows you write (or download) your own scripts that you can trigger using your remote control.  I now control the entire system with the old, white, 6-button Apple remote and it works beautifully.

Hardware:

• AppleTV 2nd Gen ($99)
• Mac Mini ($350 on Craigslist)
• Apple 6-Button Remote (Already had this from our previous AppleTV)
• Elgato EyeTV One ($90)
• Cables ($70)
• Drobo (Free to me.  $399 MSRP)

Software:

• EyeTV (Free w/ EyeTV Hardware purchase)
• Plex (Free)
• Remote Buddy (€19.99)
• iTunes (Free)

Subscriptions:

• NetFlix ($9/month)

Pros:

• Saving almost $90/month on subscription television services.
• No rain-fade.
• Having our iTunes library easily available from our home media center.
• Integrated internet channels (YouTube, Revision3, etc.)

Cons:

• Limited sports programming.
• Streaming depends on the quality of your Internet connection.
• Some premium channels have no Internet availability.*

* I'm sure if you're enterprising enough you could find an _alternative_ method of obtaining this content.

I felt guilty.  Mr. Drobo surely deserved a better life than what I was giving him.  Many friends suggested that their home was more Drobo friendly and would gladly take him off my hands for the same price I had paid.  Some even offered to purchase him for a reasonable price.  But, I knew I was just waiting for the right time to bring him into his rightful place in the family.

The right time finally came when I bought a Mac Mini to be used as our media center computer.  Now, with a machine that was always on (we're a 2-laptop family), the Drobo would have a suitable place to live.  And so it was that I ventured down to Micro Center and picked up a few 7200RPM 1.0TB drives to fill his empty stomach.  Mr. Drobo was happy.  Very happy.

Now, I've migrated our entire DVD collection onto the Drobo.  Took some time with MacTheRipper, but totally worth it to be able to access our entire library from within Plex.  He also hosts a backup of my primary iTunes and iPhoto libraries as well as a couple of user-specific folder shares for making stuff readily available on the network.

The connection is FW800 and I've never had any problem with the streaming.  Everything just works... flawlessly.  Most importantly, I've got piece of mind that in the event of a drive failure, there's data redundancy and I can simply replace a drive and carry on.  That is a HUGE win in our small network setup.  I still use a combination of Amazon S3 and Jungle Disk to make offsite backups of critical/irreplaceable things (photos mostly).  But Mr. Drobo happily sits below the television protecting all our data and serving all our media.

Domo arigato, Mr. Drobo.  Domo.

Recently I wanted/needed to move my EyeTV archive folder from my Mac Mini's internal hard drive to my Drobo.  The instructions from Elgato made it sound fairly simple and, in fact, it was with one small exception.  The steps outlined for moving your archive are:

1. Change the location of the EyeTV Archive folder in EyeTV's preferences.
2. Copy any existing files from the old folder location to the new one.
3. Make sure your user account has the appropriate write permissions on the new archive folder.
4. Restart EyeTV.

When I did this, all of my Library recordings were copied over as well as my schedules for recordings that were coming up within the next week.  What I was missing, however, were my SmartGuides (Items that query the programming guide to find occurrences of programs that I want to record).

I opened up a Terminal window and navigated to the old archive location.  From there, I did an ls -a and saw that there were a couple of "hidden" files (Folders actually) that I had not copied over when using Finder.  Specifically, .EyeTVPlaylists and .EyeTVSmartGuides.  The leading dot (.) in the filename is an indicator to OS X (and the underlying BSD architecture) that these are hidden items.  By default, OS X's built-in Finder doesn't display them.

Unlike Windows, there's no "Display Hidden Files and Folders" options in Folder View Options.  Instead, you'll need to open up your Terminal and issue the following command:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

This changes the default setting for Finder.  Then, for the changes to take effect, you'll need to restart Finder:

killall Finder

And, voila... now your hidden files will be displayed alongside all your other files in the GUI Finder windows.

When you're done and you want these files to be hidden again use this:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE

and finally restart Finder for the changes to take effect:

killall Finder

and you'll be back to the default settings.