Well following the big merge of my offline contacts from OS X’s Address Book and all my contacts in Gmail, I was a bit overwhelmed by the load of contacts on my phone. There were a ton of people that I didn’t really need on there, but there’s really no documentation on how to control what’s synced to your phone. If you have multiple calendars, you go to the Google Sync page on your phone’s web browser, and configure the calendars you want to sync, but there’s nothing like this for your contacts. Even in iTunes/Address Book, I had a special phone group that would get synced to my phone rather than the whole address book. So I started poking around.

As it turns out, Gmail has a sort of hidden way to manage this called “My Contacts”. If you switch to the Contacts view in Gmail in your web browser, you should see “My Contacts” near the top left, as well as any groups you might have. Also note “Other Contacts” at the bottom of the contact groups list.

After a bit of experimenting, I determined that “My Contacts” is what gets sync’d over-the-air (aka OTA) to your phone, and “Other Contacts” correlates to “Global Address List”. I went through “My Contacts” in Gmail, and selected all the unnecessary contacts and removed them from that group.

Now on my phone, I have much more manageable list of contacts, and if I need to look for one that was removed, I can do a search in the “Global Address List” (aka GAL). In fact, just like in Apple Mail & Address Book on the desktop, if you start addressing an email on your iPhone, the first hits will be from your local contacts, followed by the hits from the GAL. Easy peasy!

Update: I did finally find this page, after the fact, which talks about “My Contacts” being the group that gets synced to your phone.

Since the Model Identifier can be viewed in the System Profiler app, it seemed there had to be an easy way to grab this from the terminal. After a quick Google search, I found the lead I needed at Wikipedia. As it turns out, there’s a command line version of System Profiler called “system_profiler” (of course). After looking over the man page, I constructed the following command, which can easily be issued via ARD to a batch of systems.

system_profiler -detailLevel mini | grep "Model Identifier:"

This will return just the single line from the System Profile…

Model Identifier: MacPro3,1

Using that same command, you can use ARD’s “Send a UNIX Command…” to pass that command to a bunch of systems at once, and you’ll end up with a result screen showing the Model Identifier for all queried systems. Easy peasy! The system_profile command seems to work as far back as 10.4.11 (8S2167), but failed on 10.4.11 (8S165), so your actual mileage may vary.

Big props go out to Google for knowing everything and getting me on the right path.

UPDATE: Reader Chad had and even better method…

Using the command: system_profiler SPHardwareDataType | grep "Model Identifier:" gets you there much faster. It’s not having to go through as much data.

Similarly, system_profiler SPHardwareDataType | grep "Serial Number (system):" is handy too if you need to check the exact computers.

AH4 iPhone App

So Apple apparently didn’t approve the Ninjawords dictionary application due to “inappropriate” words. I wonder why American Heritage got a free pass?

Come on Apple… Stop being so evil. I’ve supported your stupid brand from back in the days when you were the underdog and I would be pelted with rocks and garbage for admitting to be a fan. Time do the right thing and change direction before you slide right into the role as the villain in your pivotal 1984 commercial.

More on the issue over at Mashable.

UPDATE: Apple’s Phil Schiller responds!