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.

First, Microsoft. Hotmail? Really? Have you really looked at Hotmail lately? It’s horrible. In fact, last I heard, it could be a detriment to getting a job. Sure lots of people probably still use Hotmail (not that I know personally of course), but your problem is, no one is excited about using Hotmail.

Second, Yahoo. Buzz.yahoo.com? Really? I don’t know if you noticed or not, but Buzz.yahoo.com is a straight rip on Digg. Try to innovate next time. Or better yet, take those resources and pour them into Flickr. It’s about the only viable business you have left.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/01/solar-eclipse-images-show-dazzling-corona-detail/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Everything after that question mark (in red) isn’t necessary to the user, and is only needed for the feed owner to track clicks from their feed. This isn’t a big deal by any means, but it is kinda annoying to me. I parse my river of RSS feeds and occasionally pass along interesting links to my twitter feed, and I prefer to send the cleanest URL possible. Sure it’s shortened automatically with bit.ly, but it still bugs me, so I’ve been looking for a solution to clean up the URL.

I’m not a big JS coder, but I figured there had to be a Greasemonkey script that would do the trick, and after doing a bit of searching, I found the solution over at userscripts.org. Enter FeedBurnerTrackingQueryStripper. This little Greasemonkey script does the trick perfectly. It’s strips the tracking information from the URL after the page loads. So the feed owner is happy, and the user is left with a simpler URL.

Previously you’d only see real spam once every month or so, with an occasional spammy (or was it just annoying?) event now and then. Today alone, there have been approximately 80 or so spam entries and the number is still climbing; and not just short items – but long ones that fill my Google Reader screen, and then some.

It’s obvious someone has figured out an automated system to post spam events to Upcoming. Or should I say, a spammer just turned his attention toward Upcoming, and realized it was an easy mark?

Or so I thought at first. I’ve been flagging events as spam whenever I could, since this started, but it finally got annoying enough that I sent the powers that be a terse message about getting a handle of this and maybe “using captcha or something.” And what do you know…they do! You see, you don’t need to bother w/ captcha when entering a new event, but you do need to when creating a new account. Here’s a sample below:

It seems some crafty spammer has figured out how to automagically read this type of captcha? It was just a couple weeks ago that I saw an article asking “Has CAPTCHA Been Broken?” It went on to talk about a Chinese hacker that had a complete pricelist of captchas that could be countered, but that Yahoo’s was currently unbreakable. Well…it appears things have changed.

Or perhaps they’re getting paid enough by their advertisers nowadays to hire an army full of people that know one English character from another. Either way, it’s obvious that the current state of human verification just isn’t good enough. Perhaps RSS spam filter services are just around the corner? Hrumpf.