Treating Painfully Chapped Lips

1. Exfoliate. Dry your lips. Take some granulated sugar and rub your lips with the sugar. This is a pleasant way of removing dry flaky skin.
2. When you're done, wash away the sugar with a little water and pat your lips dry with a towel.
3. Treat and protect. Apply an (extremely) small amount of coconut oil. Coconut oil is solid at room temperature; a tiny amount goes a long way.
4. For the first day, reapply as necessary. You should see a significant improvement in 24 hours.
5. Afterwards, as a general rule, reapply as infrequently as possible, waiting until you really need it. Applying too often seems to make things worse.

Fixing Two Issues with iCloud sync not working with iBooks on iOS 9

Scenario One. You're busy creating an ePub. You make some changes and reload the book onto your iPad so you can view the changes. But when you try to open the book in iBooks, it barfs out an error message along the lines of, "Failed to load book because the requested resource is missing," and immediately closes the book.

What happened? You created a number of chapters, say chapter1.xhtml, chapter2.xhtml, and chapter3.xhtml. You flipped through the chapters until you were at chapter3.xhtml. Then you closed the eBook on your iPad and did some more work. In the course of your work you either deleted or renamed chapter3.xhtml. Even when you delete an eBook, your iPad remembers your place from last time you closed the book. So when you reload the book and try to open it, iBooks looks for the "missing" chapter, can't find it, has an existential crisis, and quits.

The solution. If you can remember the name of the file you renamed or deleted, create an empty file with the same name, reload the book on your iPad, and navigate away from the offending section of the book. If that doesn't work, try the fix for Scenario Two below.

Scenario Two. You're busy creating an ePub. You make some changes and reload the book onto your iPad so you can view the changes. But when you try to open the book in iBooks, you can't see any of the changes. You see an older version of the ePub.

What happened? I'm not 100% sure. Looks like under some circumstances even when you delete a book, iCloud keeps a local copy. Then when you try to load a new version of the book that it thinks is the same as the old version, it can't be arsed to actually load the new version and simply brings the old local copy back from the grave.

The solution.

1. Change both a) the ePub filename; and b) the title of the book in the .opf file. (Yes, you have to do both or the workaround won't work.)
2. Import the book into iBooks on Mac OS X as usual and sync to your iPad.
3. Open the book and make sure the changes are present.

Oops, did you already use the final title of the book? Then you're screwed; you'll never be able to use it again without reverting to that earlier version. The only workaround: change the title to something you can live with, e.g. capitalize every word in the title, even prepositions (assuming you hadn't already done that; if so, do the opposite)

In terms of best practices, I'd suggest that until Apple fixes these issues (HA!) the best workaround is to constantly update the filename and book title. So if your book is called "Fubar," enter the title as "Fubar v.1" in the .opf file and call the file "foo.v.1.epub". Then whenever you make changes to the book, increment the version number in the title and the filename by 1 and reload onto your iPad. Hey, at least it works ...

Photos missing from iCloud Contacts on Nexus 4

I'm using SmoothSync for Cloud Contacts to sync my iCloud contacts to my Nexus 4 and 7 devices. Normally it works like a dream, but yesterday I woke up to find that all the profile photos were missing from all my iCloud contacts in the "People" app for no reason I could figure out. The fix was simple: delete the account and recreate it, but I'm listing the steps here because they're not really all that obvious.

1. Open "Settings."
2. Scroll down to "Accounts" and click on "SmoothSync for Cloud Contacts."
3. Click on the account.
4. Then click on the three-dot Option menu indicator and select "Remove account."
5. Open the "SmoothSync for Cloud Contacts" app and re-enter your account information.

I had a concurrent issue with my Google+ profile picture not showing up on my Nexus 4. Strangely everything was fine on the Nexus 7, so no idea how to account for the difference.

Profile Picture not Showing up in Nexus 4

One day I woke up to find that my Google+ profile picture was no longer being displayed on my Nexus 4. It was missing from both the Messaging app and the "Me" card in the People app. After some frenzied experimentation and alternating states of despair and panic, I decided to work smart, not hard. Here's the fix:

1. Open the Google+ app.
2. Click on the three-dot Option menu indicator.
3. Click on "Sign Out."
4. Sign back in.

Wasn't that easier than deleting your Google account and recreating it?

Printing Multiple Pages Per Sheet in Mac OS X Lion

I won't go into the gory details of the problem, but if you're here, you know what I'm talking about. Maybe you want to create a booklet, or just save paper; but you want to print two pages of a document on one regular sheet, and when you tried, you found a huge white border around your printed text, and the text itself reduced to a microscopic, barely readable size.

Rejoice, for a workaround is at hand!

1. First, open a .pdf version of your document in Preview (typically: File > Print > PDF > Open PDF in Preview).
2. In the document that appears, click File > Print.
3. In the middle of the panel that opens up, there is (confusingly) a bar in the middle that says "Preview." Click on it and select "Layout." Set "Pages per sheet" to 2.
4. Now click on "Layout" again and SET IT BACK to "Preview."
5. Click on "Scale" and enter percentages until the printed part of your page is as close to the page margins as you want it to be. (You can also try clicking "Scale to Fit" and then "Fill Entire Paper," but I usually get text cut off when I do this.)
6. Click on "Print" in the lower right hand of the panel. Experience bliss.

NOTE. This is a workaround, so the finished product isn't perfect in all cases. It helps to adjust the margins in the original document to keep text from getting cut off when you scale the text. C'mon Apple, this problem's been around for over two years. You used to be so cool ... was it really all just Steve Jobs' doing?

Fixing Missing Cover Art On Nexus 4 & 7

Plagued by missing cover art in Play Music? Rejoice, there is a fix! You will first need to install the following (free) apps:

• Cover Art Downloader
• OI File Manager 
• Rescan SD Card!

Now here's what you need to do. All set?

1. Transfer your music to your device. Open Cover Art Downloader to make sure that you have all the cover art.
2. Open Play Music. Note which album covers aren't displayed.
3. Using OI File Manager (or your favourite equivalent) navigate to the folder in which the music with the missing album covers is stored. (If you have several album sub-folders within an artist folder, you can just work with the artist folder that contains them.)
4. Note the name of the folder you located in step (3) and change it to anything else. I usually just add a period at the end of the folder's name.
5. Open Rescan SD Card!
6. Open Play Music and wait while the device rescans your media files. When the albums show up (cover art will still be missing), close Play Music and then REMOVE IT FROM THE RECENT APPS LIST.
7. Using OI File manager, rename the directory from step (4) back TO THE ORIGINAL NAME it had before you changed it.
8. Open Rescan SD Card!
9. Open Play Music and wait while the device rescans your media files. Then experience bliss.

Very rarely, cover art will still be missing and you'll have to run through the whole process again, but in the vast majority of cases this will solve the problem.

Still happy you switched from an iPhone? ;)

UPDATE 2013-05-23. I've noticed that you really have to wait a long time on the Nexus 7 32 GB model, about 1--2 minutes, for the device to finish rescanning your media files. Best to keep this in mind as you're going through the fixes. Also, in some cases, in step (3) I have had to rename individual sub-folders rather than just the parent folder. Not sure why.

UPDATE 2013-12-02. If you have Android 4.4 Kitkat installed on your device, you can't use Rescan SD Card! You should use SD Scanner instead.