Wimpy error handling: One of its most annoying traits is its utterly wimpy error handling. Recently I was trying to copy a Time Machine backup from one drive to another. This was many gigabytes in size, and could take hours to complete. The source drive was a bit flaky, beginning to fail physically. I couldn’t wait for the copying operation to finish at home, since I had to go to work. But while I was at work, the drive went to standby mode (after the lengthy file counting process, but before any actual copying had begun, since at that strange juncture Finder asks for a username and password), and then the drive didn’t want to come back online when I returned home — at least no without some kicking and screaming. This caused the copy operation, now in progress since I just typed my username and password, to get an error, but rather than giving me a chance to try again, it just quit. Which put me back at square one, with hours of copying ahead. What Finder needs is a simple “Retry / Cancel” dialog. There is no excuse for operations to fail because of a single error; give the user the chance to remedy the error and resume. Even DOS had “Abort, Retry, Fail?” Come on, Apple! We need something robust. And this is not the only situation where that can happen — it appears any error will cause Finder to give up.

No intelligent file merging: There appears to be no Finder mechanism to handle merging files during copy, wherein newer copies will be copied, older items won’t, etc., or simply letting the user decided item by item. Instead, the user is given no choice except replace everything or cancel. This is totally pathetic.

I really need a good workaround for these problems. I am thinking of giving the shareware application Path Finder a try. I am not sure if it will help, but I hope so.

However, since the command is long, it would be hard to remember and difficult to type. I wanted to make an alias (a custom UNIX command) that would be shorter, but Bash (the default terminal in OS X) does not allow aliases to accept arguments (variables), which is critical to making this work.

I found a way to create a custom command that does this. Here are the steps:

1. Edit your ~/.bash_profile with your favorite text editor
2. Add this line:
   manpdf () { man -t $1 | open -f -a Preview.app ; }

   (You could call it something other than “manpdf” if you want; you may also want to add a comment to remind yourself what it does.)

3. Save it
4. Try it: Open Terminal and type:
   manpdf ping

Enjoy!

*For newbies: The “man” command lists instructions — “manuals” — for various UNIX commands. For example, if you wanted to know how to use the “ping” command, you could open Terminal and type “man ping”.

That got me to thinking about how an iPhone (or iPod touch) could be used for nature activities in general. The iPhone has a clear advantage over the iPod touch in a couple areas:

• The iPhone is a phone, which is handy. (However, AT&T service is not available everywhere. Too bad it doesn’t work with Verizon.) But the iPod touch has wifi, so if you find a hotspot (at the lodge or wherever), you’re not too badly off.
• The iPhone has a built-in compass and GPS, which are very useful in the outdoors.
• The iPhone has a camera. Of course it’s a very limited camera. But combined with the other powers of the iPhone, it does some fancy things. (Note: If you have a cell phone that has a camera and a wifi connection for your iPod touch, you can get tricky: Take a photo on your cell phone, email it to yourself, download it on the iPod touch, and proceed as if the iPod touch took the photo.)
• The iPhone has a built-in mic (although you can buy one as an accessory for the iPod touch).

The following apps or uses require an iPhone:

• You can geotag photos with certain apps (do an iTunes app search for “geotag”).
• Record colors of natural things (myPANTONE).
• Email the photos you’ve taken on the iPhone to people, or upload them online.
• GPS Tracker (free), iMapMyRun (free), TrackMe (free), Trails ($2.99), Trailguru (free): Track your speed, distance, etc. iPhone needed for GPS tracking features.
• Metal Detector Pro (99¢), or other similar app: Could help you locate a buried tent stake.
• TopoPoint ($9.99): Find your location on USGS maps.

However, both the iPhone and iPod touch work equally well with a number of apps useful to the nature lover. The following apps require Internet access:

• With phone or wifi service, you can talk, email friends (or monitor work email, if you get the nagging feeling), send SMS messages, visit any website, etc.
• Google Earth (free): Get the lay of the land, check out other people’s comments and photos of local attractions.
• Ski Report (free), The Snow Report from the North Face (free), REI Snow Report (free): Check ski conditions.
• The Weather Channel (free), Weather Bug (free), etc.: Get weather updates.

These apps do not require Internet access:

• Use the built-in voice record, or app of your choice, to record those breakthrough insights that come in the wilderness solitude, or capture your final words for posterity. (Requires separate mic accessory if you have an iPod touch.)
• Animal Tracks (99¢): Track animals.
• Army Survival ($1.99): This is the big brother of the 99¢ Survival Pocket Ref app. Everything you wanted to know about survival, medicine, shelters, water, plants, animals, tools, environments (desert, tropics, etc.), orienteering, weather, knots. From an official Army survival manual. Includes pictures.
• Brushes ($4.99) or other drawing app: Draw what you see!
• Flashlight: Many uses. If you get one that can do signaling, SOS, different colors, all the better. Great for night games like capture the flag, too! (Use it to signal your buddies or whatever. The apps Banner or Fuzz Lites could be fun too.)
• A Free Level (free), TiltMeter Pro (99¢), etc.: For setting up your campsite.
• Guitar: Play and Share ($3.99), iRecorder (99¢), Ocarina (99¢), Pianist ($3.99), or other musical app: for those fun campfire moments
• iBird Explorer Plus/Pro ($19.99/29.99): Photos/drawings of birds, along with sound samples of their calls, regional maps, etc.
• iTrailMap 3D ($4.99): 3D views of ski locations. View from any angle. There is also a color version that is free, but not 3D.
• Night Stand (99¢), or clock of your choice.
• RiverGuide for Kayakers ($4.99): Name says it all.
• Seismometer (99¢): Measure the shockwaves.
• SkyGazer ($2.99), SkyVoyager ($14.99), Star Walk ($4.99), Starmap ($11.99), or other astronomy app: Learn constellations, get directions.
• Sol: Daylight Clock (99¢): Predict sunrises, sunsets (great for photo shoots).
• TideApp (free): Find out when tide will be in or out. Oakley Surf Report (free) is another, but requires Internet.

Always remember to bring the charging cable. You can get a cheap adapter that will give you a USB port from any power outlet. There are also hand-crank devices and solar devices that will charge via USB.

Be sure your device is protected in some kind of case. You don’t want to trip and fall and land on it, or suddenly get a rude reminder that you put it in your hip pocket while rock climbing.

Electronic devices require a little TLC, but can be very handy when exploring the great outdoors.

Create highlighter pen effects in TextEdit

If you are a Mac user using the beta release of the EGW CRE 2008 software (Ellen G. White Writings, Comprehensive Research Edition 2008), you may be interested in this little app I wrote. What it does is allow you to launch multiple instances of the EGW CRE 2008 app simultaneously. This was requested in the comment thread for “EGW CD-ROM via Darwine on OS X“.

Being able to have multiple windows at once is possibly handy for heavy users of the app, but not officially supported (the main concern is that if you save settings from more than one open window, the settings from one could overwrite the other, meaning some of your settings won’t be saved). [Update: One user reported that changing settings in one instance, locked the settings in other instances so they could not be saved. Another user reported that all settings were saved in each instance, but that the instances had to be quit and relaunched to get the settings to sync. YMMV. Since I have not personally used things like notes, highlighter, etc., this has not been a problem for me. If you use those things, you just need to use them in a single instance at a time, or else do some testing to be sure your changes will be saved.]

This is version 1.5 of my “New Instance” app. This one is a little smarter: it tries to find the EGW app if you moved it from the Applications folder, it should report errors to Console, and finally it has a new fancy-pants icon (the icon is based on the official icon created by the EGW Estate). It requires that you already have the beta version (or later) installed. It requires Leopard (10.5) or Snow Leopard (10.6). You can download from here:

Download EGW-CRE-2008-New-Instance-1.5.zip

Usage:

1. You must have the EGW CRE 2008 software already installed (beta version is OK)
2. Download and unzip EGW-CRE-2008-New-Instance-1.5.zip; place it in your Applications folder or wherever you like
3. Run EGW CRE 2008 New Instance; each time you run it, it will start a new instance (a new window) of the EGW software
4. To quit a single window, click File > Exit (if you want to save settings), or the keystroke Cmd-W (won’t save settings) … if you want to quit all windows without saving, Cmd-Q

Hope you like it!

* * *

For the technically-inclined: This program is pretty simple, but it is also my most complex app written as a shell script for Bash to date. I learned quite a bit from the process. The script uses Spotlight for some of its work, which I think is pretty cool.

From the website:

“One of the great features of Mac OS X has aways been the built-in spelling checker. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to see what words you’ve added. But with Dictionary Cleaner, a convenient System Preferences pane for Mac OS X, now you can.”

Making Updating Easier

For many years I used the software from VersionTracker.com to check my applications. This was a great time saver, since it would do all the checking for me. (MacUpdate.com has a similar app.) Although the software helped, it was far from perfect. It was very buggy and slow — rather off-putting, for something that actually costs money! Still, I stuck with it for lack of other options.

But then … along came AppFresh. Although it is not perfect either, it is far faster, funner, and better than the other similar update checkers I’ve used.

What does AppFresh do? It checks all your software and reports which programs can be updated. It will also tell you what has changed (if that information has been provided to the site). Besides apps, it also checks plugins, widgets, preference panes, and system updates.

And — for now, at least — the program is free!

IUseThis.com

AppFresh has built-in support for IUseThis.com. This website has several uses: It lets you brag to all the other site users about what great software you have. It also lets you find similar software, and see which apps in each category are the most popular. You can also read comments left by other users about each app. And, in conjunction with AppFresh, it lets you see how your software setup varies between machines (for example, reminding you that you don’t have an app on this computer, that you have on another computer).

If you’re curious, here is my IUseThis.com profile: http://osx.iusethis.com/user/distantthunder

(The list is a little out of date. And, yes, I admit: I’m a bit of a software junkie!)

End Notes

In the old days, I tried hard to keep all my software up to date, but my library of software has grown so large, I can no longer maintain it all. Now I limit myself to only updating the programs I actually use regularly, and rely mostly on the built-in update checking for the less-used apps. However, even this can be quite tedious. In the past I would check for updates as often as once a week; now I limit myself to checking once a month. (I’ll toss the Linux crowd a cookie, because Linux makes the process quite easy — even hard to avoid.)

Windows users: VersionTracker’s software is available for Windows, but I prefer the free update checker from FileHippo.com.

Customize your Finder toolbar.

This is what my Finder toolbar looks like:

The second button (which is one of the optional default ones available) gives you easy access to the folder hierarchy. I also added a shortcut to my home folder, and a shortcut to the awesome Open Terminal Here app (which opens a Terminal with the path set to the current folder — mainly useful for those who like to do UNIX stuff). You can add any folders or files that you like. And there are various pre-designed buttons that you may find useful.

To customize, right-click on the toolbar, and choose “Customize Toolbar….” Or from the Finder menu, choose View > Customize Toolbar…. And then drag buttons on or off as you like. To add your own folders or files, drag them from another Finder window onto the toolbar.

Add one or more “recent/favorite things” stacks to your Dock.

You probably already know you can add folders to your Dock, in the space right next to the Trash. You probably also know that those folders appear as “stacks” — an OS X term for pop-up folders — and that there are various ways you can customize the display of stacks.

What you probably didn’t know is there are some special stacks — Recent Applications, Recent Documents, Recent Servers, Favorite Volumes, Favorite Items — which you can create only by following these super-secret steps:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071101055329470

In summary, fire up Terminal and paste in the following code (and then press enter):

To see the new stacks, restart the Dock with this commend in Terminal:

Like magic, your Dock will restart, and a new stack will appear. By default, it will be a Recent Applications stack. If you want to try another type, right-click on the stack and choose which kind you want from the options displayed.

The Recent Applications/Documents/Servers selections give you a list of the most recently accessed/used items in each category; in other words, it gives you stack versions of the same things you find in the Apple > Recent Items menu. Favorite Volumes gives you the items in the Finder sidebar in the “Devices” section. Favorite Items gives you the items in the Finder sidebar “Places” section.

All of these stacks are dynamic; they automatically update to reflect your latest recent/favorite items.

If you want more than one, simply run the Terminal commands again; each time you run them, you’ll get another “recent/favorite things” stack.

Add Dock dividers.

If you have lots of icons in your Dock, it can help to separate them into logical categories. A Dock divider can help. There are basically two ways to do this:

Option 1. Insert a divider icon into your dock. You can download some pre-made ones, such as Dock Dividers or Dock Separators. Or if you have some creative flair, you can make your own (caveat: the divider must be an app or at least have an .app extension, or OS X won’t let you add it to the Dock; modifying one of the dummy apps in the pre-made dividers above is an easy way around this). When done, it looks like this (the animation shows various styles you can choose from; they’re not actually animated):

Option 2: Use Leopard’s oh-so-secret hidden command to add space between groups of icons. To do that, run this command in Terminal:

To see the spacer, restart the Dock with this commend in Terminal:

Once the spacer appears, you can drag it around. To remove it, simply drag it off the Dock.

Add Activity Monitor to your dock.

This application is found in the Utilities folder, in your applications folder. It is very handy for seeing which applications or processes are hogging your memory or your processor, and also allows you to quit (or force quit) them easily. It will even show you hidden processes (applications and such) that do not appear in the Dock.

It also has all kinds of cool little graphs (memory, drive space, network activity), and you can make its Dock icon show some of those charts in real time.

Add the Keychain Access icon to your menu bar.

This menu bar icon gives you quick access to several things, but the most useful is the first item in the list when you click on it: Lock Screen. This will immediately activate your screen saver; and assuming you have set up a password for your user account, that password will be required to exit the screen saver. This is very handy when you have a computer in a shared environment, and you want to leave the room without leaving your computer open for others to poke around in; or if you are running an important computer task that you don’t want to be interrupted by your children, significant other, or pet.

To add it, launch Keychain Access (in the Utilities folder), go to Preferences, General tab, and tick the checkbox for “Show Status in Menu Bar.”

Install Default FolderX .

Default Folder X ($34.95) makes getting around the files and folders on your computer so easy. I don’t know how I could get along without it.

Most significantly, from within any application’s save or open dialog, it allows you to navigate to any open folder just by hovering your mouse over that folder for a second or two, and then clicking. This saves a tremendous amount of tedious clicking to find a folder that you already have open.

Default Folder X adds a translucent side menu to every file dialog box, which looks like this:

These icons give you ways to access recent folders and favorite folders from any open or save dialog; set default folders for individual applications; open select folders in Finder; create, reveal, rename, move, delete, and get info on both files and folders; switch to any open Finder window; and set favorite folders. All this from within any file dialog box!

It also gives you this row of buttons beneath each file dialog box, which allow you to preview file contents, get information on the file, set Finder comments, apply meta tags, and view or change file permissions.

If you work with files a lot, you know how tedious it can be to do some of these things when you are forced to switch back and forth between an application and Finder. With Default Folder X, you can do it all on the fly when you are opening or saving a file.

This program also gives you the options of a menu bar icon and a special icon you can put in your Finder toolbar, to perform the same functions.

Install LaunchBar or QuickSilver.

LaunchBar ($24.00) — not free, but more powerful; what I use

QuickSilver (freeware) — works well, is free, and you can change the “look and feel” of it

These apps make launching applications and working with files on your computer super easy. For example, say you have a rarely used program called Super Widget on your computer. One day you need it. Instead of hunting for it, you could simply call up LaunchBar or QuickSilver by hitting the activation command (Cmd-Space by default, but this can be changed), and then type “sw” (s for super, w for widget). Both programs will give you a list of apps that match “sw”, and both will learn from your past use. Select the app, if it’s not the main one listed, and press enter. All this can be done in about two seconds, which is much faster than doing it the hard way.

Both apps let you do much more complex tasks, and explaining all that is beyond the scope of what I can do here. Try them out!

Install Isolator.

Isolator (freeware) does one thing very well: It grays out background applications and windows, so you can focus on the one thing you are trying to do.

Install Dockables.

Dockables (freeware) adds cool little icons to your dock to easily do common tasks (start Time Machine, close apps, eject, empty trash, hide apps, lock screen, log out, mute sound, restart, screen capture, shut down, put the display or computer to sleep, or start the screen saver).

Add Dock stack overlays.

The current stacks implementation is a little messy; switching to “Display as folder” helps, but there is another option. Using these overlays, you get a functional, dynamic stack icon that has a clear meaning. You can find the instructions, a visual example, and download link here:

http://t.ecksdee.org/post/19001860/stacks-overlays

It’s a little bit of a hack, in that need to add an icon file within each stack, and leave it there. But it certainly looks cool! I wish Apple had designed it that way to begin with.

Put RSS feeds in your Bookmarks Bar

Many websites and blogs have RSS feeds, which are usually all the news or posts from the site condensed into an easy-to-read format. If you are on a site with RSS (like this one), you will usually see this icon after the websites’s address in the address field:

Clicking that icon will take you to the RSS feed. Sometimes there is more than one RSS feed, so you may get a pop-up window asking which feed you want. Some websites will not show the RSS icon in the address field; but you may see an RSS or XML icon or link on the page.

RSS is great for both news sites and blogs. With Facebook, you can get a single RSS feed that contains updates from all your friends. What’s more, Safari has great support for RSS.

If you put RSS feeds in your Bookmarks Bar, Safari will show numbers showing how many new updates or posts are available. This saves you from needlessly visiting sites just to see if there is anything new. For example, I created three collections of RSS feeds in Safari, representing family and friends, news and society and culture, and work-related feeds. They show up like this in the Bookmarks Bar:

This quickly tells me that there are 2 updates from my friends’ pages, 334 updates about news/society/culture, and 271 updates related to my work. Clicking any of these will give me all the updates, newest at the top, with new ones highlighted in color. Each contains a link to the originating website, making it easy to respond or comment.

To create these collections, you would simply add folders to your Bookmarks Bar (see steps in Organize Your Safari Bookmarks) for each category you want. While you are creating the folders, tick the checkbox for “Auto-Click” if you want all the updates to load when you click the collection name. That is what I have done.

Launch multiple websites at once

Ticking the Auto-Click checkbox will make all the links in a folder open at once (each in a separate tab if they are regular web links; or in a single combined listing if they are RSS feeds). See picture above. This is handy if you have a number of websites that you like to check routinely. This only works from the Bookmarks Bar collection. See Organize Your Safari Bookmarks for instructions on how to edit.

Customize the toolbar

From Safari’s menu, choose View > Customize Toolbar…. Simply drag items on and off the toolbar to customize to your heart’s content. Here are some of the options:

• Home: go to your home page (as defined in Safari’s Preferences; you can make it whatever you want)
• Bookmarks Bar: turns the Bookmarks Bar on and off
• AutoFill: fill forms automatically, saving you tedious typing (see Safari’s Preferences, AutoFill tab, for settings)
• Open in Dashboard: make your own custom Dashboard widgets, by selecting portions of web pages
• Mail: send a link to the current page to someone by email
• Downloads: go to the downloads folder

Turn off “Open ‘safe’ files after downloading”

In Safari’s Preferences, General tab, there is an option to Open “safe” files after downloading. If you really want to be “safe” you should un-tick this. Although there are not many Mac nasties in circulation, it is still true that files that automatically open after downloading are a security risk.

Change your download location

Personally I find the Downloads folder pointless. It can quickly fill up with clutter. Unless you have a very slow connection and really hate to re-download files, there is little reason to keep old downloads. Besides that, the Downloads folder is a bit of nuisance to open each time you download something.

Personally I find downloading to the desktop much better. After I install or use a download, I usually trash it immediately or else file it somewhere. This keeps the desktop clean and keeps the clutter away.

To change your download location, go to Safari’s Preferences, General tab, and pick another folder (such as your desktop) for the Save downloaded files to setting.

Install ClickToFlash

If you have a slow connection, or simply hate seeing Flash ads or waiting for them to load on the sites you visit, try installing ClickToFlash (freeware). It has a great interface, and does its job beautifully. Erstwhile annoying Flash graphics will then appear like this:

If you want to see the Flash graphic, just click once on it. If you want to allow all the Flash on a particular site, you can right-click on the placeholder, or click the little gear icon in the upper-left corner, and set your preference.

Please note that Flash is just one type of animated/interactive graphic. Other ad images, Java, JavaScript, and other technologies are not blocked.

If you want more ad-killing kick, you can try SafariBlock (freeware). It does for Safari what Adblock Plus does for Firefox. In fact, it shares ad-blocking technology with Adblock. It will block all types of ads. However, it simply replaces those ads with white space. I did not consider it a very elegant solution. I would not advise installing both ClickToFlash and SafariBlock; because their functions overlap, doing so could have unpredictable bad consequences.

Install SafariStand

SafariStand (freeware) adds all kinds of cool and useful features to Safari.

My favorite feature is automatic restoration of closed windows. Say you have a crash or power failure, or simply need to restart after a system update, and so you lose the Safari windows you had open. With SafariStand installed, when you restart Safari you’ll be asked if you want to restore those windows. This feature alone has helped me time and again.

Other features include: some extra buttons you can add to your toolbar (see “Customize the toolbar,” above), an optional sidebar that gives you a thumbnail view of each open window; shelves (collections of websites and windows that can be restored); ability to delete website icons (favicons); setting to open all links in new tab; alternate web searches; colorized HTML source; setting to disable certain JavaScript functions (window resizing, etc.); and much, much more.

Add some useful bookmarklets

I’ve added a folder to my Bookmarks Bar called “Bookmarklets.” A bookmarklet is a small JavaScript program that can be saved anywhere regular bookmarks can be saved. Below are some that I’ve found useful; to use, just drag the links to your Bookmarks Bar (or to a folder you’ve previously created in your Bookmarks Bar):

• Post to del.icio.us: posts the current page to your del.icio.us account
• Restore context menu: enables the context menu on websites that have disabled it
• Safari Keyboard and Mouse Shortcuts: list of all available shortcuts (not really a bookmarklet, but I save it in the same place)
• Search on Wikipedia: searches for a selected word on Wikipedia
• Share on Facebook: shares current page on Facebook
• Sort table: rearranges a selected table in alphabetical order, and adds links to change the sort order to ascending or descending, or sort by any column (this is so cool!)
• YouTube FLV DL or YouTube MP4 DL: two options for downloading high-quality videos from YouTube (may not work on all videos)
• Zap colors: removes all color elements from a page (other than pictures and artwork)

Some other places to find more are the websites Bookmarklets and Pimp My Safari.

Install Bookdog

Bookdog ($19.95) is an application I’ve been using forever. It can automatically alphabetize bookmarks, as well as sync bookmarks between browsers (one way or both ways). It works very well, and has been very actively developed. It supports many browsers, not just Safari and Firefox.

The bookmarks panel will appear on the left side of Safari, divided into two sections:

1. The top section is Collections. It contains:

• History: Sites you’ve visited recently (same as using the History menu, except Safari 4 adds visuals). You cannot edit these, but you can delete them.
• Bookmarks Bar: The Bookmarks Bar is the row of bookmarks between the toolbar and tabs, at the top of the Safari window. You can drag links into the bar at any time; just drag the link icon to the Bookmarks Bar.
  
  But to edit them, sort them, or add folders or sub-folders, you will need to open the bookmarks panel.
• Bookmarks Menu: These bookmarks appear in the application menu bar. Frankly, I never use these.
• Address Book: These are bookmarks gleaned from your Address Book entries. The Address Book is the ideal place to store websites of friends and family, as well as company websites if you have Address Book cards for them.
• Bonjour: I never use this, but I believe it will show local websites broadcasting via the Bonjour (zeroconf) protocol.
• All RSS Feeds: These are all the RSS feeds that you have in any of your Safari bookmarks.

2. The lower section is Bookmarks. These bookmarks are only accessible from the bookmarks panel. However, they also show up as suggestions when you manually start to type a website address. It’s a good place to keep bookmarks you don’t need often. They will be synced between computers if you use MobileMe bookmark syncing or another syncing service.

Current features include:

• Bookmarking
• Notes
• Boolean searching
• Chapter jumping
• History (see what you’ve read lately)
• Cut, copy, paste

It currently sells for 99¢, and the developers claim the contents are officially licensed from the Ellen G. White Estate.

I was happy to find a workaround, and it is pretty simple. Open the Terminal application (in the Utilities folder), and type all on one line (no line breaks):

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin -bool true

You must do this from an administrator account, and you will be asked for your password. Then restart, and you should have no more unexpected unmounting. I have tried this only under Tiger (10.4), but someone said in a forum that it works under 10.5 as well.

For more about this hint, see here, here, and here.

MichaelPrewitt.com

I had been using JumpLine as my web-hosting company. It had been working well, but was somewhat expensive for the plan I had ($19.95/month). Plus it had limitations that kept me from growing my website. And it did not have a good web-based spam filter (at least not a free one), so I was downloading countless spam every month—an especially atrocious problem for an email device like the iPod Touch, which does not have any built-in spam filtering.

After some research, I decided to go with HostGator. The price is much cheaper (only $4.95/month), and at this point they provide everything I need. They use SpamAssassin as their spam filter, which seems pretty standard.

When it comes to server-side spam filtering, I prefer Abaca, which is what we use at 3ABN, but very few web hosting companies seem to offer it. SpamAssassin deletes a lot of junk without even delivering it, and marks other suspicious email as spam for easy sorting. This is OK. Abaca doesn’t deliver any suspicious spam, but holds it online, and it lets you sort the spam by the likelihood that it is spam, which is very, very convenient. With Abaca, at most I have to look at 5-10 messages, and I know everything after that is junk. With SpamAssassin, it is necessary to check each message in the spam folder, which thankfully isn’t that much after the obvious spam has been auto-deleted.

Email (IMAP)

Besides the spam filtering, I wanted to simplify my email system. I had multiple email addresses I wanted to consolidate. In short, I wanted to be able to manage all email through a shared account (IMAP), so that when I read or delete a message on one computer or on my iPod Touch, it is marked as read or deleted when I check my email on another computer; and when I send a message from one computer, the sent message can be accessed on the other computers. It was pretty easy to set up on HostGator, and it has made my email communication so much better, more fluid. It is also web-based, so that I can check it from a browser if necessary, from anywhere in the world.

Reinstalled XP Pro

I have Windows XP Professional on my Dell desktop computer, which I think had been installed 4-5 years ago. It had become very sluggish, so that even opening a web browser took a lot of time. I decided it was time to reinstall. It is working much better now (snappier, as the geeky types like to say). However, I am finding that Ubuntu meets most of my needs very well (too bad you can’t run Adobe software under it), so I’ve been spending more time with that lately, which is also installed on the same machine.

iPhone 3.0

I don’t have an iPhone, but iPhone 3.0 is the name of the software that runs on the iPod Touch. I just did the upgrade, and while I don’t yet notice any dramatic differences, it does have some very nice features (copy and paste, notably; and push notifications) that I look forward to using more.

Of course, using Apple’s Boot Camp, it is possible to install Windows on a Mac, and run the EGW software that way. But this involves tedious rebooting each time you want to switch to Windows. Or it is possible to run the EGW software under a virtual environment such as VMware Fusion or Parallels. And that is what I had been doing; it works, but it’s slow (open VMware, wait for Windows to awake, start the EGW software, which then runs a bit slow in the virtual environment).

Recently, a friend, Nathan Tyler, tipped me off to the fact that the EGW software works great under Wine, a software environment for running Windows apps under UNIX-based operating systems (such as Linux or OS X). There is a special build of Wine for OS X, called Darwine. He claimed that the search software ran faster under Wine than it does on his Windows machine. (Edit: I guess he just claimed it was fast!) And guess what? I found that to be true for me as well.

It is not trivial to set up the EGW software to work this way, at least not yet. First I downloaded Darwine, and configured it. (The main thing to configure was mapping the folder where I would put my Windows apps to a drive letter.) Then I copied all the EGW software files from my Dell over to my Mac. Then came a tedious process of finding all the related Windows registry entries on my Dell, exporting them to files, copying those files to the Mac, editing them so the paths to the files are correct, and importing them into the Windows registry running in Darwine. (This is necessary because those registry entries contain the license information needed to run the software. The installer writes the license information to the registry, but I have not learned a way to run the installer from the CD-ROM under Darwine. Thus I had to do it myself.) Then I had to copy a file, “egwhite.lcf,” from the main EGW software folder to the subfolder “Books,” because for some reason I got an error saying the file had to be there instead. After that I could run the EGW software, but it was a bit tedious to launch. So then I created a shell script to open the EGW software using Wine, and then used the freeware application Platypus to create an OS X application that can be opened from Finder. And for a finishing touch, I copied the EGW icon to that OS X application.

Now I have a cool little OS X application that I can open with a simple click, and the EGW software is blazing fast. Faster at opening than on my Dell, and much faster than going through VMware Fusion.