Gmail Backups with fetchmail on OS X
Posted on August 14, 2008
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I use GMail as my personal email provider, and as much as I like the simple and snappy UI, the conversation views and the filtering and search possibilities, I’ve grown more and more worried about having all of my (important) mails stored on someone else’s servers. Now, out of all of the big IT companies in the world I’d say I trust Google a heck of a lot more than anyone else, but this doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t take into consideration the possibility of something going wrong on their end and as a result some (or Bob forbid, all) of my mails disappearing into bit heaven.
The good news is that Google provides a nice, standard POP3 interface for downloading emails from their service, and all of the software required for downloading messages via POP is already installed in Mac OS X Leopard by default. Below I’ll go through all of the steps it took me to set up periodical and automated GMail backups on my Macbook.
Quick File Tagging in OS X with Punakea (& Tagger)
Posted on June 26, 2008
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Even though I am a little pedantic in some ways (like most engineers are, I suppose,) I always seem to have trouble organizing the files on my computer(s) with any kind of reasonable folder structure or naming convention. I often find myself desperately trying to find a specific file that I know I have somewhere but I’m not sure where, and sometimes I just want to find a bunch of files that are somehow related but not actually saved into the same folder. These are problems that tagging is trying to solve (and doing a reasonably good job at it, I might add.)
icalBuddy: Getting Events and Tasks from the OS X Calendar Store via the Command Line
Posted on June 20, 2008
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I’m a big fan of the “do not repeat yourself” principle, which, especially in the context of software, basically means that you should only have one place to change anything. Any highly volatile data that will be viewed from more than one location (or in more than one way) should only have one location and/or interface for changing it. This way, whenever someone, somewhere, at some point in time happens to make changes to that data, all of the views that display it will reflect that change in true MVC fashion. The calendar store in OS X is a nice centralized database for calendar data that allows me to practice this principle when it comes to my calendars, and I’ve been very happy with it, given that I’ve also gotten automated synchronization with my cell phone to work.
I used dashboard widgets for a while for getting a quick overview of all of the events I have planned for the day plus any uncompleted tasks I might have, but soon noticed that I don’t actually go and see what’s up in the dashboard very often, which lead to me forgetting some things even though I had them set up as events or tasks in my calendars. The perfect place for displaying events for the day and any uncompleted tasks for me would thus be the desktop, which, even though it is most of the time obscured by a bunch of windows, I’ll occasionally glance at during the day. GeekTool is the solution for displaying any textual output from the shell on an OS X desktop, and I was using that already for some other things, so all that I needed was a CLI application or script that would get the events and tasks from the calendar store and output them in a nice readable way.
Mac OS X Mouse Wheel Support for ActionScript 3 Flash Applications (v.2+)
Posted on April 26, 2008
Filed under ActionScript 3, Featured, Flex, Mac, Programming | 22 Comments
So I’ve finally updated the solution I’ve made earlier for enabling Mac OS X mouse wheel support in Flex applications to a second version. I didn’t want to continue adding stuff into the original post, so I decided to write a separate post just for this new version. As you can see from the title, this version should work in any Flash project you’re writing in ActionScript 3, as opposed to just in Flex projects. This change was contributed by Pavel Fljot, and all the other stuff I’ve added since have been added on top of that. Deployment should now be a lot easier and some features that were missing in the first version have also been added.
Automatic, Periodic Syncing with iSync
Posted on April 17, 2008
Filed under Mac, Scripts | 2 Comments
The first time I decided I wanted to start synchronizing my cell phone’s calendar and address book with my Mac’s, I noticed how iSync doesn’t have a system of automatically invoking the synchronization procedure between regular intervals. I wanted to have the sync invoked automatically every 30 minutes, so I figured I had to do it myself somehow. I’ve had this script in place and running for, I don’t know, a year and a half now, and I’ve used it with two different phones (the Nokia 3230 and the Nokia N82.) I’m not sure why I haven’t blogged about it before, since this is exactly the kind of stuff I tend to write about here. Probably I’ve just forgotten is all. In any case, here it is.
Going Back to the Origin of a Downloaded File
Posted on March 21, 2008
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One of the biggest reasons why I prefer to use Safari as my web browser of choice on OS X is its integration with the rest of the operating system, a quite recent example of which is the tagging of downloaded files with Spotlight metadata about the location where they were downloaded from. In the latest Safari update – version 3.1 – this was extended to also apply to pictures dragged from the browser onto the local filesystem.
This metadata is most frequently used in the dialogs that are shown whenever an executable is being opened for the first time after being downloaded from the web, and it is accessible to users via the “get info” dialog box. If you have a file laying around somewhere, and you’re trying to remember where you got it from, you can always look at the file info, find the “where from:” field, copy the address, switch to your browser, paste the address to the location bar, and press enter in order to get to the origin site. I knew you could read file metadata in OS X with the mdls utility, so I figured it’d be quite simple to make a little “droplet” application for streamlining the task of navigating to the origin web site of a particular file, so that’s exactly what I did.
Fixing the Nokia N82 iSync Plug-In
Posted on March 4, 2008
Filed under Featured, Mac, Miscallaneous | 21 Comments
I Recently updated my cell phone to a Nokia N82. The most positive points about it are the relative snappiness of the user interface (most Symbian S60 devices are dog slow in that department) and the quite exhaustive feature list. The build quality feels alright and the camera takes excellent pictures for a phone. One of the biggest things that I enjoyed with my previous phone (a Nokia 3230) was the nicely working synchronization with Apple’s iSync, so naturally I made sure that this would also work with the N82. Apple has included built-in support for syncing the 3230 in the iSync that ships with Leopard (it was in the Tiger version as well,) so I didn’t need to install anything extra to get it to work. The N82, on the other hand, is not supported out of the box, so I needed to get an iSync plug-in for it from Nokia.
Keeping AirPort Connected to a Specific Access Point
Posted on February 23, 2008
Filed under Mac, Scripts | 2 Comments
The wireless LAN access point we have at our house is an old Belkin box that only supports the 802.11b standard, which is the slowest of the few “versions” of WiFi. The speed hasn’t been a big issue — we rarely need to move large files over the internal network, and if we do, we plug in an Ethernet cable. Even the fact that it sometimes replaces web pages your browser requests with advertisements of some fantastic parental filter feature it has has not annoyed us enough to take action. What has been an issue, though, is the fact that it frequently drops connections with our Macbooks.
A “Go to Parent of Current Folder” Toolbar Button for Finder
Posted on January 10, 2008
Filed under Mac, Programming, Scripts | 1 Comment
Although the updated version introduced with Leopard significantly improves upon the one in Tiger, I still think Mac OS’s Finder is lacking in several departments. I Don’t feel “at home” with separate file managers (Path Finder or ForkLift, for example — even though I do own a license to the latter, I only use it as an SFTP client,) so I’ve taken it upon myself to improve the experience of using Finder. The first thing that annoyed me with it was the fact that even though you could use the key combo Command(or Apple key) + Up arrow to go to the parent of the current folder, there was no button in the toolbar for it (which is exactly how I would prefer to invoke this action.) Well, due to the fact that you can drag any application to Finder’s toolbar, it’s quite easy to add your own buttons there.
Update (feb 13, 08): Updated the app to have a much nicer icon (made by Matti Schneider — thanks!)
Collapsible Panel Component for Flex
Posted on January 4, 2008
Filed under ActionScript 3, Flex, Programming | 6 Comments
Here’s an another post in the same vein as my previous one: this time, the component I’m sharing is a Panel subclass that allows for collapsing and expanding its contents. What this means is that the user can click on the header of the Panel to make it toggle between an open or closed state, with a smooth animation.
keep looking »