Mail IMAP trouble

My main email service is Fastmail and I use Apple’s Mail to manage my email most of the time. Lately I’ve had some problems with emails not downloading, the account not synchronizing (it’s IMAP), etc. I kept changing the account settings and double-checked with Fastmail’s FAQ what the proper settings were, but still it wouldn’t cooperate with me. I was getting increasingly frustrated when I thought, why not just delete the account and start over. So I deleted the account from Mail and set it up again from scratch. Now my Fastmail account lives happily in Mail again. This is certainly not a power-user tip but it might be handy to remember that some of the most easy and obvious solutions are sometimes the best.

Broadband tuner

Via MacDailyNews comes the announcement of a new utility to tweak broadband performance:

Apple has released Broadband Tuner 1.0 which allows you to take full advantage of very high speed Internet connections that have a high latency (5 Mbps or greater). The installer tweaks some system parameters. There is an optional uninstaller that can be used to restore the settings that were in effect at the time just before the system parameters were changed. What does the Broadband Tuner do exactly? The installer increases the default values for the size of the TCP send and receive buffers. With larger buffers more data can be in transit at once. A startup configuration file is also updated so that these changes will persist across restarts. The system parameters are sysctl variables that are set as follows: net.inet.tcp.sendspace: 131072 net.inet.tcp.recvspace: 358400 kern.ipc.maxsockbuf: 512000 This change has a system wide effect and is applied even if the network is not high speed connection with a high latency, with the exception of modem connections for which the system uses small default TCP buffer sizes. Broadband Tuner 1.0 requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

Happens to Macs as well

Yes it does – What does you ask? Crashing and freezing up and stuff like that. Here’s an example.

Update: But of course it happens way more often to Windows.

When a Linux user buys a Mac

What happens when a long-time Linux user buys a Mac, and what would they think about the new platform?

In early 2005, Apple was announcing the Mac mini computer. It was the answer to what I was looking for in a computer, so I bought one. This is a report about the early months with my new Mac, and how it compares to a Linux computer. (I have never owned a Windows computer.) In short, I am now both a Mac and a Linux user – Apple gets GUI simplicity, usability, and coherency right, and Linux everything else. When switching operating systems, there is a strong tendency to whine about all the things missing in the new OS, or that are done differently and require a change of habits. The advantages become obvious only after some time. I’ll do my best to take that into account and present a balanced review. There are a few fundamental problems that I cannot ignore though.

It’s perhaps a bit too technical for the average Mac user but interesting reading nonetheless. The writer seems to be an accomplished Linux user and he has a number of complaints about the mini and Mac OS X. Many of them are based on his Linux experience though, and don’t apply equally, I don’t think, if you go from Windows to Mac, for example.

Broken Powerbook, migration, and faster Mac mini

I don’t want to admit it, but my Powerbook has been giving me grief lately. It’s a first-generation 15-inch G4 Alu Powerbook and it’s going on three years now I think. The screen’s been wobbly before but in the last couple of months it’s been getting increasingly worse and the last couple of days it’s been flickering pretty bad. And yesterday it went black. The computer works fine with the screen is just black. I’m so sad…

Anyway, I wanted to get all my stuff off of the Powerbook so I could continue working on it, so I booted it into target disk mode and while I was installing Tiger on an external firewire drive attached to my Mac mini I migrated the Powerbook’s content to the new installation. It went very smoothly. In about 30 minutes it had copied everything from the Powerbook drive and set up the new drive. The mini booted and it was as if I was using my Powerbook again, it was all there. And as a bonus the mini now runs faster since it’s running off the firewire drive instead of the internal drive and that’s not a bad thing.

The reasons behind my love for the new iBook

NonStopMac.com:

In this article I will try to share my experience with the best piece of hardware I ever used – a 12.1-inch iBook G4. I focused the article on giving my comments on different aspects of the iBook – software, hardware and the overall appearance. The article is accompanied by screenshots, photos and a small video.

It’s a pretty good read and I gives, I think, a good view of what most people think of their Macs.

Intel has internal Apple group

Eweek reports that Intel has formed an internal Apple group.

iPod thumb

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GulfNews:

First it was texter’s thumb, closely followed by Blackberry cramp.

Now health experts have issued a warning about the latest in the long list of hi-tech ailments … iPod finger.

The problem, they say, is that users of the wheel-driven music player are changing songs too often.

By constantly clicking on and rotating the iPod’s central control, used to select a song from the thousands that can be held, users run the risk of permanent hand damage.

In a piece called Mac Users Miss All the Security Fun Larry Loeb writes:

This is not just speculation for speculation’s sake; there are important buying decisions to be made in the upcoming OfficialCommercialOverspendingSeason. Buy now or buy after the Expo is the most pressing of these, and probably the most far-reaching in scope. Sure, everyone knows that new Macs are going to be on Intel hardware, but what does that change mean to an average Mac user? Burton Cohen of TBI Computer (an Apple reseller in Westport, Conn.) thinks it may not mean that much. “Most people don’t realize how much was changed in the upgrade from OS X 10.3 to 10.4,” Cohen says. “There was a complete rewrite of the underlying code such that Apple now does all the heavy lifting to make the program run on whatever chip is inside the Mac. If you are using XCode (Apple’s development system), you can change your program to run on Intel hardware with very little fuss. Users don’t care about whatever the underlying hardware is; all they know is that they will be running OS X just like they have been doing.”This, then, is the underappreciated success of OS X: It has made security a non-issue for users. In all the discussions and rumor mongering that is going on about the upcoming hardware changes, there has been absolutely no concern voiced by anyone I’ve encountered about the security implications of such a migration. Users seemingly have a complete faith that Apple and OS X will just take care of it for them.So far, it must be admitted that Apple has a pretty good track record in this regard… This is a case, as Sherlock Holmes would put it, of the dog that did not bark. Security concerns are somewhat muted for OS X users because there has not up to this point been a catalyst to cause these kinds of concerns to come to the forefront. Things have been working. And when the hardware changes in the future, Mac users will no doubt expect that things will continue to be as boring security-wise as they have been in the past.

Apple prepays for flash memory

Bloomberg.com:

Apple Computer Inc., maker of the iPod music player, reached long-term supply agreements with a group of flash memory components makers including Intel Corp. and Micron Technology Inc. The company will pay $1.25 billion in advance for components during the next three months, Cupertino, California-based Apple said today in a statement distributed by PRNewsire. The suppliers also include Hynix Semiconductor Inc., Samsung Electronics and Toshiba Corp.

This would seem to be good news. Apple is putting up some serious money so that they can be sure of a proper supply of flash memory. The rumors seem to be that Apple will soon switch to flash memory for their portables and stop using hard drives. That makes sense, I think, removing the moving parts. That would mean more durable notebooks with longer battery life. But whether that’s true or not it seems unlikely that Apple has spent all that money just to make sure they get flash enough for their iPods.

[posted with ecto]