Leopard

I don’t really use Apple Mail myself — these days I do all my email via the Gmail web interface. Plenty of people out there do use Mail.app, and may find the Take Control of Apple Mail in Leopard ebook useful:

You’ll learn how to use and customize the Mail window, control the size and styling of incoming messages, and make rules to move messages into different mailboxes automatically. The book covers outgoing mail, showing you smart ways to address messages, send attachments, and send HTML-based messages. But, that’s not all! You’ll also find advice about setting up accounts, solving account connection problems and other bug-a-boos, handling spam, managing attachments, making backups, searching, signatures, notes and to-do items, Data Detectors, and more.

Book Info: 95 pages; Published 13-May-08; 1.2 MB download; Free sample with Table of Contents, Introduction, Quick Start, and section starts. US$10.

I’ve bought and read other Take Control books before now, and they’ve always been well-written, well-produced and worth the cost.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Finding and fixing php.ini upload limits on Mac OS X.

Last night I was messing round exporting a WordPress blog and importing it into WordPress on my own Mac so I can play around with the design.

The MacTips blog I exported has almost 900 posts (ie 900 Tips). The downloaded file was 2.1Mb. That’s not particularly large, but it was enough to cause a problem when I tried to import it into the blog I’d set up on my Mac.

Maria Langer and I wrote in Chapter 10 of WordPress 2 Visual Quickstart Guide about exporting and importing between blogs.

When I came to import that 2.1Mb file I received an error message: The uploaded file exceeds the upload_max_filesize directive in php.ini. That upload limit is set at 2Mb, so I needed to change it.

It seemed obvious that the file php.ini was the one to edit, but where and how? Some Googling brought me to Enabling PHP and Apache in Leopard by David Powers.

First I had to create php.ini by copying another file, then it was a simple matter to locate the 2Mb limit and change it. I changed it to 8Mb.

David’s instructions are clear and easy to follow. You need a decent text editor such as TextWrangler (free) or BBEdit, and to paste in a few lines of code in the Terminal.

After amending the upload limit I went to the Sharing System Preference, turned Web Sharing off and then on again. That done, the import went smoothly. Now I can experiment with blog designs, with real content, but without disrupting the public blog.

Popularity: 22% [?]

One of the nicest things about Leopard’s Spaces is being able to press Control Arrow to slide everything out of the way and view an empty Space.

Thanks to Pic-a-Pod the desktop pictures on my MacBook are always gorgeous. When I’m working on a hard or annoying problem I just slide the work to one side for a moment and visit far away places for a rest. Ahhhhh.

Popularity: 21% [?]