We've gotten everything else organized. We've gotten Mail to play nice with Google. We've even handled our junk mail filtering for our multiple accounts with aplomb and grace. Unfortunately, we've broken something.

People used to Outlook or Thunderbird may not even notice it.

One of the reasons I've stuck with Mail.app despite the myriad (and some would argue better) choices available, is that I could see all of my inboxes, sent mail, trash, etc. in one place if I wished. Or I could break it out by mail account, if I wished. Unfortunately, while my inboxes are still together, my "Sent" mail folders exist in several different folder trees, and so do my junk mail folders. 

Enter smart folders. 

Create two smart folders - one for "All Junk Mail", and one for "All sent mail," and edit them so they look similar to the picture below:

For the "Sent Mail" smart folder, you need to select the "Sent," "Sent Mail" or other appropriate folder for each of your mail accounts. Do the same kind of thing for your "Junk Mail" smart folder, picking the respective Spam/Junk mail folders for each account.

If you want to look at the junk mail for just one account, you'll still have to go to that set of folders, but now you have a one-stop place to go and see all of your Junk mail, or all of your sent mail, together in one place.

In our last article, we saw how to tweak the junk mail filtering built into the Google-based mail services. That still leaves the question - what if we’re using iCloud, or any other non Gmail service?

If you’re not using Gmail at all, then turning on Junk filtering in Mail.app is just a matter of following the directions. Unfortunately, life is not always that easy, especially if you’re still tied to an old email address, or have multiple accounts. In that case, a few modifications are in order.

Fortunately, they’re pretty straightforward.

First, open up the preferences for Mail.app under Mail > Preferences, or simply hit Command-, (comma) while in Mail.app. Then, go to the junk mail tab. Once there, you need to change a few settings so it looks like the picture below. The important part is that you need to have junk mail filtering follow custom rules, and then you need to click the “Advanced…” button to tweak the settings.

Once you select “Advanced…”, you get to to what looks a lot like a custom set of filtering rules. You can mess with these if you want, but all we really need to do is add a rule for each Google-based account.

The logic here is that we want junk filtering to be in effect for every account that doesn’t already provide it (as Google does). So we add a rule for each Google-based account that excludes a message from being filtered if the recipient is one of your Google-based addresses. 

Click “+” to add a new rule, and select “To”, “Does not contain”, and fill in the email address of the account you wish to exclude.

Once you’ve done this, the built in Junk filtering will still filter any mail that comes in for a non-Google account, but all the Google accounts that you’ve specified will be left alone. 

So we now have multiple sent folders, and multiple junk mail folders. How do we find all of the junk mail in one place, or all of the sent mail?

That’s where smart folders come in, in the last part of this series.

So now you've got Gmail setup to work the way you want. Unfortunately, there's that buddy of yours that keeps sending you listings from the fantasy football league, and his emails keep ending up in junk mail. Or perhaps you want to mark something as spam, like that Viagra ad that keeps coming in.

The good news is that if you look at Google's page on how Mail (or Outlook) actions translate to Gmail actions, it's pretty easy to report a message as spam. Just drag it to the "Spam" folder on the left that is nested under [Gmail]. 

Unfortunately, Google is not so simple about flagging mail as "not spam" when you're not using the web interface. Fortunately, it's not that hard, and they have some fairly clear instructions on how to do it, if you know how to read between the lines. The short answer is to add the sender who keeps getting misfiled to your online Google contacts list.

There are two ways to do this. The quick and dirty way that is also the best for people with multiple accounts is to log into the Gmail web interface, and simply add the name and email address as a contact. That, or you can import all of your contacts from a file, but that has enough variables in it that it won't be covered here. Either way, once the name is in your contacts list, it won't get filed as spam.

The long term solution for people with only one Gmail account, or with a main one, is to synchronize your contacts list with your Gmail account. The downsides are that you can only realistically do this with one Google account at a time, and that you sometimes end up with odd duplicates as Gmail adds its own contacts automatically for people you've sent messages to.

To set up syncing, do the following (screens may look different for Snow Leopard, but the gist will be the same):

First, open up the preferences window for your address book, and go to the "Accounts" tab.

Then check the box to synchronize with a Google account.

Then, fill in your full username (full email) and password for the Google account.

And you should be ready to go. The biggest headache I've run into has been hunting down and consolidating duplicates - especially after the first merge. That said, having all of my contacts update to Gmail so I don't have to manually add or import them has been a big plus.

Next up - for those with multiple accounts - smart folders and advanced junk mail filtering.

 If you’re running Snow Leopard or Lion, adding a gmail based email account to your mail application may seem trivially easy. Go to the accounts tab of the preferences and add a new account, and let Mail.app configure itself.

The problem of course lies in the fact that while Gmail may pretend it’s an IMAP service, it isn’t, quite. One of the largest differences is that Gmail uses “labels” instead of folders. The advantage to this is that if a message belongs in several categories, you can actually effectively file it under multiple labels without having to make copies. While Google makes an effort to bridge this very different view of how mail should be organized, it means that Gmail can behave very differently than typically expected. As a result they have a knowledge base article on recommended IMAP settings, and an article mapping out how certain actions in a mail program translate to Google.

IMAP, for those who are wondering, is one of the two most common systems for retrieving mail. POP3, the older standard, downloads the mail to your machine just like recovering it from the cubby in a mail room, and now your computer has the only copy.  IMAP allows easy web access because the master copy always stays online. Whenever you log in via the web or a mail program and read new mails, delete mail, or move mail, those changes are also made to the original copy so that the next time you check your mail, no matter what you check it on, you see the same view. 

I’ll address one other issue right up front: Why bother using a separate mail program?

I don’t mind Google’s web interface. On those occasions where my laptop is unavailable or inconvenient (I’m working at another computer that I need to access email from) I’ll gladly use the web interface. That said, I also have several email accounts (work, Gmail, and an older personal account that I’ve had for years that isn’t Google-based), so being able to get to all of my mail from one place is a necessity. Factor in some nifty keyboard shortcuts courtesy of Mail Act-On and better integration and handling of attachments with the rest of my computer, and it’s a done deal.

The problem of course lies in the conflict between how every other IMAP mail service talks to Mail.app (or Outlook, etc.), and how Google does. I don’t want to treat one account differently from the others. 

So here’s a guide to tweaking both Google, and Mail.app, to work the way you want it to . Some of these hints have parallels in Outlook or Thunderbird, especially the ones dealing with online Google settings.

Stop Checking Your Mail

First things first, turn off all automated, scheduled email checks if you can. Google (and Mobileme/iCloud, and many other IMAP mail services) use a feature of IMAP that allows them to  get email as soon as it lands in your inbox without having to ask the server if anything new is in. Not only do you not need it in most cases, but if you are using the web service, or a phone to check your email as well, this can result in enough simultaneous connections (the desktop mail programs can make a lot of connections) to trigger Google into blocking access to your account as a potential spammer, and you won’t be able to download new mail.

In Mail.app this is found under the general tab of the mail preferences. The applies to Thunderbird and Outlook as well, though Outlook does give you the ability to isolate some accounts to check for new mail, but not others. 

If you must update your inbox on a schedule, set it to hourly, or even less often.

Recommended Settings

Let’s walk through the recommended settings for Google, and see why each of them exists. Before we do that, let’s look at how Mail.app sets up a Gmail account by default:

• Do NOT save sent messages on the server. If your client is sending mail through Gmail's SMTP2 server, your sent messages will be automatically copied to the [Gmail]/Sent Mail folder.

This one is plain enough, but not mentioned here is that since Google automatically copies all outgoing mail to “sent”, if you copy all sent messages to the online sent folder as well, you get duplicates of everything ever sent. You also waste time uploading a second copy of your message just to park a copy in “Sent Items”.

If you look at the earlier screen shot, you’ll see that Apple doesn’t set it the way Google recommends. I strongly recommend unchecking it.

The only downside is that your default “sent” folder in Mail.app may not reflect any messages sent via the web, or from your phone or another computer. That said, if you look at the list of IMAP folders (usually to the left), under the folder “[Gmail]” you will find a folder called “Sent Mail” that contains every email sent, no matter where it was sent from.

Since I have multiple accounts, I still want one place I can go to and check for sent messages that may not have been sent via Mail.app. That’s where smart folders come in and I’ll cover those later.

• DO save draft messages on the server. If you want your drafts in your mail client to sync correctly with Gmail's web interface, set your client to save drafts to the [Gmail]/Drafts folder.

This is generally good advice, and Apple sets this by default. Unfortunately, there’s a known “bug” in how Mail.app deals with Google and drafts that results in two wonky side effects. First, when you finally finish a draft and send it off, it doesn’t always clear the draft out of the drafts folder. Second, there is an auto-save behavior of the drafts that can result in dozens of draft copies being saved as you keep the draft open and keep working on it. I generally recommend to follow Google’s guidance here, but people who don’t care about accessing the same drafts folder no matter where they are may consider unchecking this.

• Do NOT save deleted messages on the server. Messages that are deleted from an IMAP folder (except for those in [Gmail]/Spam or [Gmail]/Trash) only have that label removed and still exist in All Mail. Hence, your client doesn't need to store an extra copy of a deleted message.
• Do NOT save deleted messages to your [Gmail]/Trash folder because this will delete a message in all folders.

You’ll notice that Apple doesn’t follow this by default, and personally, I prefer the way Apple sets it by default.

Google wants you to actually drag a message to the trash to delete it. “Deleting” the message by using the delete button or key merely hides it and is treated like archiving a message that hasn’t had a label/folder applied to it - and it is still available in “All Mail”. Given that email programs don’t differentiate between “Archive” and “Delete” like the web interface does, this is a reasonable compromise, and if I was using only Google accounts, I would probably do it their way. 

The problem is that it makes Google based accounts behave differently from the non-Google ones I use. As a result, I DO save mail on the server, and DO move deleted messages to the trash folder. I want the messages I delete to actually be deleted. I don’t even use “All Mail” - even in the web interface, since I figure if I want to keep the message, I’ll file it under a label/folder, even one as generic as “other.”

• Do NOT save deleted messages to your [Gmail]/All Mail folder as some clients will try to empty this folder and ultimately fail. This can lead to delayed mail access or excessive battery consumption on a mobile device

Solid advice. Though the only harm in doing so is duplicate messages, why waste space?

• Do NOT enable your client's junk mail filters. Gmail's spam filters also work in your IMAP client, and we recommend turning off any additional anti-spam or junk mail filters within your client. Your client's filter will attempt to download and classify all of your existing messages, which may slow down your client until the process is complete.

In short - turn off junk mail filtering entirely if you can, and just look in Google’s “Spam” folder for anything that may have been misfiled. If you can’t turn off all junk filtering (say, you use it for an iCloud or other account), there are some advanced settings I’ll show you in a bit that allow you to selectively filter some accounts but not others. You can also use smart folders so that you can still look at all of your junk mail folders in one place.

As a result, my “Mailbox Behaviors” under Preferences > Accounts tends to look like this:

Before we settle in to email friends and family, we need to do one more thing - designate our drafts and trash folders. Otherwise, Mail will end up creating its own folders, and you’ll end up with the confusion of duplicate folders to sort through whenever you look at your mail elsewhere.

In the folder list to the left, expand out the folder named “[Gmail]” and select the folder named “Drafts”. Then go to the Mailbox menu , then select “Use This Mailbox For”, and choose “Drafts”. Then select [Gmail]/Trash on the left, and go to Mailbox > Use This Mailbox For > Trash.

The next articles will cover setting up smart folders, advanced Junk Mail settings, and how to manage junk filtering in Gmail.

This post is a change of pace. Usually I talk tech, the computers and stuff I use, and sometimes even philosophy. I like to make things better for people, and I’ve chosen a certain focus. I don’t wander off of it that often because I’m not planning on becoming an expert 3D modeler, a professional illustrator, or anything else that would normally cause me to post on a completely divergent topic. 

Say, as an exercise coach.

Yet, I do have an interest in my own health, and knowing and pushing your body is part and parcel of developing the will and focus to push your mind, and to not be pushed around in turn, physically and mentally. The body and the mind are inseparable. Learning to better focus and ground one, to ignore distractions, and to make it do what you need it to do even as it protests, makes you better able to do the same for the other.

As a result, over the last few years I decided to make a focused attempt to regain my physical conditioning. I’m older, and never quite expect to achieve the physique I had in my early Navy days, but dammit, I wanted to be better.

One of my friends, Mike Bronco,  is a fitness coach with a ton of experience, and I started working out with him and several other guys out of his garage on a weekly basis. I learned a lot there. I also dug up other sources that I cross-checked, and found reputable. Depending on exactly how fit you want to be, and how intensely you wish to improve, and how much logging you want to do, there are several paths you can take that all work, but they boil down to some simple rules. 

1) It has to be sustainable. Sure, as you get healthier and stronger you may be able to lift more, bike further, etc., but if it’s not something you can find time in your schedule for at least several times a week for the forseeable future because it requires time or gear you do not have regular access to… forget it.

2) It has to be enjoyable (and therefore self-motivating).  But there's a catch here:  Is it enjoyable for the sake of the movement itself, or, for the results it provides?

If it's for the results - it won't work. Stu Mittleman, one of the world's leading coaches says, "the running itself is the reward - not what the running gives you."

It has to be joy driven, not reward driven. I love to swim, I love to skate, I hate to run. Without a drill sergeant hanging around day in and day out as in boot camp, you’ll never get me fit by running. I’ll quit. The only time I ever ran regularly was so I could prepare for the Cooper River bridge run - and then I quit immediately after. Working 12-hour shifts in Norfolk I took precious time off to spend more than an hour on the boardwalk rollerblading almost every single day.

3) You don’t need anything fancy. A cheap workbench or exercise mat, and gravity exercises are an excellent place to start. A pull-up bar, and light weights can readily be added, and the collection of weights can be easily and cheaply expanded through second-hand stores as you need them.

4) Do more, but not always.  What? Shouldn’t you try to do more than last time. More reps, more weight, but always try to push a little further. You're doing this for self improvement, right?

Well, yes. You want to improve. You need to keep pushing. But not. every. workout.

As Mike told me -  DON'T push yourself every time to do more than the last time.  Olympians spend 80% of their time doing the same or even less than last time out.  Only 20% of their work is actually beyond current limits (even less for highly trained athletes).  The reason is simple:  You get stronger when you rest and you can't sustain high intensity for long periods of time.  The folks who push constantly tend to be injured quite a bit, and eventually burnout and quit altogether.

I’ll note in all honesty that when I originally asked Mike for input I’d said almost the opposite here - always do more - thinking that the following rule, “Don’t overdo it” would be enough.

The thing is, the lower intensity has a purpose. One - you’re already doing it for the sheer joy of it. You’re still operating your body at or near the limits to “keep in practice.” You’re mentally getting comfortable with the new boundaries, and better preparing yourself for pushing them. 

It’s also about form. And stability. it's about the mind mastering the body.

Why do squats with no weight or small weights instead of something near your max? Because doing it that way allows you to focus on your form. How you move your body. How you brace yourself. Your position. Where the strength flows.

Ditto when you run. Or skate. When you’re not at your limits, you can practice your form. To be more efficient. To be more effective.

Or curls - to work on how your holding and moving the weight rather than expending all of your energy simply lifting it.

For that matter, one of the reasons to do single-leg squats is not to make you stronger. You can effectively squat even less than you think - and a large part of the reason why is because your body is expending a lot more of it’s effort to simply keep you stable.

When you return to doing full, regular squats, you’ll find that you can lift more, because you’ve become more stable.

5) Don’t overdo it either. Didn’t I just say that? Well, yes. It’s important enough to repeat as its own rule. Your body needs time to heal. That is where you actually get stronger, and the workouts just force your body to rebuild. Heavy workouts every day don't give your body that time, and make you burn out. Pushing too far past your limits simply injures you, and that wastes time and energy recovering just to get back to where you were.

6) When you’re pushing yourself, don’t just work for “x’ reps. If you do ten, and you can comfortably do ten, then you’re not doing enough to force your body to rebuild and to become stronger. Push yourself to your limits. It helps to have friends to watch your back when you do this so that you don’t overdo it.

I told you it was important.

7) Accountability. Most people need this to really improve. Workout with friends, keep a log, do something to make sure you’re improving and not slacking off.

And don't make it complicated. Whether you're tracking your workouts or changing out backups, "complicated" means you stop doing it, unless you actually enjoy running the numbers (see Rule 2).

You also pick up other things. Over time you integrate them into a cohesive whole. All sorts of little things over the years, and even more bad information that I had to unlearn to distill into what I know today that made me wish I had good guidance "back then."

High Intensity Interval Training

The most surprising thing I discovered, and only recently discovered the source of scientific backing for, was that unless you really, really, really want to be a marathon runner, you can literally get most of the cardio conditioning you could ever want simply by working on your strength, and with short series of intensive exercises instead of hour-long stints running, or on a cardio machine. 

As described in the Wiki article, the basic concept is that working for 30, 40, 60 or more minutes at a fairly steady pace is not the most time-effective way to improve cardio conditioning. Instead, short, intensive bursts of intense whole-body exercise, with short interspersed breaks, push your body further, and also give you better conditioning to apply bursts of strength and power since it also improves your body’s anaerobic capability as well.

It is very flexible. It can be done with any excercise that uses large muscle groups: squats, sprints, “burpees”, etc. It can be done with weights ( I recommend without or very light at first) or with gravity alone. It can be done on various cardio machines - though as a practical matter treadmills take too long to change speeds readily. It is also easily logged. 

As mentioned in the Wiki, the basic protocol for the Tabata is simple: 20 seconds of maximal effort, followed by ten seconds of rest, repeated eight times. The total is four minutes. No cheating on the breaks. You should also warm up before, and cool down after. You can use a wall-clock with second hands, any number of gym timers, or one of the available iPhone and Android apps. There are other variants that are not quite as intense, but also effective, and all of them involve alternating fairly intense workouts with "down" periods.

It is very important to be careful with high-intensity intervals if you’re not already in basically OK shape already. A period of at least 6 weeks conditioning is paramount before anyone - especially those new to exercise - should do these high-intensity workouts. Walking is still without a doubt, the world's best and most effective from of exercise.  It is natural for the body. Walks are fun! In the meantime, start working on your strength, which carries over to cardio a lot more than most people think it does - especially excercises that deal in large muscle groups.

Then, when you get started, instead of doing a strict Tabata, you can start by doing sprint - walks, or adding sprints to your jogs. There are also several other formats that don’t push the intensity anywhere near as high, but that start conditioning you to work at full output for more than a few seconds.

Remember. Rule 5. Don’t overdo it. If you're doing it every day, you're doing it wrong. Your body needs a day or two to heal. That's where you actually get stronger. Not the workout itself. 

If you wish to log your performance, and all of your sets are really maximal effort, then the number of reps or distance covered for the last set is a convenient shortcut for logging your performance and fitness over time.

So as we near the end, you may notice what I have NOT told you.

I haven’t told you which exact exercises to do. There’s no magic combo. Even if there were room in this post, there are plenty of sources that illustrate the available options. Some gyms have weights, some gyms have machines. I prefer weights because of that whole stability thing - the real world doesn’t conveniently give you a brace anytime you have to move something. Some people like to run, some people like to swim.

It’s about what works, and what you enjoy.

As long as some exercises work on strength, some work on balance and stablity (karate and yoga are also good for that…), etc. You will be well rounded and overall “fit” - not just a muscled freak. Some of the excercises should let you establish a steady a rhythm - say running, swimming, or skating or walking - but some should be unpredictable. For example playing basketball, or cross-country running, or adding some footwork to your skating. 

It’s about having a fit life, and being prepared.

One more thing. There’s a rule 8.

8) Have fun!

I don't know if this will be the world-changing feature that Apple touts - Android has already had much of this functionality. That said, reports such as those at Ars Technica indicate that it will be at least as well integrated, if not better, while allowing noticeably more natural speech.  

One complaint about speech-based control and dictation systems, even the excellent software by Nuance (Dragon Dictation, etc.), is this: how does a computer, often in an office environment, distinguish between you and the guy next to you when he says "delete files."?

Plus there's the whole "who wants to look like a dork talking to their computer" angle.

One huge advantage that speech-to-text and voice command have on phones, as they approach the sophistication of the Dragon line of software, is that these are devices we are used to talking to all the time anyway.

Just food for thought.

He will be missed.

Rest in Peace, Steve.

One of the hardest lessons I ever had to learn in my life - one I still struggle with daily, is that of realizing that usually, "Good enough" is just that. Good Enough.

The problem of course lies in part that - at least in simple programs and math problems - there is no fuzzy "it works." Things are either correct, or not. As a child playing with the family printer, sending the correct sequence of bytes to a dot-matrix printer resulted in a pretty graphic. Sending another sequence resulted in a jumbled mess. It's really easy for an incipient geek or computer programmer to fall for the illusion that everything is that black and white, or that at least in the realms of programming or engineering, everything should be perfect.

Of course, it cannot be. For one, people and natural systems are chaotic. Secondly, even engineering is not that straightforward. I learned this lesson the hard way in the Navy, and the teacher was ironically what would appear to be the most unforgiving tutor: maintenance on power plant and propulsion systems aboard a nuclear submarine.

At first glance, that seems ludicrous. The loss of the Thresher almost single-handedly kicked off the birth of rigorous Quality Assurance paperwork and documentation for every critical safety system on submarines. Later, the Iwo Jima had a steam plant leak that killed ten people due to the use of the wrong bolts in reassembling a high pressure steam valve, which subsequently failed. This resulted in a similar program being instituted for surface ships. Obviously there are times where a lack of attention to detail, doing things a little less "perfect" can have deadly results.

The thing is, "perfect" here depends on the standard you wish to achieve. A NASCAR stock racer will blow the doors off a minivan or Humvee, but would fare poorly on anything but the smoothest pavement, and both would be hopelessly mired in conditions that a Humvee would blow through with ease.

Even when you have a primary purpose, there are conflicting standards. On a minivan, the desire for cargo space and the ability to haul said cargo directly conflicts with a desire for fuel efficiency and handling.

The art of engineering, and it is an art, is an art of putting together design choices such that, when all is said and done, the strengths reinforce each other, as many weaknesses as possible cancel out, and the final result is "good enough" at all of its respective jobs.

You have to get used to it.

With submarine maintenance we lived in two worlds. On the one hand, we thoroughly documented the proper installation of the proper material and size O-ring or gasket, with the proper torque applied to the bolts for seawater and steam valves. We obsessively checked off verifying the status of ballast tank valves before a dive. Mistakes got people killed. We spent hours practicing startup and shutdown procedures, done by the book. We drilled over and over again on casualty procedures to hone our response to any problem... and this is where the break with "perfection" began.

There is an "ideal" way to shut down any piece of equipment on a submarine that is listed in the technical reference. There is also a standard startup and shutdown procedure employed as part of the overall ships procedures. In many cases there are even alternate "emergency" procedures, and these are all found in volumes of engineering manuals and procedural guides. Yet there are often discrepancies between what the maintenance and technical reference state for starting up or shutting down a system, and the ships procedures. These differences exist because a motor, a diesel engine, an oil pump, a condenser does not exist in isolation, but as part of an integrated and interconnected whole.

These "standard" procedures are often modified. Revisions are supplied by the Navy as a whole based on maintenance and other accumulated data. The engineer and CO have wide latitude to promulgate changes ("Standing Orders") as long as said changes don't break things. They even have latitude to break things and order people into situations that will kill them in order to get the job done.

Lastly, casualty training has a brainstorming component where many what-if's are asked, because it's widely understood that when things fail, they're not likely to fail strictly in isolation (unless it's relatively minor), but in ways not strictly covered by the manuals.

In short, when things actually break, we don't throw out the manual, but instead use it to - hopefully - make wise choices in what we're actually going to do. And often enough we ended up improvising repairs to keep things running when the "proper" parts and tools were unavailable. Maintenance procedures would be pieced together as needed from multiple references, choosing the appropriate steps and discarding those that did not apply.

What I learned, in short, was that instead of striving to meet an arbitrary, unchanging standard of perfect, I should strive to meet the requirements of my priorities, because the real world keeps changing the "specification" you have to meet. Push comes to shove, accomplishing the mission, followed by keeping the ship running and keeping the crew alive trumped nearly every other procedure written down.

And since you didn't have the time or resources to do everything as perfectly as possible all the time, you had to choose which things must be done "right" - accomplished no matter what - which things should be done well ("good enough"), and which things not to bother doing in the time available, and to be happy with the result of your decisions.

Of course, it never hurts to strive to be a little bit better at whatever it is that you happen to be doing, each time you do it - that is the path to mastery.

Why is this important?

Because the scroll bars give you, with very little wasted space, two very, very critical pieces of information.

Their presence tells you that there is more to be seen, and the "footprint" of the scroll tab combines with it's position within the window tells you both how much of the total page you are seeing, and what your position is relative to the whole document/web page/whatever.

In the default mode, you may never realize that there is more to be seen.

In my opinion, this is the single most egregious mistake they made. Fortunately, it's also easily fixable. Go to your system preferences, and under the general preferences, select the option "Always" under "Show Scroll Bars." You won't lose much space on the screen, but you'll immediately know if there's more to see in any open window.

Insofar as the scrolling directions being changed - I actually like it now that I've grown used to it. Almost all of my computer work is on a laptop, with a trackpad front and center, and I spend little time on a mouse. 

• Auto-popup of authentication sheets at public wifi hotspots like Starbucks works great.
• Love the new spelling correction hints that let you see what it wants to do before autocorrecting it - giving you a chance to say no.
• Love the fact that you can now hold down a key to get the tilde/umlaut/whatever accent marks.
• Mission Control allows me to find windows that are open a little faster due to grouping by App than expose
• I love that Safari auto-restores, and Pages, and Textedit, and...
• Fast launches
• Versions of previous pages
• Apps conforming to the new document standard don't force me to save before dragging into Mail App, etc.
• For the same apps, not having to worry about saving the stuff I'm working on when I close the program. It gets saved as I'm working on it too. 
• Call me nuts but I actually like the new three-column layout in Mail.
• You can search by multiple terms within Mail, etc.
• Seeing battery status, etc. on the login screen.
• PDF annotation. Not just "signature" graphics, but actual text entry, etc. even on PDF's that are not pre-configured as forms (for an example of the latter, download your typical IRS tax form as PDF).

Things I dislike

• Effectively borked the minimize-to-app in Mission Control
• Using "Duplicate" instead of "Save as" can be a bit unexpected at first.
• The "hold key" behavior does mess up people who like repeat keys enabled.
• Why did you cripple digital color meter?
• The "real life" look of the address book and iCal is a bit much, but I can deal with it.

While the interface is considered dated by some, it still has one of the best grep-based multi-file search and replace tools available on a Mac editor, and one of the best file comparison tools I've seen. It's also free, and available via the Mac App Store.

Office has withstood the onslought of Adobe's PDF standard, because you cannot easily edit spreadsheets and text documents once they are PDF files. Despite the foothold in the law community, Wordperfect is effectively an also-ran.

Yet, there are alternatives. On the Mac side, there is Apple's iWork suite and the OpenOffice - based NeoOffice. For mac, Linux, and Windows, Open Office and Libre Offic all try to capture the breadth of features and feel of Microsofts 800-lb gorilla. For most people, they succeed admirably, and given how well most convert documents in and out of the MS Office formats, there is little need for most people to buy a copy from Microsoft.

So why in this environment should anyone go out and pay good money for a suite that comes from Microsoft?

Exchange

Google is making significant headway with its powerful online mail, document, and calendar sharing services. Nevertheless, it doesn't quite meet the power and flexibility - or cost, complexity, etc. - of an Exchange server, especially when it comes to shared contacts. Exchange is completely integrated with Outlook, and nothing else quite works so well for the people who need those features.

MAPI and OLE

Office provides several ways for other programs to communicate with them. A number of programs - especially business or industry-specific ones, use these to create emails or documents from scratch including word processing and spreadsheet documents. Unfortunately, in this case, no combination of Open Office, Thunderbird, etc. are going to quite do the job.

Compatibility

Other office suites currently are very capable when exporting to or importing from the Microsoft document formats. Minor variations in formatting can creep up between different versions of the Microsoft suite (2003, 2007, Mac) as well. Nevertheless, when formatting fidelity, etc. is a must, the results are much better if you stick to the same software all around instead of converting between completely different document formats.

Your boss/school/etc. Told You to.

You can argue that "Exchange" or "Compatibility" also qualifies here, but if your boss, company, or school says to use office, well, then that's what you do.

In short

If no-one is forcing you. If you don't need complete integration with an Exchange server. If you don't need as close to perfect compatibility as possible with other MS Office users, or use software that requires Office to use all of its features, you may want to consider the cheap or free alternatives available to you. Otherwise, well, you need to bite the bullet and go get a copy of MS Office.

So what is there to say that hasn't already been said?

First, some high points. In case you've never been bitten by this, never, ever, ever upgrade a business-critical computer until the software you need is updated to work with it. Ever. That especially applies to niche software like architectural CAD software, or if you make a living as a graphic designer.

Also, "rosetta" - the technology that allows Macs to run older programs depending on "PowerPC" chips, is no longer available, at all. This especially hurts those who use products like Quicken for the Mac  (Intuit, along with Adobe, is another company that seems to think that adapting to long-announced changes and providing current product updates is just passe). Also, Mac versions of MS Office before Office 2008 will not be usable without an update or switching to iWork or Open Office/Libre Office.

Please note - if you are using Quicken for the Mac, please export your file as a backup before upgrading OS X.

So now what?

Well, I'm not every user. I make my living helping other users. That said, many of the programs I use are the ones I recommend to others.

 The Install

Straightforward. Buy the app, let it download, let the installer run. Wait 30 minutes or so after that, and a new splash page appears with your login.

The first thing I checked, as with every major update since 10.5 completely reset the printer settings, was to verify my printers were still there. Yes they were, and yes they worked. Also, as shown below, the 10.7 update didn't scrub my custom keyboard shortcut for  printing PDF's (originally at OSX hints).

 Personal Information and Mail

I started up the new Mail app, and ended up waiting quite a while for it to update the mail database to the new format. In the meantime, I opened up my google account in Safari, and discovered a new wrinkle. When logging in to at least several services that Lion recognizes using Safari (I can verify this for Gmail and MobileMe), Safari helpfully asks of you wish to add the account to your mail and calendars. Since those accounts were already in Mail.app (which was updating) I simply said no thanks, but it's a nice touch that goes hand-in-hand with automatically opening up the login sheets at many public WiFi hotspots.

Once the mail had finally updated, I looked in the system preferences. Oddly, even though the soon-to-be-obsolete MobileMe control panel listed that I was syncing my contacts, the (new) unified "Mail, Contacts, & Calendars" account panel showed my Mobileme account as only synchronizing calendar items, mail , and chat items.

Yes, chat items. I'm not sure where that will lead just yet. 

Either way, my contacts do sync. 

Looking into my address book, I discovered that Address book was no longer syncing with Gmail. I fixed that, and after a few rounds of discrepancy reviews, had my contacts under control again.

Scrolling

I'm still torn on the scroll direction reversal. I will say that it's actually fairly natural when scrolling via a trackpad. 

That said, the hiding scrollbars were driving me nuts. I need to know where I am in the document, and the default setting to hide them when not scrolling can make it difficult to tell if there is anything further to scroll to.

Apps

Despite the dire warnings at the beginning of this post, very little broke.  The following third-party apps worked without any apparent hitches:

All's well that ends well.

Overall, it was a very smooth update. While there are a few things that are known to break, very little broke unexpectedly, and I've now had enough exposure to this to start getting really comfortable. Many apps did not need updates at all, though a number of the ones that didn't need post-upgrade updates had already been updated in the recent past to be compatible with Lion. 

This comes up because I was explaining to a friend a large part of why "Like a D6" (that I mentioned earlier in Parody) was funny. For a lot of gaming geeks, hanging out around a table playing D&D, wargames, boardgames, etc., is just as fun and looked forward to just as much as a "good time" (if not more so) as hanging out in a club with friends and dancing, etc.

There are several excellent and simple systems available. My preferred system is Git, but Mercurial is also an excellent, modern system to use. It's also fairly easy to set up. And if you don't want to mess around with the command line a lot, or don't want to pay for the (excellent) Tower, then there's a new, free option for managing your git repositories at the popular online service GitHub. (Note - you don't need to host your repositories online - they never have to leave your computer. Unless you want to share them with other people not in your home or office).

First of all, thanks to the guys at the D6 Generation for mentioning it. Also, yes, the song is available on iTunes.

"You can have anything you want, you just can't have everything you want."

No-one special, just something I heard. I sat on this a while, but honestly, I can't improve on it. 

Enter ebay. It turns out that - reasonably enough, though they don't make it clear in advance - that they limit the number of big, expensive, or particularly brand-conscious items that can be sold at any time by a new seller. This limit varies depending on both whim and the particular item being sold.

In practical terms, I can only list items like my older MacBook Pro that I'm trying to sell once every 30 days, and I can only list one such item at a time.

While it's a bit wonky that I have to wait a month to re-list my laptop if it doesn't sell, that at least is somewhat reasonable. It's when you actually try to revise your listings that the real shock comes.

You see, a revised entry is treated, temporarily, as if it is an additional entry. If your item limit is one, you cannot revise your entry. You cannot add pictures, you cannot edit the description, you cannot do a single thing to change it. You start with one entry, you end with one entry, for the same physical item that does not magically duplicate itself no matter how ebay's system sees it, but you cannot revise it because they treat it as a new item.

If I remove it from sale, I can't relist it for another month. if it doesn't sell because I wasn't able to add more relevant information, I can't relist it for another month.

The kicker is that no one in their right mind considers revising an existing item to be the same as adding a new item.

So I'd like to follow ebay's guidelines for professionalism. I'd like to add pictures. I'd like to revise the description to be more informative and accurate - and thus useful to buyers.

And because of a stupid decision in how to handle revisions to existing objects that flies in the face of reality, I cannot.

Calendar is expanding the available views so that the iPhone/iPod Touch version will now allow a week view. I've lost count of how many times I've waited until I could open up iCal on my laptop in order to see the week at a glance.

Mail will now allow formatting, including bold, italics, and (most importantly for several people I know) indenting. My favorite new mail features are the ability to drag to arrange addresses, and the ability to manage folders.

Lastly, with an appleTV, the iPad2 can now be mirrored directly onto an HDTV over wifi.

There was not the classic "Steve" version of "One more thing", but one new feature that has seen some mention in the press feels incomplete to me. There are also some things people were hoping for that were NOT announced.

There is a new messaging system built into iOS5 to supplement/coexist with MMS/SMS, but available to any iOS device even if not a cellular data plan - such as iPod Touches. I'm willing to be that like facetime, this is a feature that will be added to or made available to the Mac OS in Lion.

There have also been people talking about how movie streaming and a new AppleTV were not mentioned. My only reply is: All in good time. Apple is not positioning these things against Netflix, but once this infrastructure gets put in place, then movie streaming is such a no-brainer in terms of desirability that I'm sure we will see it.

One must remember - Apple no longer does annual announcements at MacWorld, etc. I suspect it's because that lets them announce what features they want to, when they are good and ready to unleash something new.

Thus was born Markdown. Markdown is both a plain-text syntax for tagging text for web/formatted output and a program of the same name that converts text in the markdown syntax to valid HTML. Since the formatting and syntax use conventions already long common in emails, it's very easy to mark up the text, and text formatted this way is highly readable even as plain text.

Since I don't feel like breaking out a massive writing tool like Open/Libre Office or Scrivener every time I want to write up a few paragraphs, and since I absolutely hate going back after the fact to format everything in even the best WYSIWYG implementations when I could do it from the keyboard as I type, I really appreciate the ease of use.

I also appreciate the fact that it's widely available. While blogger doesn't directly support it, it's fairly easily added to Wordpress, and is available for Posterous and Squarespace.

So here's my cheat sheet that I keep in Emacs when I need a reference. Most of it is paraphrased from the original, and further details or nuance are linked to on a section-by-section basis to Gruber's original spec:

Markdown reference:

You'll note the headers for each section link to the respective section in Gruber's syntax page for more information on the available options and nuances.

Block Elements

A paragraph is simply one or more consecutive lines of text, separated by one or more blank lines

This is a new paragraph.

To FORCE a
newline,
use two
spaces.

Headers

Two types.

This is H1 (with ===== underneath)
====================================

This is H1 (with ===== underneath)

This is H2 (With ------ underneath)
-------------------------------------

This is H2 (With ------ underneath)

Alternately, you can use '#'

# One '#' for h1

One '#' for h1

## Two '##''s for h2

Two '##''s for h2

Three '###' for h3, and so forth.

Three '###' for h3, and so forth.

Blockquoting

Markdown uses email-style ">" characters for blockquoting. They can be nested by adding additional levels of '>'. They can also contain other markdown elements (headers, code blocks, etc...

> This is a blockquote with two paragraphs. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
>
>> Inset second level.
>
> Donec sit amet nisl. Aliquam semper ipsum sit amet velit. Suspendisse

This is a blockquote with two paragraphs. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,

Inset second level.

Donec sit amet nisl. Aliquam semper ipsum sit amet velit. Suspendisse

Lists

Markdown supports ordered (numbered) and unordered (bulleted) lists.

Unordered Lists

Unordered lists use asterisks, pluses, and hyphens — interchangably — as list markers:

- Item a
- Item b
- Item c

• Item a
• Item b
• Item c

Ordered Lists

Ordered lists use numbers followed by PERIODS. Order is irrelevant.

1. Dog
2. Cat
3. Kids

1. Dog
2. Cat
3. Kids

List items separated by a space have the content of the <li> wrapped in a <p> paragraph tag.

Code Blocks

To produce a code block in Markdown, simply indent every line of the block by at least 4 spaces or 1 tab. For example:

This is a code block.

A code block continues until it reaches a line that is not indented (or the end of the article).

HTML in a code block is converted to entities, and Markdown syntax is NOT processed within a code block.

Horizontal Rules

You can produce a horizontal rule tag (<hr />) by placing three or more hyphens, asterisks, or underscores on a line by themselves. If you wish, you may use spaces between the hyphens or asterisks.

---
***
___

Span Elements

Links

Inline or reference. In both styles, the link text is delimited by [square brackets]. See the original syntax for a more thorough explanation of reference-style links.

This is [an example](http://example.com/ "Title") inline link.

[This link](http://example.net/) has no title attribute.

Reference-style links

[This is linked] [id1] to something

[id1]: http://www.midknightgallery.com/  "Midknight Gallery home Page"

This is linked to something

Also, a reference can be implicitly identified by the linked content

  [The Midknight Gallery][] is a great site.

  [The Midknight Gallery]: http://www.midknightgallery.com/ "Home"

The Midknight Gallery is a great site.

Emphasis

**Bold**

Bold

*Emphasis*

Emphasis

Emphasis can be used in the middle of a word:

Crap*tac*ular.

Craptacular.

Backslash to escape literal asterix's like this: \*.

Span of Code

Wrap a span of code within a paragraph with backtick quotes (`)

To include a literal backtick character within a code span, you can use multiple backticks as the opening and closing delimiters:

``There is a literal backtick (`) here.``

Images

Inline image syntax looks like this:

![Alt text](/path/to/img.jpg)

![Alt text](/path/to/img.jpg "Optional title")

Reference-style image syntax looks like this:

![Alt text][id]

Followed by the same syntax as reference links:

[id]: url/to/image  "Optional title attribute"

Miscellaneous

Backslash Escapes

Markdown provides backslash escapes for the following characters:

\   backslash
`   backtick
*   asterisk
_   underscore
{}  curly braces
[]  square brackets
()  parentheses
#   hash mark
+   plus sign
-   minus sign (hyphen)
.   dot
!   exclamation mark

Automatic Links

Simply surround the URL or email address with angle brackets.

<http://example.com/>

Markdown will turn this into:

<a href="http://example.com/">http://example.com/</a>

So how did I get into this hobby in the first place? For most gamers my age, it usually starts at Dungeons & Dragons, but actually, it started even earlier than that with regular straight-up wargames.

My first wargame I ever bought with my own money was a copy of Starship Troopers by Avalon Hill.  I'm still not sure precisely where I first saw it - it may have been at the the Navy Exchange's "toy" department. Perhaps it was the local hobby shop where I started looking for models more varied than the standard department-store airplane kits. It sure as heck wasn't the standard Kmart, Sears, or JC Penny's.

A long-time Heinlein fan, I was hooked. I started looking at other games. Fortunately for me (and unfortunately for any hope of sanity on the part of my parents), the husband of the couple that provided before-school care for us while my parents worked - the D.C. commute was a stone cold b*tch even then - was a wargamer and had a rather nice collection of AH games.. I lost a lot of time there playing Afrika Korps, Dune, and other games.

It wasn't until we started staying over at a friends place after school in 5th or 6th grade that I first saw a copy of Dungeons & Dragons - a "box" set intended to get a foothold in toy and game stores - and promptly bought my own.

I started paying more attention to the weird books in "that" corner of the hobby shop. Sooner, rather than later, several friends and I had a fairly complete set of D&D books: the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide, the Monster Manual, and a number of modules. We also started looking at related stuff like Gamma World for post-apocalyptic Sci-Fi role playing, also by TSR.

Then I stumbled into a copy of The Traveller Book, a compilation of the first three manuals for the spacefaring RPG Traveller.

It was like finding home. I loved D&D - played it quite a bit through high school, but I'd spend hours going through the Traveller rules - especially the rather unique spaceship combat system (that used real newtonian mechanics!)

I'd also picked up a few more games - as I still played wargames. Panzerblitz and Magic Realm were added to my collection. I tried to convince my cousin to get into wargames by buying him a copy of Storm Over Arnhem based on the battle for Arnhem bridge that also inspired the movie "A Bridge Too Far."

I also received my intro to Steve Jackson Games with the ludicrously fun "Car Wars," spent a lot of money on Battletech right after it changed from Battledroids, and quite a bit of time in Shadowrun (magic and cyberpunk).

I then needed something with more flexibility, as the ever-changing editions to Traveller were driving me nuts, and I didn't feel like keeping up. So I tried on GURPS (yeah, I know, I'm now a couple editions behind again, but that's not bad for a game system I bought fifteen years ago...). While not very scalable and justifiably put down as fiddly, it had a unique character development system that allowed you to tailor your strengths and your weaknesses. It also had the flexibility needed to put out incredible resource books on everything from Vikings to Cthulhu and the far, far future. I ended up writing an article for the Pyramid (SJ's in-house gaming magazine).

While dabbling in the vampire based games from White-Wolf games, I mostly skipped that as well as Magic: The Gathering, though I did end up getting quite a few cards for SJ's loony "Illuminati: New World Order" card-based world domination game. The sheer lunacy of having Bjorne the viking dinosaur be the dictatorial ruler of California while running the world via TV advertisements was a sight to behold, and only a hint at the possible craziness in a game where all conspiracy theories could be true. Fasa actually had a very nifty game of armored grav tank combat that unfortunately petered out, but I dearly loved it.

These days, while I still have a few GURPS books, it's mostly current boardgames, as I don't have the time to invest in RPG's. Descent, Survive! Warmachine, Mag Blast, Seven Wonders, etc. take up the majority of my monthly (sometimes bimonthly) playing time. I still have an old copy of Fortress Europa by Avalon Hill.

This didn't work out of the box in emacs, but I found a fix (h/t to Justillilly.com). 

In your user directory, you'll find a hidden file called ".emacs" Edit the file to add the following:

(setq backup-by-copying t)

Or, you can use the in-emacs preferences. If you type M-x (refer to the tutorial if you're not sure what that means), and then "customize", you'll get to a customization screen. Select "Files", then "Backup," and toggle "Backup By Copying" on, and save the results. This will automatically add the entry to your '.emacs' file.

While it's possible to open the GUI version of emacs from the command line with a specific file, it's not quite so graceful if you forget and close out the terminal window - it crashes. I've tried several workarounds, but none of them are truly satisfactory, especially given that I don't have to open up the terminal to see hidden files in the first place.

So of course you learn the basics well enough that opening up emacs in the terminal allows you to get done what you need, and then realize that to open a file anywhere on the drive, even hidden files and ones hidden from you by the computer, is drop dead simple. 

C-x C-f (Control -X followed by a Control-f) allows you to open up the file browser, starting at your home directory (shown by a "~"). Hitting return then changes the display - the buffer - to the specified file or the contents of the selected directory. From there you can navigate through the file system with much of the same ease as you can through the terminal. 

The lesson here is that you don't even need the terminal to open up a hidden file. If you are in the terminal because you want to pipe the results of a command to emacs, you can either deal with the terminal - emacs is emacs - or bring up the graphical version. In the last case, just don't close  out the terminal window before closing out the graphical one.

In short - this isn't an issue so much as it just works different. 

You'll have to unlearn a lot that you "know." Also, if you've used other high-end text editors like BBedit, you'll find some features not available right away out of the box. 

As usual, the best way to learn is to actually do it. 

A good site to learn more about about emacs as you get started is the Emacs Wiki. The site includes all sorts of information, including where to get different versions, and how to setup certain features. They also have an excellent page on where to get and set up Mac versions. I recommend you download the version compiled by Vincent Goulet because it includes several common packages and needed adjustments to work smoothly with the MacOS clipboard, and then that you skip on to do the tutorial.

The tutorial? Emacs is 'self-documenting,' and includes an excellent tutorial that leads you through the basic commands to move through a document and modify it. To start the tutorial, first start up emacs, and then type CNTRL-h (hold down the control key and press 'h', often referred to in emacs as C-h), followed by a 't'. 

I'll be back later to work around some things I missed from using BBedit and TextMate.

When discussing programming earlier, I discussed that you should choose a text editor, and stick with it, learn it. I also outlined why I chose the text editors I was using. 

Well, circumstances have changed, and so have my tools.

One of my two go-to editors (TextMate) still has not seen any real progress. Any promises of an updated version fixing the problems I and others experienced still being so much vaporware. Also, I was spending most of my programming time in Xcode, and while Xcode has its faults as a text editor, losing the integration, code completion, etc. just wasn't worth it. Lastly, I've found myself spending a lot more time in not only the Mac terminal, but working with other, linux computers, and needed to finally buckle down and learn an editor that would be available - or installable - almost anywhere I was logging in without having to learn yet another set of tools.

Thus I'm back to learning Emacs.

Why two tools? The friction of working around Xcode's external editor support when it did exist - it's not available in the latest update - was just too much trouble, and I still needed something I could use everywhere else. Screwdriver and a hammer.

So yes, there's a learning curve. Emacs is insanely powerful and was designed in a pre-mouse world for handling text in a number of different contexts. But the basics are the same in the OSX terminal, Cocoa, a linux terminal, Windows, XEmacs under gnome or KDE. Whatever I learn, I learn once, and I can use it anywhere.

While I personally won't be switching to it from Pixelmator, what I've said before holds true - they'r both excellent programs and it's more a matter of which suits your style. Check it out.

Note: Updated to dix a typo in mispelling "Mac"

First, obviously, you need to update your device to iOS 4.3 and your copy of iTunes to version 10.2

Secondly, if you haven't yet, you need to turn on home sharing for your computer's copy of iTunes under the advanced menu.

Then, go to the Settings app, and look for the iPod settings.

You'll find an entry for home sharing. Enter in the AppleID you used to set up home sharing in the first place - it should be the one you use for purchasing apps and music.

After that, open up the iPod/music app, and check for a new item called "Shared" under "more" that will show up when you are on the same network as a shared iTunes library. You will be presented with a list of shared libraries that you can dive into and look through music, video, etc.

To go back to your own iPods music selection, go back to "Shared," and select "My iPod."

Then... enjoy!

The short answer: yes, it's a shame. Yes, some people will get some exposure to radiation outside of the plant. Yes, parts of the plant will likely be shut down for good. All in all, the plant suffered an earthquake well in excess of design parameters and has been shut down. The core may slag itself, and some radioactive gases may be vented (and dissipate, and rapidly become non-radioactive ) relative to normal background, but in the end, explosions of the reactor core, or anything like Chernobyl, is just an impossibility.

The long answer is here, from the guys at MIT's Nuke sciences division.

It is worth mentioning at this point that the nuclear fuel in a reactor can never cause a nuclear explosion like a nuclear bomb. At Chernobyl, the explosion was caused by excessive pressure buildup, hydrogen explosion and rupture of all structures, propelling molten core material into the environment.  Note that Chernobyl did not have a containment structure as a barrier to the environment.

Additionally, Chernobyl was designed so that it got more reactive when it lost water, and the moderating material that made it more reactive was flammable graphite which caught fire.

So please go read the whole thing. 

Code you don't write is the easiest and fastest to debut, test, document, read and support.

This quote to me outlines several principles. 

First - while I strongly believe in learning by trying the hard, slow, painful way, by going through the basics, this doesn't apply to when the priority is to actually produce. Also, the whole point of of doing it hard, slow, and from the basics is to gain an intuitive grasp of how to do it more efficiently, to improve the quality of your work, so that you get better at it, not to be a masochist.

This applies to code as to anything else. Brevity matters. As the quote attests, any line of code you don't have to write is not only less time spent typing, but the time figuring out how to do it in fewer steps often pays itself back in better performance, and easier maintenance. Lastly, the next time a similar solution is needed, you don't have to think about it anymore, and you still get the rest of the benefits.