Ali Hassan

Is winter ever coming? I’m starting to feel cheated by the lack of snow. I want to sit inside and read a book and watch it come down.

I thought it was over, but it seems that my war with the rats and mice continues, albeit on a different battleground. Let me make this clear: I shall not cease until the rodent armies are defeated.

Quite out of the blue my television has started issuing the following message:

“You are listening to the Second Audio Program, or SAP, of 6 ABC. If you do not wish to listen to this Spanish language broadcast of 6 ABC please switch your audio channel to Main Audio.”

There’s actually no audio at all. Just that message. Over and over again. Grrrrrr.

Note: Gmail now supports IMAP. These instructions still work, but IMAP is probably a better option. Google’s instructions on getting IMAP to work with Apple Mail can be found here.

This is an explanation of how to setup Apple Mail to send and receive messages through a Google Mail account. Although Gmail is the best free webmail service available, it can still be handy to use a standalone e-mail client to access messages. For one thing, if your messages are stored on your computer you can read them even when you don’t have an internet connection. And you don’t have to look at the advertisements.

Note that if you set this up you’ll still be able to use the Gmail web interface to check and send e-mails.

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The hard drive on my MacBook died last week. Which wasn’t a great experience, even though the friendly folks at the local Apple Store managed to get it replaced in under 24 hours, and also replaced the whole top case including the keyboard and trackpad. Which was nice, since the only thing wrong with it was that it was dirty. Nonetheless, I’ve had to spend some time reinstalling all my software. This is a list of the handy little pieces of free software that I use on a regular basis.

Firefox 2.0

A far better browser than Safari.

Camino

Also a better browser than Safari.

LiquidCD

Disk burning and copying software.

Text Wrangler

My favourite text editor for Mac OS X.

Cyberduck

A nifty little FTP and SFTP client.

iChax

A plug-in that adds tabbed browsing in iChat.

Google Earth

Maps galore.

Stellarium

Planetarium software.