Apple Mail: filtering GIF spam, the latest e-mail spam plague

Over the last few months, I've seen a huge uptick in the number of spam e-mails I get which contain an attached GIF image, like the ones shown below. Fortunately, some wise souls have figure out a good rule in Apple's Mail application, that does a good job of sorting out this junk mail.

See Another Mail.app rule to catch image spam on Hawkwings.net

Update, Dec. 2, 2006: The new Junk rule is working beautifully. It's catching all of this type of spam,  with no false positives after two days and about 60 junk mails.  I set up the rule to move the suspect mail to my Junk folder, and by coloring the background, I can quickly scan that folder for messages caught by the rule, versus the mail already caught by Apple's (excellent and flawless) Junk Mail tool.

Technorati Tags: AppleMail, AppleMailRules, JunkMail, mailfilters, spam

How to shrink your Virtual PC disk size on Mac OS X

If you use Microsoft Virtual PC with Windows XP Home on Mac OS X, you may find that your virtual PC's hard drive, or disk image, expands over time. In the year that I've been running Virtual PC 7 with Windows XP Home, my PC disk had grown from about 4 gigabytes to over 14 gigabytes, even though the only thing I installed on my PC was Firefox. (You'll typically find your Virtual PC disk as a file inside your user's Home folder, in Documents > Virtual PC List.)

You needn't loose disk space to this “dynamically expanding” disk, however. By following the instructions at Microsoft's Virtual PC Support website, I was able to shrink my virtual PC disk down to 5.8 gigabytes — a savings of 8 gigs!

For step-by-step instructions, see Microsoft's support article “How to reclaim disk space on a disk image in Virtual PC for Mac.”

For kicks, I ran the process twice, and saved a bit of space the second time around too, getting the disk image down to 5.33 GB.

Now, can you convert your newly-shrunk disk from a “dynamically expanding” disk image to “fixed,” so it doesn't creep up in size again? Bad news: you can't. When I ran Virtual PC's Virtual Disk Assistant and converted my 5.33 GB dynamically expanding disk to a fixed size disk, thinking I would prevent the disk from ballooning up again, it didn't create a fixed disk of 6 GB — on its own accord, it created a 15 GB disk. It did this even though I had only 4.8 GB of data on it. So I converted it back, from fixed to dynamic, and ended up at 5.36 GB.

Technorati Tags: macintosh, macosx, Microsoft, OSX, virtualpc

Implementing “tags” in Mac OS X

Add this to the pile of things I'd like: the ability to add “tags” to my data in Mac OS X. Above, I've mocked up what this might look like in the Macintosh Finder. The white triangle to the right of the file name (DSC_8957.JPG) has been clicked and is seen here in the “open” state, revealing the associated tags which I would have typed in. Clicking on any of those tags would bring up a Spotlight-like interface showing more items with that tag. Tags could also be auto-generated by the OS.

And wouldn't this be nice: tags from photos in the Finder could also be automatically included when uploading via 1001 to Flickr.

Technorati Tags: macintosh, OSX, macosx, tags

Ikea's Vika Inge legs by Olle Lundberg: aluminum is the metal of modernism?

I was wasting time (precious time) over at Apartment Therapy when I came across their posting about Ikea's Vika Inge table legs.

I like the same legs paired with Ikea's Vika Lauri table top at 46“ x 30”. The legs attach with one allen bolt; everything is stock Ikea. Plenty solid, and a perfect match for Apple Computer's aluminum product designs.

This close-up reveals the cheap metal casting that left a big seam on the inside of the leg. The outside of the leg is clean, though; and the table top's aluminum edge is perfectly smooth.

For more pictures, see my other posts:

• Ikea's Dirigent shelving // the aluminum workspace
• Modern San Francisco: Putting the Mod in Modern California

Technorati Tags: aluminumchair, emeco, ikea, modernism, vika

Long Live Emigre! The Magazine “Emigre” Is Dead!

After many years of publishing, Emigre magazine is calling it quits. I first learned about Emigre when I was a budding web designer at CMP Media in the mid 1990s. My colleague introduced me to “this really cool design magazine” called Emigre, and from the first look I was hooked on the concept. Emigre is a type foundry based in Berkeley, California, where Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko have influenced the graphic design world for years, introducing stylish new typefaces and publishing the sometimes cryptic magazine Emigre.

The magazine has had many forms since it began in 1984. For a long time, it was a fairly pedestrian 8.5x11 inch rag, but then it became a cardboard folder with a CD and a booklet, and then it became something like a paperback book with nothing but text in it. At first it was free, then it was free if you ordered something from them, then it you had to pay for a subscription to the 4 issues per year. It's been interesting to watch the progression of design of the magazine, of the overall concept, and of the ideas presented within — as well as to watch what fine typefaces came out under their brand.

I really started to be intrigued by Emigre when their head honcho, Rudy VanderLans, began publishing photographs of his desert road trips, first in a series of magazine issues and then in a series of books: Palm Desert, Cucomonga, Joshua Tree, and Supermarket. VanderLans is not your typical photographer; his photographs are those of the interested amateur, apparently taken with an ordinary 35mm camera and not a medium or large format negative camera, as is often the case with landscape photography that aspires to “art.”

Below: pages from VanderLans's book “Supermarket.”

Like me, VanderLans moved to California from a far away place (he came from the Netherlands, considerably farther than my own homeland of Connecticut). He went to U.C. Berkeley where he studied photography. He founded Emigre in 1984 and went on to influence the world of graphic design. I moved to California in 1984, studied geography at Berkeley and graduated in 1995, and influenced precisely nothing, but still, I've enjoyed the contributions of Mr. VanderLans to the world of design and photography.

So it's with sadness that I learn, through the last issue of Emigre, #69, of the end of the magazine.

The Computer As Social Interaction & Environment

The world some of us live in, December 18, 2005:

Every day, I use my computer. With it, I do a lot of different thing, from work to hobbies. I make my living developing and maintaining websites, I communicate with friends and colleagues via e-mail, and I enjoy an active photography hobby. I listen to music, I compose music, I chat with people, I write down my ideas, share my recorded music, take care of my finances, and file my taxes.

We're at this strange point in human history where much of our lives happens on a machine — a personal computer connected to the Internet.

The computer, as it functions connected to the Internet, has become both an environment in which we live our lives, and a social interaction we have with other people.

Astral Blossom - totally rad screen saver for Mac OS X

My brother Greg has created an amazing screen saver for Mac OS X: Astral Blossom.

If you have a Mac, especially if you have a nice big flat-screen like an iMac or a Cinema Display, then you just couldn't make your Mac look any more awesome than this. Buy it online at his website.

Mac OS X “Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder” bug: files overwritten

In Safari running under Mac OS X 10.4.3, I will often want to save receipts of bank transactions. So I hit Command-P to print, then in the PDF menu button, I'll choose “Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder.”

When I look in my Web Receipts folder, it has saved the file, but if there was already a file there with that file's name, the old one is replaced by the new one. There is no warning that I am about to replace the previous PDF receipt with the new one.

Safari uses the page title as the file name. Instead of accumulating PDFs in the Web Receipts folder, Safari is overwriting the existing file.

This is certainly a bug: the Mac shouldn't be overwriting files without telling me. If it's going to save PDFs in the Web Receipts folder, then I should have the option to choose a name or approve the name that it generates from the HTML title. Or it should give every receipt a unique name (for instance, adding a date and time stamp to the name).

Bugs found: a review of Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 and Fireworks 8

UPDATE April 12, 2006: Get the Dreamweaver 8.01 update

Macromedia (recently bought by Adobe) has released new versions of Dreamweaver and Fireworks. I'm using them on the free 30 day trial. Here's a report on what I'm finding.

Dreamweaver bugs & shortcomings:

• The Site window is very slow to refresh from the Finder. For example, I made some new images in Fireworks, and stored the GIFs in my site's images folder. Minutes later, I went into Dreamweaver to upload these images to the server. The images didn't show up in the Files window (F8) until I pressed the Refresh button (F5, just like refresh on Internet Explorer for Windows).
• The Delete key doesn't always work when deleting files in the Files window (neither the delete key next to +/= key, nor the delete key under the help key). This bug existed in Dreamweaver MX 2004 too.
• No support for the text-shadow property in CSS
• No support for the image title tag in the Properties window.
• Random quits: on the 10th day of using Dreamweaver 8, the application suddenly quit when I clicked on a CSS name to edit it.

Fireworks bugs & shortcomings:

• Most OS X applications use Option-Command-H to Hide Others (in the application's menu — i.e., the first menu after the Apple in the upper left corner). Fireworks doesn't have any command-key to execute this menu command, which is retarded and sucks. This bug existed in the previous version of the software (MX 2004).
• When I click on a property in the Properties palette, it often takes over five seconds for the properties palette to update with the properties for the object I have selected. It seems like this bug may be associated with using a Wacom tablet for selecting, instead of the mouse.

Macromedia wants you to pay $199 to upgrade Dreamweaver  and $149 to upgrade Fireworks to the new versions — which I think is too much. After all these years of using Dreamweaver and Fireworks, I'm shocked that in the relative calm of the past two years (post dot-com bubble), Macromedia hasn't found the time to fix some really obvious and really basic bugs in their software. Man, that's lame!

Mac OS X Tip: Zoom a window from the keyboard (OMG)

When using Mac OS X, you'll frequently find that you want to zoom an interface window. The only way to do this is to click the green button in the window's title bar, or choose “Zoom” from the Window menu. Both of those actions require using the mouse, which I'd prefer not to use.

Luckily, Mac OS X allows us to assign keyboard strokes to any menu command in an application (including the Finder). Go to the Keyboard and Mouse preference pane, click the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, and click the + button in the lower left to add an application to which you'll add a keyboard shortcut. Let's choose “Finder” from the pop-up list of applications. Type in “Zoom” as the Menu Title, and in the Keyboard
Shortcut field, press Command-=.

Click this screenshot to see what I mean:

In the image below, you see the dialog where you choose the application and enter the menu title and keyboard shortcut:

And that's it. Just close the preference pane and you're done.

TIP: Add Zoom with Command-Shift-+ to Preview for easy viewing of PDF documents. Usually when you open a PDF with Preview, it's too small and the first thing you'll want to do is zoom in. Press Command-= and Command-- to zoom in and out of the doc; assign the keyboard shortcut Command-Shift-+ to zoom the whole window to fit the scale size of the PDF. Much better than having to drag out the window with the mouse to view a document zoomed in at 200%.