Tag: gmail

Email not receiving

My Inbox in Apple Mail has a triangle icon with an exclamation point in it, and isn’t receiving emails. I’m having to use my “All Mail” folder below. How do I fix this?

I get this question from time to time. It happens for different reasons, often when either your internet or your email service is interrupted — which has afflicted Gmail recently. Usually the easy fix is, in Apple Mail, clicking on Mailbox > Take All Accounts Online. I’m actually a little surprised that “All Mail” worked; kudos on finding that!

The triangle went away all on its own!! 🙂

It does that. Now, what would be great is if they made a big freakin’ sign that said, “If you see a freakin’ triangle over here, this is what you should do…”

Sheesh.


What email service should I use?

I have an earthlink.net email address, which comes with webmail and 10MB storage. But I’m thinking about changing my internet service provider? And sometimes I run out of storage at earthlink. I just don’t know if it’s worth it to me to convert to a new email address.

May I suggest Google Apps to host your email? It’s free, has a frigton of storage (7.5GB), and has all the bounteous benefit of the Gmail interface, or you can access it from Apple Mail or your email client of choice. There are few comparable alternatives out right now, and none of those are free.

This is important: You can KEEP your current email addresses. In the case of your earthlink.net address, we just start forwarding it to Gmail — either a general @gmail.com address or to your @yourdomain.com. Your correspondents may never have to know that you changed addresses. And for you@ (or whatevertheheckyouwant@) yourdomain.com, Google simply becomes your email host.

You can pay Earthlink a few bucks month to keep the address, but that’s a sucky long-term idea.

Also, the Gmail interface is importantly fantastic. I sometimes switch over to it just to get certain things like automatic organization accomplished. And lemme tell ya, the spam filtering is outta sight. I don’t see spam anymore. One message a month or less, and I can always look in the spam folder in Apple Mail just to double-check I haven’t missed a real message.

One last thing: There was once the perception that a @yahoo.com (or the like) implies an inconstant personality. I can say definitively that, especially since Gmail, that is no longer the case. The service is recognized net-wide as legitimate and unique. I practically insist on my clients using Gmail, unless they are already on Yahoo. If they have any address other than Yahoo, including using their own domain, 7 out of 10 times we get them over to Gmail quick as we can, and they never look back.


Finally ported to Google Apps

My j2mac.com email, calendar, and docs are now all managed by Google Apps. I’m pretty impressed. Setup is easy. They even gave specific instructions for GoDaddy’s domain manager. And things like syncing calendar (with Calgoo) and address book (with Apple’s iPhone-Google sync) make business so much easier. I’ve also signed a couple of other folks up on it, too.

So if anyone has been using my j2worldofmac-at-gmail address, please delete it and stick with info-at-j2mac.com. It’s official!

Keep your surfing secure

This is a tiny but important tip: When you go to Gmail or Yahoo! Mail or any other personal web-based service, you can make your connection less hackable by changing the “http://” to “https://“. The “s” stands for “secure,” and it means that traffic — the 0s and 1s — between your browser and the online service will be encrypted.

“Using an https: URL indicates that HTTP is to be used, but with a different default TCP port (443) and an additional encryption/authentication layer between the HTTP and TCP. This system was designed by Netscape Communications Corporation to provide authenticationand encrypted communication and is widely used on theWorld Wide Web for security-sensitive communication such as payment transactions and corporate logons.”
Getting in this habit is especially important for laptop and mobile users. It’s easy to store the https:// in your bookmark. When you use a secure link, you’ll see a little lock icon in one corner of your browser window.

Creating a web gallery for artwork

What is the best place for me to do a website for my artwork?

As usual, there’s free…

Post images to a photo site like Flickr.

There are multiple benefits to this approach: easy slideshows, easy “tagging” (e.g. ceramics, painting, installation)

… or cheap…

Apple has the .Mac service for $99/year. You can look at all the features — it’s pretty useful, especially when you get a laptop, but just for example, here’s one of my web galleries, and one in a different style.

One posts all the images straight out of iPhoto.

You can also point your domain name (e.g. alextheartist.com) to .Mac, so people won’t see that the real URL is gallery.mac.com/alextheartist.

Also, you can design your own site with a program like RapidWeaver. Hosting a web site can be as cheap as $4/month. I have yet to find a reason to go somewhere besides GoDaddy.

…and not cheap: hire a web designer …

This is doable, but for many folks, let’s just say a cost/benefit analysis would not favor this approach.

I know that, many times, a gallery who represents you will post the work that you have given them. Finesilver had some nice-looking pages.

Finally, I would suggest googling a bunch of artists you dig, see whose web sites you like, and asking them how they did it. FWIW, I just looked up Lloyd Walsh off the top of my head, and he used .Mac for at least a few images.

UPDATE 2013-04-03: Apple’s services .Mac, later MobileMe, don’t exist any longer, and their successor iCloud doesn’t offer web galleries. I recommend SquareSpace for all web-publishing needs. WordPress is certainly a viable platform still, but SquareSpace is much more configurable and user-friendly.

Can I make my menu bar fonts larger?

is there a way to increase the size of the menu bar (mainly the type size)? I have a new large display, but the menu items are tiny.


An age-old question. Apple has not built in a way to do this, but that's when 3rd parties come to the rescue. I have used TinkerTool for a long time to do things like this, and a whole bunch more. It's free, and while it's a use-at-your-own-risk product, I have never had any trouble with it. You can always ask it to revert to the system defaults:

 
 

End User: The Internet Giveth, and …

Published in San Antonio Current, September 5, 2007

In May, I devoted a column to griping about how difficult it has been to keep one’s calendars and contacts synchronized between devices and online services. I am super-jazzed to say that our wait is officially over, and I’m wearing my party hat. Plaxo, whom I mentioned at the time, has released a preview, or beta, of its revamped service, which now offers syncing — of both calendars and contacts — between Outlook, Outlook Express, Mac, Yahoo!, Gmail (calendars only, for now), and several other databases. And not only does it work beautifully, but it has already saved my butt when my calendar got corrupted.

This, finally, is one completed lane in a bridge to a unified online experience, where we can use all the available tools, and our data is available in any one of them.

Run, don’t walk, to Plaxo.com. You’ll be glad you did.

Another service I want to mention is GrandCentral.com, where you sign up for a phone number for life, for free, to be forwarded to any other phone number you choose. Voicemail and everything. This is the latest über-cool web technology that Google has acquired. They have it in beta, and one can sign up to be invited to join. Now we get to wonder how Google plans to tie GrandCentral in with the rumored Google Phone …

… and the internet taketh away.

End of summer is typically a slow time for tech, but this month screeched to a halt a couple of times, forcing us to become all too keenly aware of our reliance on the internet.

On July 24, a power outage in San Francisco took out services at a major colocation facility at 365 Main St. Colocation, or colo, is a business that offers rental of a server in a secure, climate-controlled, 24/7-staffed, and yes, power-redundant building. Colo might mean sharing a single server with other folks, or having one, or two, or a gajillion servers all to yourself. One might own the server, or just rent it. To ensure that your website shouldn’t ever go down, you should host it on a colocated server.

(Bringin’ it back home: San Antonio’s Rackspace, for example, is a colocation agency.)

Apparently, 365 Main’s “continuous power supply” was not exactly that, and consequently, some of the web’s most popular sites — Netflix, Craigslist, and Technorati, to name a few — were out for several hours. It was money down the “series of tubes,” and at least one service’s user base is said to have been permanently damaged by the failure.

Then Skype went down on August 16. Skype is the incredibly useful voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) service that lets one have audio and video conversations around the world for free, or on the cheap if one needs to call a conventional phone. For two days, 220 million users were blocked from logging into the Skype servers.

And then Elton John claimed the internet is destroying music. He wants the internet taken down for five years. Sir Elton may be off his piano bench, but Web heads obviously can’t take anything for granted these days. •

My new tech column – End User: That syncing feeling

The San Antonio Current has asked me to pen a bi-weekly column. Two have run so far, and I’m enjoying the project. I used to be arts editor, and later production manager, for the Current, and I’ve kinda missed the gig. Fine, I’ll say it: I’m a byline whore. But I always felt a bit of a dilettante writing arts reviews and features, so this tech bent feels more legit.

{OLD VERSION: Dontcha know the iPhone has been on my mind, and this first jaunt is really a two-parter: here and here.}

So here’s the first one:

Published in San Antonio Current, May 31, 2007

If you want to practice swearing for an hour, try getting your contacts from your Gmail to your Yahoo! address books. Then try migrating your calendar.

It’s doable if you, the trained Googling bear, want to Google through a few hoops to get it done. None of the hoops are on fire, but you might still feel burned on your beary behind.

Wait, now comes the trapeze act: Try syncing your address book or calendar between Outlook and Gmail and Yahoo! accounts. By “sync,” I mean having your information flow, in both directions, between one or more devices or databases. Make a change in one address book — on your phone, say — and that information shows up in Gmail, and Outlook.

Believe it or not, more than one internet page refers to this idea the “Holy Grail of synchronization.”

Now, if computers can make Britney Spears a singer, could this syncing thing possibly be that complicated?

More mysteries: Sometimes I wait 15 minutes for my Treo to sync to my Mac. Sometimes it duplicates every contact in my address book, or every calendar event, or just makes multiple copies of the email addresses in each card. That’s a real laugh riot when I’m trying to get out the door. So I make backups almost every day, before I hit the sync button.

To be fair, Windows has long had nearly instantaneous sync with Windows Mobile devices. Plug a Windows-based smart phone into your computer, and pop! your data is the same on both. Also, Apple offers a $99/year online service called .Mac (“dot Mac”) that will, albeit slowly and not dependably, keep your address book, calendar, and bookmarks synced between Macs.

Stray just a little, however, from Apple’s or Microsoft’s closed systems, and you find yourself inventing new swear words.

I have found a couple of pages that discuss methods to attain the “Holy Grail,” using software and services with snappy names like GcalDaemon, Funambol, and ScheduleWorld. I messed with GcalDaemon, and it works, but it involves command-line heavy lifting — sudo chmod -R yadda yadda — that would daunt any non-geek. Even I didn’t enjoy it.

Another semi-option is Plaxo, a useful online address book that syncs Macs and Windows with Yahoo!, but only imports one way from Gmail.

iWait

So what’s to come? Speaking of holy grails, we return to the iPhone, that obscure object of desire. We still don’t know if the damn thing works, but here’s my latest penny for the iPhone wishing pool (I’ll probably end up throwing my Treo in):

Yahoo! is offering free mobile-syncing mail accounts with the iPhone. Google has teamed with Apple to make a cool Google Maps program for the handset. I would love it if these three entities have put their brains together, and will release an open system for syncing, one in which everyone (except probably Microsoft) agrees on the fine points and plays well together.

I’ll have bunting and confetti and party hats and T-shirts that say “Sync This!” printed and waiting for the day.

(Side note: One netizen has created a contest called the “notMac Challenge,” to offer a cash prize to anyone who develops a viable and easy-to-use replacement to .Mac.)

Not using Apple Mail

This has been a little weird, but I’ve recently had to play with browser-based email because my PowerBook died. Also, the Bigfoot mail server that I’d used since 1996 also tanked, which inspired a migration to Gmail. So while my little aluminum baby was away at Apple (you DO have AppleCare, don’t you?), I actually moved away from Apple Mail, and I’m stunned how easy it was.

One thing I found, however, was that Safari didn’t work so hot with the Gmail interface, so I use the free Camino, which is based on Firefox but made for the Mac.

If you have a yahoo.com address, you might try the Yahoo! Mail Beta in Camino and see how you like it. And check out Plaxo to sync your Yahoo! contacts with Apple’s Address Book. (Plaxo doesn’t sync yet with Gmail. Check my recent article in the San Antonio Current for some of my thoughts on that matter.