I always found Apple’s Mail.app in its Tiger incarnation be a really neat MUA because of the nice interface and the good spam filter it offers. Unfortunately it lacks a little when you have to deal with large amounts of mail or want to use some of the more advanced features other MUAs have to offer, so I started looking around for some plug-ins. I soon found Hawk Wings, a site dedicated entirely to “Tips and add-ons to make Apple Mail even better”.

Here’s a list of the plug-ins I’m using so far:

• GPGMailBundle (Review): Lacking support for GPG in the default installation is IMHO one of the greatest shortcomings of Apple Mail. Fortunately enough there’s GPGMailBundle to remedy this situation. This nice little plug-in of course needs a working GPG installtion to function properly and I recommend MacGPG in combination with GPGKeychainAccess from the same site for this. Once you’re set up and ready to go, GPGMailBundle can easily be configured from Mail’s preferences panel. A great plug-in, which makes Mail.app a lot more useful to me!


• Letterbox (Review): If you too own a widescreen display, Letterbox may just be the plug-in you’ve been waiting for if you’re trying to make the most out of your screen real estate. What it does is arranging the interface into three vertical columns by putting the message preview right of the message pane instead of below it (as known from Entourage). This definitely depends on personal preference and reading habits, but so far I really like this layout, especially with all the additional information GPGMailBundle adds to the message preview.


• Mail Act-On (Review): A cool plug-in which allows you to create a plethorea of different mail rules and to assign them to keystrokes, therefore making your mail sorting a whole lot faster and more efficient.


• MailTags (Review): Coming from the same author, MailTags does for managing mails what Mail Act-On does for sorting them. It adds a little tag to all messages, which lets you add keywords, notes, due dates, priorities and other useful infos to them. And as if that’s not cool enough already, you can also build smart mail boxes from this metadata (which btw can be used and changed from Apple Mail rules). Now consider that this great plug-in also allows you to link messages to iCal to do items, and you’ll immediately see how useful this thing really is. The only thing that annoys me a little is the “begging” for donations. Not because I don’t think it’s worth the money – I’m probably going to donate something too – but because I think the PayPal button on the web site would have sufficed, since I really don’t want to see it all the time…

That’s it for today, but since there are a lot of other nice and useful looking plug-ins for Apple Mail, I’m pretty sure there’ll be a followup post to this in the near future.

Setting Orange, Bureaucracy 1, 3172 YOLD

I found a great tutorial about how to make KDE look like MacOS X on the Baghira website and although I didn’t follow all the steps, I’m really satisfied with the result:

Sweetmorn, Confusion 60, 3172 YOLD

Since too many of life’s pleasures are demonized by all the greyfaces out there, I’ve decided to start a new series called “In defense of”, where I’ll collect quotes, song lyrics, etc. which show them in a different and maybe more positive way.

Does love really need that kind of defense? If we’d be talking about the watered down Hollywood version, this post would most probably be pretty obsolote. But when it comes to the real thing, involving real people, feeling real happiness and despair, things may look a little different…

“To live is like to love -
all reason is against it,
and all healthy instinct for it.”

- Samuel Butler, Life and love

Although a little too pathetic for my taste, it’s just too cool to have Bruce Lee in here!

“Love is like a friendship caught on fire.
In the beginning a flame, very pretty,
Often hot and fierce,
But still only light and flickering.
As love grows older,
Our hearts mature
And our love becomes as coals,
Deep-burning and unquenchable.”

- Bruce Lee

“A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature
To stop speech when words become superfluous.”

- Ingrid Bergman

“Love is like a rumor,
Everyone talks about it,
But no one truly knows.”

- Anonymous

“Love is a haunting melody
That I have never mastered
And I fear I never will.”

- William S. Burroughs

“Love me without fear
Trust me without questioning
Need me without demanding
Want me without restrictions
Accept me without change
Desire me without inhibitions
For a love so free….
Will never fly away”.

- Dick Sutphen

Johnny Cash – Ring of Fire

Love Is A Burning Thing
And It Makes A Fiery Ring
Bound By Wild Desire
I Fell Into A Ring Of Fire

The Ring Of Fire

Boomtime, Confusion 56, 3172 YOLD

Every so often you’ll find what you believed to be your future shattered to pieces on which you cut youself. But this pain is healthy, as it makes your mind clear enough to see through all the layers of artifical bullshit modern society has wrapped around your true feelings. It seems like tears make for excellent magnifying glasses…

Against Me! – 8 Full Hours Of Sleep
When you sleep,
No one is homeless.
When you sleep,
You can’t feel the hunger.
When you sleep,
No one is lonely in a dream.
Without classes,
Without nations…
When you sleep,
She’s standing there with open arms,
And one night could last forever,
And if you asked her,
She’d never let go,
And you’d stay forever…

And the sun’s always rising in the sky somewhere,
And if young hearts should explode
From all the lies they’ve been told…
To live through one night like this,
I would trade it for the silence…

Pungenday, Confusion 42, 3172 YOLD

Since too many of life’s pleasures are demonized by all the greyfaces out there, I’ve decided to start a new series called “In defense of”, where I’ll collect quotes, song lyrics, etc. which show them in a different – and maybe more positive – way.

Kikizo: So, how many drinks does it take for ideas to stop being feasible, good ideas, and start being just complete nonsense?

Itagaki: Haha! It’s hard to say, because I am drinking pretty much full-time. Of course, there are ups and downs, waves, of how I drink in terms of the amount, but it’s a long period of time. In the last ten years – not that you asked this question – I think I had better ideas when I was drinking whisky. When I am drinking shochu, that’s a conservative drink, so the ideas are not that great. Beer is just like water to me, so it just helps me and everyone else loosen up a little bit, it doesn’t really contribute to coming up with ideas. (found on Ars Technica)

“I wouldn’t recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they’ve always worked for me.” – Hunter S. Thompson

BOUNCING SOULS
“I Started Drinking Again”

I ain’t shed one lousy tear over you
Since I started drinkin’
Since I started drinkin’
Since I started drinkin’ again

“Alcohol may be man’s worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy.” – Frank Sinatra

“Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.” – George Bernard Shaw

“Man being reasonable must get drunk; The best of life is but intoxication; Glory, the grape, love, gold – in these are sunk – The hopes of all men and of every nation” – Lord Byron

(Quotes taken from Thinkexist.com)

Sweetmorn, Confusion 40, 3172 YOLD

June was pretty busy, so I only managed to blog once. So here’s a little update of what happened during the past few weeks:

Work:
Still the same old bullsh*t, except that I spent 7 days at a customer’s site in Upper Austria, where we set up several virtual Heartbeat clusters in VMware Server. Summary: the scenery and people in Upper Austria are pretty nice, VMware is one of the coolest things since the invention of sliced bread and Heartbeat really can be a bitch to set up correctly (no surprises here I guess).

Capitalism:
Got myself a nice widescreen 19" LCD for my beloved Mac Mini. I also decided that it’s about time to get a new digital camera, since my old one broke ages ago. I finally settled on an Olympus SP-700, which Amazon sold for a really good price. The camera arrived last Thursday, and from what I’ve seen so far I’m really impressed with my new gadget. Today I once again went on a DVD buying spree and bought Ken Park, Romper Stomper, Bad Taste and the first season of The Sopranos. Next on my list are an external Mac Mini HD like the miniStack and a new notebook. Unfortunately neither the MacBook nor the MacBook Pro does really cut it for me (no 12" version, too heavy, too hot and far too many issues reported by early adopters), so I will probably settle for an X60s running Gentoo. I’d really would have loved to buy a portable Mac, but I’m not enough of an Apple fanboy to buy a product which doesn’t really fit my needs…

Books:
If you want to read a really good book by a Cuban author, you definitely should try The Insatiable Spiderman by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez. Next on my list is "Playing the Moldovans at Tennis ":http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0753152142/qid=1151763922/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-1901030-1131048?s=books&v=glance&n=283155, which I’ll start reading tomorrow. I also got myself a copy of Mac OS X Tiger: Missing Manual, which has shown me some neat tricks although it mainly targets a non-techy audience.

Geek stuff:
I’ve always been a great fan of tiling window managers like Ion3. However, lately I fell in love with wmii, which I think is an absolutely amazing WM. I’m using version 3, which features dynamic window management as known from acme or Oberon. Reading the guide doesn’t take longer than about 15 minutes, after which I was already able to conviniently work with wmii. So far the experience is really great, and I haven’t even started using the scripting capapilites 9P offers… Additionally using wmii once again made me play around with Plan 9, an operating system I’ve been strangely interested in ever since I first heard about it around 6 years ago. Note to self: spend some time with the 9fans at 23C3!

Gentoo:
Another month spent without doing anything Gentoo related. To be completely honest, my Gentoo box has only been started twice since I moved into my new apartment in early March. Given that I’ll be on holidays for around 10 days in July, you once again shouldn’t expect too much activity from me… :( I’m really thinking about leaving the project, as I’m currently not doing anything which warrants my developer status. Probably the only alternative to that would be dropping all the ebuilds I’m currently working on, and to focus solely on Gentoo-alt, maintaining the Gentoo/FreeBSD and Gentoo/NetBSD docs, while also working on Gentoo for Mac OS X (although Fink works really well for me). Input wanted!

Random:
September 19th is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Yarr!

Boomtime, Confusion 36, 3172 YOLD

Karma Police
I’ve given all I can
It’s not enough
I’ve given all I can
But we’re still on the payroll

And for a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself
And for a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself

- excerpt from Karma Police, probably Radiohead’s best song.

I kinda lost myself too lately, and I’m not entirely sure if I want to start searching for the missing parts.

Prickle-Prickle, Confusion 8, 3172 YOLD

Now that I’m working full-time, I have to cope with only 5 weeks of holiday per year, which isn’t really much compared to the ~5 month you enjoy as an Austrian student. That’s why I decided to make the most out of it, and as my boss has already approved all of it, I can present you my holiday schedule for 2006.

Mid-July: Me and some friends will go to the Mondiali Antirazzisti in Montecchio (Italy) again. What’s better than camping, beer, cocktails, sun and playing soccer all day? Not much, except maybe for the free concerts and cool parties in the evenings. Maybe we’ll also spend a day or two at the Rototom Sunsplash, but that still remains to be seen.

September: I’ll spend three weeks in China to visit some friends in Beijing and Shanghai, some of whom I haven’t seen since my days at Tongji University. Additionally a good friend of mine will also be in China at that time, so we’re going to meet up in Beijing and crash at my former flat mate’s place for a while.

End of December: Once again I’ll spend the time between Christmas and New Year’s Eve in Berlin to visit the Chaos Communication Congres. Given how great last year’s congress was (thanks again to the people who went with me, you guys have been great fun!), I’m really looking forward to this!

@ All the usual suspects: if you want to join me on one of those trips (or all of them for that matter), tell me at the next party or give me a call or send me a mail or a carrier pigeon.

Prickle-Prickle, Confusion 3, 3172 YOLD

As regular reader of this blog, you should already know that the Mac Mini I’ve ordered a while ago arrived last Saturday. During the time I was waiting for the delivery I already read up lots of stuff, so that I could immediately get my hands dirty once my new shiny toy arrives. Here are the first impressions of a new Mac OS X convert after one week.

Personally I think that the designers of OS X can’t be praised high enough. Sure, Aqua may not be everyone’s taste, but IMHO it’s quite nice looking and the usability is absolutely fantastic. All things you want to do work in a simple and intuitive manner without bothering you. Add stuff like Expose, Dashboard and Spotlight and you’ll understand why the system is such a pleasure to work with. And that doesn’t even take into account the power that comes with AppleScript, Automator and the available Bash shell.

However, where there’s light, there’s shadow. As a long-time user of various Linux distributions, I have come to appreciate the merits of centralized software repositories, where a single command like “emerge foo” or “apt-get install foo” will get me the app I want without me going to a website and downloading stuff. Now also consider the value of easy upgrades of all installed software components, and it’s obvious why a good repo is the heart of any self-respecting Linux distro. That’s something I sometimes thouroughly miss, although Mac OS X doesn’t fare to bad in this department either: Mac Update keeps the core system up to date, while most decent applications have a way to automatically upate themselfs to the newest available version. Besides that the disk images OS X apps are often distributed as are a really convenient way to try out a program before finally moving it to the “Applications” folder. Oh well, you can’t have everything I guess…

With Mac OS X comes the possibility to use a plethora of free (as in beer and/or speech) or commercial programs, which as far as I have seen are all of fairly high quality and do a good job of integrating with the user experience of the whole system. Now that I’ve wet your appetite, you may be quite disappointed to find out that I won’t talk about this topic right now, but will reserve this for a later blog entry. What can I say, life’s a bitch…

Setting Orange, Discord 67, 3172 YOLD

My Mac Mini is almost here! “Almost?”, I hear you asking? Yep, almost, because this morning when the nice lady from the logistics company who is delivering my shiny new toy called, the dialog went something like this.

Me: Hello?
Ms. Logistics: Hi, it’s Ms. Logistics from Foobar Logistics. I have a delivery from Apple for you!
Me (silently): Finally we can take over the world, Igor.
Ms. Logistic: We want to deliver it today, when will you be home?
Me: Well, right after work, 6:30pm, 7:00pm to be on the safe side.

Me: Lemme guess, that’s too late?
Ms. Logistics: Unfortunately, yes. How about tomorrow morning?
Me: Sure, morning’s fine. I’ll be home until about 8:45am.
Ms. Logistics: Uh..ahm..
Me: That’s too early then?
Ms. Logistics: Yeah, I can’t promise a delivery that early [sic!]… How about 10:00 to 10:30am.
Me: Sure, who needs to go to work anyway? How about the weekend?
Ms. Logistics: I’m afraid we don’t deliver on weekends…
Me: Arrrghhhhhhhhhh!
(Disclaimer: Wording changed for emphasis.)

Finally we agreed on a delivery on Friday afternoon, where at least my girlfriend will be home because she works for a company which – strangely enough – believes that Austrian laws regarding maxium work hours per week are to be taken seriously.

And the morale of the story? Try to work for a logistics company, where you’ll have immense amounts of free time, because they apparently only deliver between 10:37am and 4:23pm on even numbered days… Seriously, I’m the last person to expect anyone to work 24/7, but those times Ms. Logistics offered me just don’t work for anyone who has a regular day job.

Conclusion: Get rid of the day job before ordering the MacBook! ;)

Setting Orange, Discord 57, 3172 YOLD