It is a good idea to change your email password every now & again. In many ways, control of your email account is the key to a lot of other things, such as recovering a ‘forgotten’ website password. So you want to make sure that your email password is not easily guessed either by humans nor machines. You also want to be sure that your email password has not been stolen somehow from the server or any other way.

The topic of passwords themselves is a whole ‘nother article. There are still some people who use the same password for everything, which is a bad idea. Some people say you should make a really complicated password that is difficult to remember. Bleh. A great way to make a new password is to use several words or a sentence that you can easily remember, but is long enough to be difficult for a machine to guess. For example; “Katie goes to school at 8″ . That is a nice  long password, but still easy to remember. Or another idea; “dougsphonenumberis3105551212″. If you already know Doug’s phone number, I bet you have already memorized this one, and yet at 28 characters it is VERY difficult for anyone or any machine to guess.

Let’s change your email password!

The first step will be to visit the email server & change it there, then we can go forward & enter the new password into your Apple Mail, and iPhone or iPad.

I’m using DreamHost hosting, and so is the SBAMUG. Maybe you are too. We are going to start there by signing in to the server so we can officially change to a new password. This must be the first step. The server needs to know about it first. If I am doing your web hosting,  the link to change your email password may be http://mailboxes.yourdomain.com  you can give that a try & see.

http://mailboxes.SBAMUG.com

After we successfully sign in, we can change to a new password. Enter it twice, then click “Change it” to save.

Ok! That’s it! the new password is set! It may take a few minutes before your email app notices & complains that the old password doesn’t work anymore, but let’s go ahead and enter your new password into Apple Mail.

HOW TO ENTER A NEW PASSWORD INTO APPLE MAIL

These screen photos are of Mail for Mac OSX Snow Leopard, and yours will probably be fairly similar.

Start by pulling down the Mail menu to Preferences, and click the toolbar button for “Accounts.” We will start by entering your new email password for the incoming POP or IMAP server.

Not too difficult for you? Good! That part is done!

Next step is to change the password for your Outgoing SMTP server. It is sort of hidden. Click the pop up menu for Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP) and choose the very last item on the menu.”Edit SMTP Server List…”.

Click the tab for “Advanced”, and we see the window where we can actually enter the new password.

Click OK to save the changes, close any extra windows, and we’re good to go! Hooray! We win! 

With the blustery winter weather comes the occasional power outage. Most of which are just a few seconds. I’m a well prepared techie, so I have 8 UPS Battery Back Ups in house to protect; my computer, another computer, database server, cordless phone, alarm clock, internet modem, router, wireless router, Tivo, etc. All very good, and it’s a nice feeling that my equipment is all protected against power failure…. Until the power actually goes out and the whole house starts beeping buzzing & alarming. Usually at night when I’m sleeping!

Why do I need to know the power is off? I don’t. Really, I’d rather stay sleeping unless it is an actual emergency. A power outage of less then a few minutes is certainly not an emergency around here, especially because I have all these UPSs. The biggest problem is the beeping!

Some UPS models can be adjusted in software to not beep, but that is less then reliable, and sometimes it needs to be reset after a power outage. When I tell something to not beep, I expect it to always not beep until I tell it to beep! Not all UPSs have this feature, and we have a variety of UPS units, made by different manufacturers.

Sufficiently annoyed, I set to remedy the situation by physically disconnecting the beepers in all 8 UPSs. Originally I was going to just clip the beeper wires to permanently disable them, but I thought that it would be even better if I could occasionally turn the beeper back on to hear what it had to say. Disabling the UPS beeper is fairly easy if you know what to look for.

After opening the UPS, look for a round thingy with a hole in it, usually about a half inch diameter to 1 inch diameter. That will be the beeper. Usually there is nothing else that could be mistaken for the beeper.

There are times when it might be useful to hear the little communication from the UPS, but so far I’m not impressed with the language. I especially don’t like this model of Belkin UPS because during a power outage long enough to use 80% of the battery, it completely shuts down power to the protected devices to save the battery. Lame! Wrong priority! Even worse, it won’t turn back on when power is restored until you push & hold the power button for 15 seconds. Really Lame! Oh, and even though it has a dedicated indicator light to communicate when it is time to replace the battery, that apparently doesn’t work. I didn’t know that it needed a new battery until the power blinked off for 15 seconds and this Belkin UPS died and wouldn’t turn back on. So if it is not even going to beep nicely when it needs something, I really don’t need to hear it beep to wake me up. That was the last straw.

What you want to do is unsolder the 2 legs of the beeper from the circuit board, then attach a pair of wires to a switch so you can reconnect the beeper on or off easily & positively. (See diagram). Mind the polarity of the beeper, usually it has a + at one leg, and a matching + on the board. Re-solder one leg back to the board, and run the wire from the other leg to the switch, and back to the board where that leg formerly connected to. With the switch open (off) the beeper isn’t connected to the board and therefore simply can not beep. HA!

The white junk on the side of the beeper is glue. I had to use a razor blade to carefully disconnect before de-soldering the beeper.

Here is the beeper reinstalled. Note I rotated the beeper slightly so there would be a little more room underneath for the wire, and to give physical space to prevent any unintended connections.

Run the wires to the switch. My that’s a big yellow transformer!

And mount the switch so you can get to it easily. I drilled an oval hole (2 holes next to each other) in the plastic or metal housing and screwed the switch in place. In choosing the location for the switch I considered the orientation of how that particular UPS usually sits where it lives. I want to easily see the switch too.

Hooray! Now I won’t be unnecessarily alarmed!

Apparently I’m not the only person bothered by unnecessary UPS beeping!

After years of being abused by my bank I fired them and I couldn’t be happier about it.  The bank was into charging lots of fees, giving me a hard time about everything (even refusing ordinary deposits), and paying a teeny tiny amount of interest. Even though I had several long term and active accounts with them, it was like they had never heard of me, or obviously hated me. I won’t bore you with all the mean things they did & said to me, or the really lame mistakes they made,  that they tried to charge me $20 to close a savings account, $8/month for a paper statement (even with a good $$ balance), or the really horrible way they treated the non-profit group I am treasurer of.

So after several years of excuses & foot dragging, I really parted ways with my bank. I don’t know what I was afraid of. As it turns out Credit Unions are way better!

Credit Unions are better than banks because they:

• Pay more interest (& attention) to you
• Pay interest on your checking account
• Have less fees, if any
• Are friendlier
• Charge less interest when you are borrowing
• Have far more free ATMs in their network
• Let you make deposits at many ATMs
• Usually don’t charge any atm fees, even out of network
• Mail you coupons for the county fair
• Always give you 2 accounts; checking & savings
• Don’t charge for mailing your statement
• Charge less for new checkbooks

And of course they all have online banking, web bill pay, atm cards, paper checks, etc.

I was initially concerned that I was not eligible to join a credit union because I do not work for a big company, That is until I discovered that there is usually another way around to join. I was able to join some little airplane museum for a $20 one time fee. (look for a “Join online now button on the website and follow along) That got me into the Northrop Grumman Federal Credit Union for life! Fantastic. They I moved my business, personal, savings, the non-profit group, everything to the Credit Union. Seriously, it is a lot better at the CU, and instead of me paying them any monthly fee, they are paying me interest.

TIPS FOR CLOSING YOUR BANK ACCOUNT:

1. Open the new Credit Union account. Order the ATM card and checks if you need them.
2. Transfer a good chunk of your available cash into the CU, leaving enough for any uncleared payments in the old bank account.
3. Notify any Direct Deposits of the change. Be sure not to close your old acct until all your Direct Deposits are coming in at the new CU.
4. Set up & schedule all your web bill payments at the CU. I like to send $1.05 via the “web bill pay” to pay each bill immediately, so I can make sure it is correctly received. I even like to make each payment a different amount by a penny so I can easily tell them apart.
5. Disable any scheduled bill payments from your stinky old bank account. Examine your last several months of statements to find any auto-withdrawls you may have authorized, and notify those companies of your new account.
6. Wait several weeks to make sure any/all outstanding payments clear through the old bank. After you are *sure* the dust has settled…
7. Transfer or withdraw the exact balance out of the bank account to empty it. Ideally do this via a check, or online money transfer to avoid completely unnecessary confrontation. One of the easiest ways is to write a check from the old bank account made out to yourself, and just deposit it at your Credit Union. Really easy!
8. After the bank account has been$0 zero for at least a week, and no activity, (I waited 6 weeks, just in case) go ahead and close the bank account before they charge you for another month of fees. If the bank tried to charge you any fees, ask for them to be reversed before closing the acct. You do not have to go into the bank office to do any of this. Don’t let them waste your time! In some cases they can close an empty account over the phone, or you might need to mail or fax them a letter requesting closure. If the account is not empty it is more difficult to close because they think they can stop you, or charge you some good bye fees.

In my experience, it is important to have already zeroed out the old bank account before closing it. For several reasons;

• they can’t charge you monthly fees when you have a zero balance,
• they won’t charge you an “account closing fee”, and
• the bank doesn’t give you a hard time about closing an empty account.

I’m very happy with the Credit Union I joined. You can find a Credit Union near you too!

After certain software updates and/or Mac OS X installs your Palm HotSync may broken. You might have had to Force Quit it because it seems completely stuck. Don’t despair! Here is a fix.

* First off, know that Palm HotSync DOES WORK with Mac OS X 10.5.x Leopard and 10.6.x Snow Leopard. Yes, this really old software that started life as Claris Organizer before being bought by Palm Inc still works 10 years later in Snow Leopard, and the Palm HotSync too.

If your Palm HotSync software tries to launch, bounces in the dock, but is unable to get farther than that, that is the problem we’re talking about here. When I pushed the Sync button on the Palm Centro (or hot sync cradle) the HotSync software in the Mac responded by launching the hotsync manager, which tried, but was unable to launch.

The cure seems to be to remove these 2 files from your home folder;
~/Library/Preferences/Palm Desktop Info
and
~/Library/Preferences/com.palm.HotSync.plist
You can trash them, or if you prefer to be careful, just drag to desktop for now, & trash later.  It will make new copies if it needs to. Actually, I’m not sure if you need you remove both of them or just one, but that will fix it, and no harm done.

You might Reboot, just because that is what I did about that time.

Ok, your Palm Hot Sync ought to be operational again. (YAY!) It should launch without problem, and Sync. Expect this 1st sync to take far longer than usual because it is going to do a “slow sync” meaning that it actually compares each & every record in the address book & calendar.

What is the best Web Browser for an old Mac?

Opera 9.64 is the best you can get… for anyone stuck on a very OLD Mac still running OSX 10.3.9 Panther.

I know that because I had an injury earlier this year that kept me flat on my back for 2 weeks. The challenge was to be productive with nothing more than an iPod Touch & an iBook G3/700, circa 2003. The laptop (which originally shipped with a bootable OS 9)  runs too slow to realistically use with Tiger (osx 10.4) so I erased it & installed Panther OSX 10.3, then amused myself by assembling a collection of useful tools to help me be productive and tools that would run under such an old OS.

FireFox 2.0.0.20 will run in Panther, but useless because it can’t properly display most modern websites. (Just forget about watching YouTube on an old computer). Neither did that old version of Safari, but Opera 9 works pretty well, and includes a decent IMAP email client (pop3 client too, but I was using imap). Supposedly, Opera 10 is rated to work with Panther, but that was not my experience. 9.64 is it. BTW, this is when I seriously gave IMAP a try, and for those of you out there with multiple email devices, it works far better than POP3 mail – but your server needs to allow you enough server space to make imap practical.

Other OLD apps I found useful and worked with OSX 10.3.9 Panther:

Adobe Reader 7.08
ChronoSync 4.05
Comictastic 2.32
Chicken of the VNC 2.0b4
GraphiConverter 5.95
Flash Player 9
MS Office 2004
PDFPen 2.43
SuperDuper 2.1.4
TextWrangler 2.13
Timbuktu 8.6
Transmit 3.66
WakeOnLan 1.0

I used 1Password on the iPodTouch, and since DropBox is not supported on such an old system, ChronoSync can sync a local folder to a network volume that is a dropbox folder on the server. More old Mac apps at;
http://mac.oldapps.com/

Best,
Dave Nathanson
Mac Medix

Sometimes you want to send a plain text email. Perhaps you belong to an email list that requires it, or you are sending to people who are using software that prefers plain text. Perhaps you just want to send smaller, lighter emails twice as fast in a more compatible fashion. Rich Text emails are usually about double the file size of a plain text message, and they *could* include undesirables such as malware, and bad scripts.

Different email software does this differently, so let’s start with Apple Mail.

Apple Mail has some hidden features, including a toggle switch to chose Rich Text or Plain Text. One quick way to make sure your outgoing message is plain text is to pull the Format menu to ‘Make Plain Text’.

If you’d like an even easier way you can modify your Mail toolbar to include a toggle between Rich Text & Plain Text – as circled in the top picture above.  To do this;

Open a new message. Or any unsent outgoing message you can type into.

Right-Click (or control-click) in the toolbar to pop up the contextual menu.

Then drag the “Rich Text/ Plain Text” button into your toolbar, and click “Done. Ok, all set!

The “dimmed” side of this button shows you what your outgoing message is now. The bright, clickable half shows what would happen if you pushed that.

I love 1Password! It is a really great Password manager, and in a recent version they added support for storing all your software serial numbers & registrations. I’ve been using a simple FileMaker Pro database for that, so I want to import all of it into 1Password.

The problem begins when you notice that 1Password can import from a text file, but it can only import a text file into Secure Notes or Logins. Aw really?   Hey, these are software registrations, and they belong in that section. It is easy to import your software registrations into 1Password as “Secure Notes” but that seems wrong, especially with a special “Software” section right next to it.

As it turns out there is a trick, and it sounds more difficult than it really is. I’m going to show you how to import your software serial numbers into 1Password so they go into the right section all at once, from any software that can export to a text file. Then I’ll show you some tricks you can use to get your data smoothly from FileMaker Pro to a text file to import into 1Password.

Begin;
Export your software registrations from the other software as a text file; either CSV (Comma Separated Values) or Tab-delimited. If your data might include commas, then export as tab-delimited, then find/replace the commas with something else, then find/replace the tabs to be commas. I used the awesome & free TextWrangler for Find/Replacing, it was great. I replaced commas with double dots (..) .

Ok, so Export your data, or export & rearrange the columns in Excel so that you have them in this order:
title,version,serial number,registered name,registered email,registered company,publisher,website,support email,purchase date,currency,price,order number,notes

It MUST be comma delimited to import as we need to .
Do NOT allow a space after the commas because that will add a space to the beginning of the next field. If you don’t have all of those fields, it is ok to just have the right number of commas, even if there is nothing between them.

You MUST use Windows line endings. So open the file with TextWrangler and pull the Edit menu to Document Options. Choose Windows (CRLF), & OK.

For FileMaker Pro Users:

If your original data has different fields than needed, or less fields, you can make a new calculated field to concatenate several fields into 1 fmp field for export. In my case I had only 6 Filemaker fields (Title, Version, Registration Number, Number of Users, Date, Notes), but 2 of them (Notes & Number of Users) needed to be combined into the 1Password Notes field. So something like this will work in Filemaker Pro;

Make new calculated field “LicenseKeeperExport” of type “text”. Here’s the formula =

Title &”,”&
Version &”,”&
Registration Number &”,”&
“,”&
“,”&
“,”&
“,”&
“,”&
“,”&
DateToText(Date) &”,”&
“,”&
“,”&
“,”&
Notes & If(Number of Users >0, ” | Number of users = ” & Number of Users,”")

Then from FileMaker, export just the 1 field (I called it “LicenseKeeperExport”) that includes all of the above in this order, with commas. It won’t matter if this export is tab-delimited or CSV, because we are only using 1 field per record, so there won’t be any more delimiters added. Only what we defined in that calculated field, and a CR ending each record.

OK! So we’ve exported a text file! Hooray. But we are not done.There is some important formatting or it will not work out. You’ll need to use Windows CRLF line endings as (as explained above).

If your exported data is surrounded by Quotes (“) you want to remove those. Find/Replace the quotes with nothing, starting from top.

Note: depending on your data, you might also need to remove control characters from your data. Also easy. Pull TextWrangler’s Text menu -> Zap Gremlins. You probably only need to zap the control characters, replacing with a bullet.

OK! So that’s the difficult part. Save & close the file. We are finished with FileMaker & TextWrangler.

Let’s Launch 1Password and pull the File Menu to Import.
Choose the file type of LicenseKeeper. Surprise! You might expect to choose CSV or Text file, but that will NOT work – because those don’t allow import into the Software section. Remember? That is why we are doing all this! Apparently LicenseKeeper also uses a text format, but with those differences that we did find/replaces for.

Select your CSV file, and select the Character encoding. Mac Roman worked the best for me, but ascii was mostly pretty good too.

If you get to this next screen where it shows a list of your data in nice columns you’re doing well & it will probably work. Keep going!

Give a quick Shout! Hooray! It worked & we are FINISHED!

Email has gotten out of control. You probably receive a lot of it, and maybe so much that you don’t even want to wade through the mess. So much email that you occasionally miss a message from a friend or relative, leaving it unread amidst the sea of low priority commercial email that may not be spam, but it isn’t your first choice to read either. If only there was a way to easily flag or separate email from people you know versus everything else.

Well if you are using Apple Mail, there is a way to do that!

This trick makes use of “Smart Mailboxes”, which are sort of like a saved search. What we are going to do here is make a new “mailbox” and have it automatically contain only mail from people in your address book. To begin, we open the Apple Address Book application (you’ll find it in your Applications folder) and make a new Smart Group.

We want this Smart Group to always include everybody in your address book, and one way to do that is specify all records that have been updated in the past 20 years. That ought to do it!

* If you wanted to make this smart mailbox only contain messages from close friends & family, you could make Address book group of those instead of the “all cards” group, and use that as your filter.

Click OK, and we are finished with Apple Address Book for now so you may Quit Apple Address Book.

Back to Apple Mail.We are now ready to make a new Smart Mailbox. Pull the”Mailbox” menu to “New Smart Mailbox”.

We want to define the criteria for this Smart Mailbox to contain only messages from senders in our address book, and I went further saying I only wanted messages that are in the Inbox and less than 3 weeks old. You can change this to suit your own needs.

There you have it! Now instead of being overwhelmed by all that mail in your inbox, click & read your mail in this smart mailbox instead. It will be a lot more manageable, and you can peek into your main Inbox when you have time.

Here are some more ideas for Smart Mailboxes:

This was done with Leopard version of Apple Mail that comes with Mac OS X 10.5.x. Also works with other versions of Mail.

PS: If you get a lot of email, you may also be interested in this article I wrote about how to let your email app automatically file your emails into folders for you. http://www.nathanson.org/davesays/2009/07/email-in-box-management/

It is easy to find a chart that shows the translation from alphabet to Morse code. And those are easy to use when you want to EnCode or translate words into Morse code. The regular chart is optimized for translation in this direction because it is sorted alphabetically.

But what happens when you want to translate Morse code into alphabet? That is difficult with the usual Morse Code table because it is not sorted by dots and dashes. You have to hunt through the whole alphabet to find the matching Morse code.

Here is a novel approach to DeCoding Morse. Start with your finger at “Start Here”. Then move your finger to track the Morse dots & dashes. You will arrive at the correct letter! Try it!

You may download nice clean PDF all ready to print. The chart without numbers (as shown above) is simpler to look at and easier to use if you don’t need to decode numbers. I hope you find this useful, or at least amusing.

Download Morse DeCode Chart, A-Z (without numbers, as shown above)

Download Morse DeCode Chart complete with A-Z and Numbers (I left off the punctuation & symbols for simplicity).

INTERNATIONAL MORSE CODE

A		N		1
B		O		2
C		P		3
D		Q		4
E		R		5
F		S		6
G		T		7
H		U		8
I		V		9
J		W		0
K		X
L		Y
M		Z