Ambriel Consulting

Extracted from the home IT support mail archive:

ERROR MESSAGE READS:

Some actions taken while the account [an IMAP account] was offline could not be completed online.
Mail has undone actions on some messages so that you can redo the actions while online. Mail has saved other messages in mailbox “Drafts-87” in “On My Mac” so that you can complete the actions while online.

Additional information: The connection to the server [IMAP server] on port [number] timed out.

The Drafts keep coming!!!!

Do the following, and only the following:

0 – Quit Mail
1 – Launch the Terminal application from within Utilities in Finder.
2 – Paste the following command into Terminal exactly as is and press return:

find Library/ -name .OfflineCache -exec rm -r {} \;

3 – Quit Terminal.
4 – Restart Mail

Apple’s Time Capsule is the new right answer for my backup needs.

That’s one less server running all the time…

For 10.4, This little script makes sure you have your ssh keys in your shell, with the agent running. SSH agent is already available in 10.5.

if [ -f ~/.agent.env ]; then
  . ~/.agent.env -s > /dev/null

  if ! kill -0 $SSH_AGENT_PID > /dev/null 2>&1; then
    echo
    echo "Stale agent file found.  Spawning new agent..."
    eval `ssh-agent -s | tee ~/.agent.env`
    ssh-add
  fi
else
  echo "Starting ssh-agent..."
  eval `ssh-agent -s | tee ~/.agent.env`
  ssh-add
fi

In terminal,

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow DesktopPicture "/Library/Desktop Pictures/Plants/Leaves.jpg"

There, that’s better.

Just today, I fixed a Mac that was behaving oddly. A suspect was one of the cheap maintenance programs for OS X that runs the standard periodic maintenance scripts, fiddles with permissions and so on.

There’s a great article by the X Lab that covers this, so I won’t be a bore, but if you are used to all the maintenance Windows needs, I suggest you take a look before installing one of these utilities.

After a child sat on my MacBook Pro, I stripped it to tighten the hinges and reseat the power button. Find out more here.

You do this at your own risk of course.