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Rob Griffiths

On the vagaries of saving from Mail

As I suspect is true of many of you, I buy a fair bit of stuff from Apple, whether in a physical Apple Store or in the various online stores. I receive electronic receipts for all these purchases, which look something like this (but with all the personal info filled in, obviously):

Until yesterday, I have just filed all these receipts in their own folder in Mail (in the On My Mac section, so they're stored locally). But in the process of going paperless, I wanted to move them directly to my hard drive, so I could store them in a more-organized manner, and keep them alongside my other receipts. That meant saving the messages from Mail to the disk.

I had only two objectives when saving:

  1. Maintain the formatting and images in the original receipt
  2. Have the message content indexed by Spotlight

You'd think this would be a simple proposition, but you'd think wrong…the above two criteria are basically mutually exclusive with Mail's Save As feature. Read on for the details, and my eventually-discovered workaround (and labor-saving shortcut).

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Cutting the (headphone) cord

Until very recently, I wasn't a user of Bluetooth stereo heaphones. I don't necessarily have a good answer as to "why not?," other than I recall trying a pair early on, and not being impressed by sound quality and battery life. That was, of course, years ago, but I hold grudges for a long time, it seems.

Recently I thought I'd try cutting the cord again; there are any number of Bluetooth headphones available—including some very expensive models. Needless to say, these are not in my budget as a casual music listener. I was more interested in something in the $100 or less price range, and in an over-the-ear (versus on-the-ear or in-the-ear) model.

While browsing Amazon one day, I stumbled onto these headphones, with possibly the longest product name I've ever seen in Amazon: Sentey Bluetooth Headphones v4.0 with Microphone B-trek H10 Wireless Headphones Headset Foldable with Mic for Running Sport or Travel, 40mm Audiophile Drivers - Also Comes with 3.5mm Cable -Up to 15 Hours Battery - Comes with Free Transport / Protection Carrying Case Ls-4570.

Rolls right off the tongue, doesn't it? I'll just call them Sentey Bluetooth Headphones. Although they list for $100, every time I've looked, they've been listed for sale at $50. And with over 100 very positive reviews—and Amazon's easy return policy—this felt like a safe bet. So I ordered a pair, and have had them for a few days now.

So were they worth $50? Absolutely; keep reading for my review.

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Use a mouse and keyboard…and a trackpad

When Apple released its new accessories, I thought it might be time to revisit my input setup. For a few years, I've been using the original Magic Trackpad and the Logitech Wireless Solar Keyboard.

While this setup has worked well for me, I missed the precision of a mouse (so much so that I kept a corded one nearby, and plugged it in when I needed to do such work). So I thought I'd check out Apple's new gear, with the thought of either upgrading to the new Magic Trackpad, or perhaps moving to the new Magic Mouse as my pointing device, and maybe replacing the Logitech with the new Apple keyboard.

Unfortunately, the local Apple Store only had the mouse in stock, not the keyboard or trackpad. Unable to compare the pointing devices, I just bought the mouse. After setting it up, I loved the added precision it provided over the trackpad. But if I was going to be using a mouse regularly, I wanted to narrow the reach from keyboard to mouse, so I pulled out my old Apple wireless keyboard, which is about six inches narrower than the Logitech.

This setup seemed really good, except that I'd be giving up a lot of features by removing the trackpad: I use it with BetterTouchTool and our own Butler (as well as Keymo and Moom) to execute all sorts of gesture-related actions.

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Resolve an iOS FaceTime/Messages activation error

After reinstalling iOS 8.4.1 on my iPad Air (due to some issues with the 9.0 developer betas), I was unable to use either FaceTime or Messages. When I'd enter my iCloud credentials in the setup box for either service, I'd be greeted by a long delay, followed by this error message:

FaceTime Activation
An error occurred during activation. Try again.

When I searched on this message, I got lots of hits, including the first one, which points to this article:

The advice in this article matches what I was told by Apple Support: back up the iPad, erase it, set it up as new, make sure Messages/FaceTime works, then restore from backup. And for me, it seemed to work at first: Everything worked fine until I did the restore, and that would then break Messages/FaceTime. Ugh.

Apple Support told me the backup must be corrupted, and I'd just need to start fresh. But with over 200 apps, and who knows how many that don't sync data via iCloud or other service, I did not want to do this.

But then I noticed something. Something completely self-induced. And that something turned out to be both the problem and the solution. So just what was that something? Nothing more than a bit of time travel…

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How far we’ve come…

Happy 34th birthday, IBM PC!

While I didn't own the original, our family did get one of the follow-on models. But that tweet really got me thinking about just how far we've come in 34 years. And while the original PC did start at $1,565, that price didn't get you much of a usable machine, as noted by oldcomputers.net:

A basic system for home use attaches to an audio tape cassette player and a television set (that means no floppy drives or video monitor) sold for approximately $1,565. PC-DOS, the operating system, was not available on cassette, so this basic system is only capable of running the Microsoft BASIC programming language, which is built-in and included with every PC.

If you really wanted a usable IBM PC, you were looking at a much higher cost (from the same site):

A more typical system for home or school with a memory of 64K bytes, a single diskette drive and its own display, was priced around $3,000. An expanded system for business with color graphics, two diskette drives, and a printer cost about $4,500.

Keep in mind this is 1981 money. Adjusted for inflation, those costs are dramatically different in 2015 dollars:

  • $1,565 (Basic IBM PC) --> $4,109
  • $3,000 (Home IBM PC) --> $7,876
  • $4,500 (Business IBM PC) --> $11,814

Doesn't seem quite so cheap now, does it? But what's really amazing is what you can do with that same amount of money today. I'll use the Home IBM PC as a comparison, so I've got $7,876 to spend. Here's what you can get for that in 2015…

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The 15th club in my golf bag…

For those who don't know, the rules of golf only allow you to carry 14 clubs. But in my case, I do carry a 15th "club" in my bag: a ball retriever. If you don't, this little story might convince you that you should, too.

I don't know anyone who likes paying for golf balls. But most people do enjoy playing with nice, clean, new-looking balls. By carrying a 15th club that is a golf ball retriever, you can play with others people's nice new golf balls!

I carry JB's nine foot model, and its telescoping poles and simple head design have worked well for me. Expect to spend $15 to $50 for a retriever, depending on the length you desire, the design of the head unit, and the construction quality. Whatever you spend up front, with a dozen golf balls costing $20 to $60, your retriever will quickly pay for itself.

As an extreme example, I recently played at a course that features a creek that meanders between the last two holes. As I was playing alone, and way out in front of everyone, I took about 20 minutes to wander along this creek as I played the last two holes (see note below) I didn't walk the creek's entire length, nor did I retrieve every ball I saw. And my retriever is only nine feet long, so there were balls I could see but couldn't reach.

* Note: This is not something you could do during a normal round. During a normal round, I just walk near ponds and creeks, and if I see a ball, I'll quickly scoop it up while my partners are busy prepping for their shots. Using this technique, I can still collect up to 20 balls a round. If you're delaying the game due to ball collecting, you're doing it wrong.

So how many balls do you think I collected in that time, given those restrictions? Two holes, 20 minutes. 10? 20? 30? 50?

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Folderizing Office 2016

In case you missed it, Microsoft just released Office 2016 for Mac. Well, released if you're an Office 365 customer. I am, so I downloaded the release version today. I'd been playing with the betas, and one thing bugged me: the installer wouldn't let you pick an install folder.

Sadly, the same holds true for the release version; after installation, my Applications folder was the mess as shown in the image at right. Ugh.

My Applications folder resides on my boot SSD, and I like to keep it tiny and tidy. Tiny in the sense that only my most-used apps reside here; others are on my RAID. Tidy in the sense that I don't like looking at long lists of apps that all start with the same word, e.g. Microsoft. So things like Office go into a folder, helping at least the tidy side.

Eric Schwiebert of Microsoft tweeted an explanation for this user-unfriendly behavior:

While I understand the rationale, I don't agree with it. Office isn't yet in the App Store, and even if it were, that's not where I got it from. So why are you affecting my options for a version that neither exists nor that I even have? In any event, I wanted Office 2016 in a folder, so I set out to find a way to do that.

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For want of a Play All button in Apple Music

As has probably most everyone else, I've started my three-month Apple Music trial. I listened to about an hour's worth of Beats 1 Radio on the first day, and found it basically forgettable. (All the "Beats 1 worldwide!" voiceovers during songs certainly didn't help—but I figure they're doing that to prevent people from recording the high quality stream.)

Anyway, I was most interested in the For You feature, as I wanted to discover music similar to what I liked, but that I may not have heard before. Using my iPhone, I went through the "tell us about your tastes" feature in Apple Music, then switched back to my Mac to look at the For You section in iTunes. There I found an assortment of playlists:

Some I wouldn't like, some I would, and (most interesting to me), there were some that had stuff I hadn't heard before. Unfortunately, this is where Apple lost me…

What I wanted to do, as I looked at this wide assortment of music, was just hit the Play button, and let iTunes navigate the entire selection. But I couldn't, because iTunes' playback buttons are all grayed out. Argh!

The only way to listen to these selections is one playlist at a time. But that's not how I listen to music. I enjoy a broad selection of music across many genres, and very rarely do I listen solely to one artist, one album, or even one genre. Why? Because when I do, I wind up getting burned out on that artist, album, or genre, such that I don't want to hear it again for a while.

Instead, I just play music, paying no attention to genre, artist, or album. And once I start iTunes playing, it's typically playing all day without any interaction from me. But if I want to use Apple Music's For Me, I'll have to return to iTunes to pick new selections as each selection finishes. Honestly, for something that's background as I work, that's too much effort.

In the end, as much as I'd like to use the For Me feature in Apple Music, I just can't see myself doing it unless Apple adds a Play All (random, of course) button. Please?



Cheap fireworks in slow-mo are oddly compelling

I'll be out of town on the Fourth of July, so the kids and I did our little fireworks celebration last night. This being Oregon, we stuck to what we could legally buy, which basically means nothing that can fly or explode. For grins, I set up my iPhone on a tripod, and shot some of the fireworks in slow-mo mode. The result was much better than I was anticipating…

That's about a minute's worth of one of the larger fireworks. You can download that one (1280x720, 96MB), or if you want, download the full seven-minute version. Be aware: If you're on a metered connection, the big version will set you back 671MB!



Trip Report: Chambers Bay for spectators

When I first heard—way back in 2011—that the US Open was coming to Chambers Bay golf course, located less than three hours from my home in Beaverton, Oregon, I knew I wanted to go. Having played the course (just once), I thought it'd be great fun to watch the pros play at the same place (though with a very different setup…and a very different skill set!)

After much planning and a year of waiting, we finally made the trek last Thursday. We arrived at the course at 7:00am, and didn't leave until after 8:00pm. Overall, it was an amazing experience—heck, I even got to hold the actual trophy during a backstage tour of the TV production facilities. (That was an amazing experience, and well worth the $10/year cost to belong to the USGA, even ignoring all the good stuff they do for the game.)

But having been there for Thursday, I was quite content to return home for the final rounds this weekend, watching on the big screen in high def. Why? Because as amazing as Chambers Bay is to both visit and play (if you're a golfer, it's well worth its outrageous cost), it's a terrible place to watch pro golfers play the game.

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