Pre-Leopard the command to force OS X to flush and reload it’s DNS cache was:

In Leopard, lookupd no longer exists. Instead force a DNS cache refresh with:

I have received several requests for the source of my MailAnnounce script that is able to speak the subject of mails using Mail.app and Applescript.

Source for version 1 of the script is now available.

Has anyone seen this error on a MacBook before:

This is a real pain in the ass when it happens. The only thing that seems to fix it is to reboot.

The only thing I could find was on Apple’s support forums. But there is still no solution there.

I purchased a ‘free’ (with rebates) HP printer with my last MacBook last month. I had originally intended to list it on Ebay with a ton of other tech junk I need out of my house. This hadn’t happened and my MacBook still didn’t have a printer available to it (can’t find OS X drivers for my old Epson Actionlaser workhorse), so I thought I’d hook it up.

Network printing seemed to be the best option since the MacBook may be wireless anywhere in my house. The only permanently connected (and non-laptop) box I have is an aging XP machine. Setting up a printer on it and allowing network access to my workgroup should be a snap, or so I thought. Boy, was I wrong.

Long story, short… I was able to install the printer locally only. I was able to work around OS X’s undocumented feature to access the advanced printing properties with the help of a few pages from Google. Namely from Erik J. Heels’ blog. Using his howto, I got the printer connection up, but all of my prints were garbage on account of no available driver for my specific printer being available. The HP setup disk did install a driver that I could use locally but the new driver is not showing up under available drivers when setting up the printer via Samba.

It is interesting that in this instance Windows is more user-friendly than good ‘ol Apple. Why doesn’t the new printer driver get added to the overall driver list as in all Windows versions since 95? Why are the advanced printer settings hidden and undocumented in OS X?

Anyone know where the printer drivers are actually installed so I could manually select the file?

When you live and breathe email for work and play, it can be quite important to keep messages around for reference. In my business, client and project specific correspondence is supremely important as a record of what has been done, what needs done and project cost quotes among other things. The important information usually gets copied into my bug tracker, project information database and billing applications, but there is just something about the chronological nature of email that helps me follow a project.

What’s the point of keeping email around if you can’t accurately find the messages you are looking for? Apple’s Mail application can be used to do some heavy lifting searches if you can think outside of the box a little. Below are some examples of the general boolean search available directly in Mail.

Heads AND Tails

Heads OR Tails

Heads but NOT Tails

Heads AND either Tails OR Both

While researching these search options I found some users that reported that and, or and not worked as well. This is not listed in the Mail documentation and I was not able to confirm their usage. These did not work on my machine. For reference, I am running 10.4.9 and Mail 2.1 (752/752.2).

From the Mail help system:

If you search the From, To, or Subject fields in selected mailboxes, Mail finds messages that contain the entire search phrase, in the order you entered the words. If you search an entire message or search in all mailboxes, Mail finds only messages containing words that have the same prefix (or the same beginning letters) as any of the words you entered in the Search field. The words can be in any order. For example, if you enter “box” in the Search field, the results would include “boxcar” but would not include “mailbox,” because “box” is not part of the prefix in that word.

The help document also mentions that any IMAP accounts need to be configured to “Keep copies of messages for offline viewing”. This setting is configured from the Advanced tab of the Accounts pane in Mail Preferences. The default is to cache “All messages and their attachments.” I use “All messages but omit their attachments.” I would like to use “Only messages I’ve read,” as that would omit all of the uncaught spam and messages that get deleted without being read, but from my tests that option still caches the attachments. I think caching attachments is a waste of bandwidth and local disk space, plus it doesn’t fit in with my normal usage. When I get an important attachment, I download it to a local folder, either a client folder to keep with the rest of the client data or to my general downloads folder where it can be dealt with and deleted when no longer needed.

I have been using a beta version of MailTags for a month now and am finding it more and more invaluable in tracking project and client emails. It adds customizable fields to messages so may easily tag a message with a project name or add notes to a message and adds to the built-in Mail search so you can search by these tags specifically. It also integrates nicely with OSX’s Calendar application, allowing you to create To Do items directly from the MailTags pane in a message.

Another searching option is to create a Smart Mailbox with your search parameters. Smart Mailboxes can be used to mix and match multiple search parameters in the same search. Don’t be shy about creating a Smart Mailbox to do a one-off search. Wouldn’t it be faster to create a Smart Mailbox, use it to find your messages and delete it afterwards than to manually search for a message for twenty minutes? You can also create a Smart Mailbox to pre-select a group of messages, say by including all messages from all of the parties involved in a particular project and then using Mail’s basic search over that Smart Mailbox to find only those messages that contain a particular keyword.

There are some shortcomings I find in Mail’s search and Smart Mailbox implementations. My biggest beef is that Mail won’t let you Cmd-select multiple locations to do a keyword search over. For instance, you cannot search for an email address that appears in the From or To fields. You can do separate searches for both and manually merge them in your head or setup a Smart Mailbox to do the task.

The Smart Mailbox implementation is also crippled in that you can only select messages by all the criterion you supply or by any single criteria not some of these but none of those. This can be overcome by using multiple Smart Mailboxes, one to select all of the messages you want and a second mailbox to deselect the ones you don’t need that happen to fall in to the first mailbox.

Say you would like all messages from a particular domain except the general address info@domain.com. First create the deselect mailbox that finds all messages from info@domain.com, then create a second Smart Mailbox that selects all messages from domain.com and add a second criteria to it that says “Mail is not in mailbox” and choose the deselect Smart Mailbox you created. This is a simplistic example that can be overcome by creating a box that manually selects all messages from user1@domain.com … userN@domain.com, but that would require you to know all of the addresses and key them in.

All in all Mail’s searching implementation is powerful if you know the right tricks. Have some more Mail search tricks? Post via the comments below.

I hate popups and links that open in a new window. I can control where I want windows to open. If I want a new window or tab, I’ll use the appropriate key combinations when clicking the link.

If a window opens in a popup without a menu bar or url bar, hit Apple + T to force a new tab in the popup window. Then you can click and hold on the first tab and drag it to the tab bar of a full window to get the page to open in a window with a menu and url bar.

To add a virtual loopback address:

Recent versions of iTerm support Growl notifications. iTerm shows how to initiate Growl events from the command line with:

The example shows how to get an alert after a long make. I know I would never remember that command so I wrote a little Bash user defined function to do the same. Add this to your .bashrc file:

Now the command to initiate a notification would be:

If this snippet is useful to you, please consider buying me a beer.
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Why don’t we have the option to switch this to a search of or sort to that artist or album in our own library?

In this age of hyperliked everything, I can’t believe something so simple isn’t.

MailAnnounce is an AppleScript which can be used to speak the sender and subject of incoming mails using Mail.app. Due to the great feedback I received, I have cleared up a bug and added a few new features.

v1.2 Changelog

Download: MailAnnounce.app