Fixing Dialup Problems in Leopard
From Jim Schimpf:
Hi,
My sister has dial up, and on going to Leopard she had the opposite
problem, her email (Apple mail) worked fine, but web browsing was very,
very, very sluggish. Going to Slashdot would never completely load
after waiting 10 minutes.
Anyway, we found that the MTU from
her ISP was specified at 1500, and that did not make Leopard happy. We
found that if we set the MTU to 1400 (found the suggestion in a news
group), it fixed the problem. The only other issue is you have to do
this every time you connect in.
sudo ifconfig ppp0 mtu 1400
We did an automator script for her that pops up, asks for admin
password, then does the command above. I'll gladly send it to you, but
since you are on dial up I didn't want to impose. You can try the above
line in a terminal window after you connect up to your ISP and see if
that makes any difference.
- Jim Schimpf
Hi Jim,
I'll check out the command and see if that helps.
Charles
Eudora as the 'Correct' Email Client
From Tony:
Mr. Moore,
re: Eudora Broken
with Dialup in Leopard, but Where to Go Next?
Thank you very much for your explorations with Eudora 6.2.4 and
Leopard. I have a law office built on Mac, and Eudora is the correct
email client. Although always a rapid adopter, I approach Leopard with
trepidation in part because of concerns about getting stuck without
Eudora.
Further thoughts about how and whether to jump ship will be read
gratefully.
Tony
Hi Tony,
I love your reference to Eudora being the "correct"
email client. So true! Nothing else is even in the same proverbial
ballpark IMHO.
I should say that I am less and less convinced that
Eudora is the genesis of the trouble I'm having with email in Leopard.
The problem is more likely some weirdness in Leopard that creates an
incompatibility (or marginal compatibility) with my dialup ISP, so I
hate to dissuade you from trying Leopard, and the whole thing might
work just fine with your Internet hookup.
That said, classic Eudora is now orphaned, so we can
be sure that sooner or later it will hit the compatibility wall as
standards and operating systems evolve.
I'm very much hoping that the Odysseus project to
build a real Eudora successor will bear fruit.
Charles
A Fan of Mozilla Eudora
From LHS:
Hi Charles,
Merry Christmas and (soon) Happy New year!
I wrote to you once in the past to share a frustration regarding
something said about Opera by another publisher (Tidbits.com) - if you
remember. Anyway, many thanks for your many articles.
I share your admiration for
Eudora. Still, I have not used Eudora for many many years because
of its shortcomings when it comes to multilingualism - a.k.a. Unicode.
There are many things that Eudora had that seemed so obvious, that I
could not understand how other mail clients could fail to implement
those features. Such as how it handles multiple identities. Another
force of Eudora is - I believe (though I am not certain - since I had
to switch) - that it is a pretty good tool for writing email in.
In the end, I chose Thunderbird for its
multilingualism and because I find it the best tool to write email in.
Not perfect - but what it is lacking is, in my view, down to lack of
care for the details - at least on the Mac platform.
Thunderbird has two editors: An HTML editor and a plain text editor.
The HTML editor is the best - for me, as the plain text editor
basically is SimpleText or TextEdit without any styling/formatting
options - if I remember. While the HTML editor lets you add some
structure and style to your letters, which will carry on to the plain
text messages that I usually send out. So all in all, I write with the
HTML editor, using Courier New as my default font, and have it
converted to plain text when I send it.
This way I can e.g. easily create indents - and other such
ASCII-artsy stuff. Well - I don't know what others think, but I like
this way.
I can also add headers [this is one],
And it it will partly carry over to the plain text version. In my
view, many email programs are very bad writing tools. And I am very
happy for those things I get of Thunderbird (and Mozilla Eudora). I can
for instance make text bold or italic, and then
Eudora/Thunderbird will convert it ASCII-mark-up for me ... (Well, I
don't use that feature too much, but it is there when I need it
...)
Okay - I digress. I wanted to say that I think you could have said
more positive things about «Mozilla Eudora». ;-)
For instance, you say in your article that you «don't like
"3-box" user interface».
However, Mozilla Eudora doesn't force you to use the 3-pane
interface of Thunderbird. You can use a 2-pane layout. It is in the
Penelope preferences of Mozilla Eudora.
Also, they have tried to implement some of the Eudora smartness in
the Message List. For instance, you can click on the name of a sender,
and then all message of that sender in that list will be displayed
together.
As I have not used Eudora for so many years, I am not a Eudora
expert at all, and never was. But I feel that Eudora already offers
some nice improvement compared with the Thunderbird version. And so I
have made Mozilla Eudora my preferred emailer. Call it my 2 cents of
support for the Mozilla Eudora project.
This said, I too have subscribed to the announcement list for the
Odysseus project. It might well be that I end up as their customer. But
they will then have to offer a decent writing experience. They must
have an alright editor! (There are many okay mailers out there:
PowerMail, GyazMail, and perhaps others, but they all fail to give me
the a good writing experience.)
All the best,
Leif Halvard Silli
Oslo, Norway
Hi Leif,
Yes, I remember your previous correspondence. Good to
hear from you again. Hope you had a great Christmas, and Happy New Year
to you as well.
I can't dispute your point about Unicode. For folks
like yourself for whom multilingual support is an important matter, if
it doesn't have it, it doesn't have it, and you have to look
elsewhere.
I agree that Eudora/Penelope is an improvement on
Thunderbird, and I will continue to monitor its development hopefully,
but it isn't a very lively hope.
I would say that Thunderbird/Eudora 8's biggest
shortcoming for my needs is its totally lame and crippled management of
multiple email accounts. I have 22 accounts configured in Eudora 6.2.4
with different SMTP servers configured for various accounts, and it all
works near-flawlessly.
I'm aware of the two-pane Penelope option, but what I
want is Eudora's "no-pane" interface, with just open mailbox and
message windows visible, many simultaneously if I prefer. The only
other email client I know of that works this way is Nisus Email, which had a lot of
promise when it was introduced, but Nisus Software apparently lost
interest, perhaps because it is tough to sell an email client when
there are good, free alternatives, and it hasn't been upgraded for
years, has no SSL support, and so on.
Classic Eudora is a decent writing environment, with
inline spell-checking and some basic text tools, but for anything but
short replies, I do my composing in Tex-Edit Plus and then copy and paste into
Eudora. One of the cool things about Nisus Email, by the way, is that
it lets you work in the word processor or text editor of your choice
and send mail from within that application directly.
HTML support in an email client is not a priority for
me, and being stuck with a slow dialup Internet connection, I prefer to
use all plain text anyway.
Meanwhile, I'm glad you are finding Eudora 8 a
satisfactory tool for your email requirements. I'm certainly supportive
of the effort to keep Eudora alive, although it will have to become a
lot more versatile, flexible, and manually controllable for me to
embrace it. I expect that the amount of classic Eudora's feature set
that can be grafted on to the Thunderbird engine is somewhat limited,
which is the problem.
Charles
Griffin iMate Battery
From Ken Watanabe:
Charles,
I quick note to reader Stephen who
wrote:
"I've been trying for a very long time to keep my old
Apple Extended Keyboard II working
with my Quicksilver through a Griffin iMate. But every Tiger update
would make it quirkier, and it's not officially supported any more
above 10.3.9."
My favorite keyboard is an ADB Apple Extended Keyboard II. I have
two of them, and they are both in great shape. I use it with a Griffin
iMate also, and it seems to work 100% fine with Mac OS X 10.4.11.
I didn't even install the iMate driver. My possible tip for Stephan is
that the iMate has a small battery inside. I'm not sure what it does,
but perhaps the "quirkiness" Stephen has experienced is from that
battery getting weak.
Hi Ken,
Thanks for the tip.
I also have an iMate, although I haven't used it for a
long time.
I do have an old MacAlly New Wave 'board that I'm
partial to and a few old ADB mice, so it comes in handy sometimes.
I wasn't aware of the potential battery issue.
Charles
Cooler Running Laptops with Scripting
From John Muir:
Hello Charles,
I have one of those first
generation 12" PowerBook G4s which can run particularly hot if
given the chance. Mine will easily hover around 50ºC while doing
nothing much in particular if left to its own devices. So I've been
using the same power management tricks as you for a while instead. My
early 2003 system has no Automatic mode for its CPU, demanding instead
a manual switch from Highest to Reduced. For most things Reduced is a
good choice, but I soon tired of fiddling around in System Preferences
each time I wanted to switch between the two.
Instead I use a keyboard shortcut.
Red Sweater Software have a utility called FastScripts, which lets
you run scripts using systemwide keyboard shortcuts if you like.
There's a free FastScripts Lite version of the program if you're happy
with ten or less. It works in both Tiger and Leopard in my experience,
and right now I have five scripts hooked up to my PowerBook's function
keys. I press Function+F1 to engage Reduced CPU mode and Function+F2
for Highest. I also use the next three keys to switch between ColorSync
profiles.
The only downside to my solution is that the two scripts I wrote for
changing between CPU speeds need to have admin privileges: which means
they contain a username and password. Here they are without those:
Reduced Mode Script:
do shell script "pmset reduce 1" user name
"yourusername" password "yourpassword" with administrator
privileges
Highest Mode Script:
do shell script "pmset reduce 0" user name
"yourusername" password "yourpassword" with administrator
privileges
Pasting those into Script Editor, substituting a real username and
password, and saving as AppleScripts provides a quick way to change
modes. I find FastScripts to be the most convenient way to handle
several of them which I have in frequent use.
Note that those sample scripts are one single line long each. Script
Editor throws up an error if you try them with the linebreaks they've
picked up in email form.
And as for winters: I'm up at 56ºN here in Scotland, and our
nights start between three and four o'clock right now. If it weren't
for having the other side of the Atlantic nearby to even things out a
bit, it would be a frozen place indeed. Fingers crossed that the Gulf
Stream doesn't find reason to wander elsewhere any time soon!
John Muir
Hi John,
Thanks for the tip about FastScripts. I'm a big
AppleScript fan and use them extensively in Tex-Edit Plus. My entire
F-key row is assigned to toggle AppleScripts, except for F12 through
F15, which handle Eject/Dashboard, Spaces in Leopard, and display
backlight intensity.
My 1.33 GHz G4
PowerBook runs about 45-50° in Reduced mode with Leopard. It's
fine for most things, and I can always kick it to Automatic if I need
the extra power. I'm used to working with slow speed G4s with my
Pismos anyway.
;-b
My biggest workflow bottleneck is the Internet.
It gets dark around 4:30 PM here in Nova Scotia these
days. I'm at 45°N. The Gulf Stream runs past about 100 miles south
of me on its way to you.
Charles
Another Text Processor for Mac OS X
From Dale O'Gorman:
Dear Mr. Moore.
Have you ever considered reviewing software such as TexShop, which functions
as a front end for TeX on Mac OS X? As both a Linux and Mac
OS X power user, I have found TeX to be an incredibly powerful
tool for manipulating and editing text and producing beautiful and
consistent output. It seems a shame that such software does not often
get reviewed, as it is the most portable and platform agnostic format
available.
If you would like, I would be pleased to review the software for LEM
at some point in the future.
However I defer to your good judgment in this.
And the fact the software is open source (and free) is a bonus.
Best Regards,
Dale O'Gorman
Hi Dale,
I'll definitely look into it. I'm not especially
erudite on the Linux/Unix end of things and wasn't previously aware of
the TexShop program, but it sounds great.
Charles
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