Trust Tommy

One of the most common questions about email is what’s the best way of accessing it. There are two main ways.

1. Through your browser, going to www.gmail.com or www.hotmail.com.

2. Using a desktop like Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird or Apple Mail.

There’s no right or wrong answer here, so I’m just going to lay out the pros and cons of both options.

Some things to consider about web-based email.

1. An internet connection is required. If you’re away from home, on a plane or away from wifi or your dongle, you can’t access your email.

2. Your email interface is only as fast as your internet connection. If someone’s throttling your speed with major downloads, you’re stuck at a snail’s pace (you might as well stick with snail mail in that case…)

3. Generally speaking, syncing won’t be as good between web interfaces and mobile devices like iPhones, BlackBerries and such than a ‘native’ interface. What I mean is that syncing will be better between the mail app on your iPhone and the Mail application on your Apple computer because they were made by the same company and generally talk to each other better. I speak from experience of using an iPhone with both the web interface and Mail on an Apple, by the way.

What I do

I use Mail.app for a couple of reasons. Firstly, when I go up to Dublin and have emails to write, I can write them offline and Mail will automagically send those emails I write whenever I pass through somewhere with wifi (protip: Avoca Rathcoole has free wifi). I mean, sure I could write those emails in something like TextEdit but then I’d have to copy and paste and whatnot.

What you should do

I can’t say for definite. It depends on a couple of things. Maybe you don’t have enough space to keep 10,000 emails on your computer, or maybe since you have to use the web interface on public or friends’ computers you don’t like changing when you’re at home.

Apart from the ability to write emails offline, desktop apps don’t have anything huge “on” the web interface.

Like much in the computer world, it’s a matter of personal preference!

I connect my phone to the computer, intending to copy over the photos from RENT from the weekend, only to find a pop-up appear in iPhoto.

Pop-ups, both online and offline, are the bane of my computer use. I mean, I don’t want to be interrupted in what I’m doing for anything unimportant, which pop up messages almost universally are.

‘The hard-drive that iPhoto is using is low on disk space. Are you sure you should like to continue?”

I open Finder and look at the bottom of the screen to see just how much (or how little) space I have. 700 MBs. Hmm, doesn’t seem all that little, I think to myself – that’s a decent quality movie, or 2 House M.D. episodes. After tweeting my annoyance at the pop-up however, I find out that in fact, anything under a GB will cause my laptop not to work at optimal levels.

I’d been having hard drive problems for a good while now, and I couldn’t trace them. The only big things on my laptop were my music collection (about 1,500 songs, or 8 GBs) and my photo collection (3,500 pictures, about 6 GBs) – so how come I have less than a GB free? My hard drive is 80 GBs, and I can account for 12 of that from two things – which are the only big things on my laptop, I know that. So where’s the rest of that?

I know that sys files will take up some space, but I’d be damned if they’d take up anywhere near half the HD space, let alone 68 GBs. My only guess was that lots of little things were hidden away in my desktop, library and downloads folders.

Something had to be done, I decided. I thought about restoring my laptop to factory defaults after backing up my merge 80 GBs onto Dad’s behemoth of a 320 GB external USB drive – but that would have required the Snow Leopard original install disks, and those CDs are kind of hard to come by in our house – along with various cables and such. And so, after some googling, I found out of a second solution which did much the same thing:

- Create a new user account
- Give it admin privileges, demote the old (to be deleted) account to ‘limited user’
- Delete the old account without saving the home folder.

And that’s what I did. The back up of the original “Tommy Collison” account took about an hour; during which time I ate dinner and did homework. Maybe it was my laptop on its last legs, but the process to delete “Tommy Collison” after creating the second account “Trust Tommy” took longer than expected because System Preferences crashed (colloquially known as “beach balling”) numerous times. After forcing a restart, the system gave way and let me delete myself.

After that, I logged into my new account – Trust Tommy. 26 GBs free, which jumped to 35 after I deleted the save of the Home folder that Mac OSX had made.

So, I’d effectively wiped everything off my laptop – save for the Applications folder. I also saved App Support and Prefs from the /Library folder. At 6 GBs in total, I deemed that a small price to pay to save those – it meant that everything else was just how I liked it

I left Dad’s hard drive copying back over stuff I needed overnight. Desktop and Downloads were known black spots for things getting stuck and then bloating the folders and the hard drives, so they were left untouched. Music, Pictures, App Settings and Prefs were the only things I felt I needed.

This morning, I looked at how much space I’d saved from nuking my own computer for the greater good. 5 GBs free.

Hang on – I didn’t do all that for 4.3 GBs. I looked at Music to make sure everything was in once. Music/iTunes/Library contained all the different artists – no problem there. However, /iTunes/Untitled also contained all my artists. I made untitled the last time I changed laptops and couldn’t save my music. It contained the contents of my iPhone’s music library copied back over onto a computer. And now my music was on my new account twice. I deleted Untitled, freeing up 8 GBs of space immediately. I went into iTunes and double checked that I could still play all my music, which I could, proving that /Untitled had been a duplicate.

And so, 12 GBs were free on my laptop. Much better.

Resetting up applications didn’t take long; Apps like NetNewsWire (RSS reader), EchoFon (desktop Twitter client) and Chax (iChat hack so as to allow MSN addresses) needed were just a quick login, while Chrome could be reconfigured easily by just importing the file of all my bookmarks, history and such. Mail.app was also very easy to set up.

From usage so far, all I can see that I’ve lost (which I knew before that I would lose) is song play counts. That’s where Last.FMcomes in – my play counts are now stored online and not on one machine, just for such an occasion as this.

Speaking of which, whenever I tried to use Last.FM on my old computer, it’d crash, forcing me to use the older (OS9) classic version. Now, I’m able to use the new version, which, critically, supports iPod scrobbling.

So, how do you solve a problem like no hard-drive space? Back it up, nuke it and start afresh.

I read a very interesting article from the BBC about so-called Spyclists – worth checking out!

In the summer of 1937, when tension was rife in Europe, when satellite photographs weren’t invented yet and in a time when Ordinance Survey (OS) Maps were hard to come by, English country lanes were full of foreigners cycling their way between historic monuments and spending their nights out under the stars in fields (Famous Five style).

The only problem with an idyllic thought like that is that some of those groups were teenagers who belonged to the Hitler Youth.

Their itineraries were usually built round visits to the great English historic sites – Oxford, Cambridge, London, though one party was touring Scotland and another finished in Wales.

In May 1937, British newspaper the “Daily Herald” published an article based on a translation of the Nazi Cycling Associations’ guidelines for cycling abroad:

“Get into your head all landmarks like steeples and towers and all fords and bridges and acquaint yourself with them in such a way that you will be able to recognise them by night”

And one of the senior figures in the Hitler Youth had moved to London at the start of the year, ostensibly to study. MI5 suspected that Joachim Benemann’s real object however was to develop the Hitler Youth in the UK.

He tried to develop links between the Hitler Youth and the Boy Scouts, albeit unsuccessfully.

The Hitler Youth who travelled to Britain had been specially selected – a number had even had been to training camps before the visit. Some of them met or shared camps with British Boy Scout groups. The most striking was the Tamworth Scout troop – for whom this was a return visit. They had already been guests of the Hitler Youth in Hamburg earlier in the summer, thanks to their very pro-German Scoutmaster.

“It was like a Roman legion”
-Les Fardon, former Boy Scout

They had stayed at a Hitler Youth camp and even taken part in a torchlight rally. One of the boys, Les Fardon, told Radio 4’s Document Programme ten years ago: “It was like a Roman legion,” he said. “You had these long banners and you were marching to tune… it was very stirring and frightening”

Link to full article

Poster wording translates into: “Youth serves the leader. All ten year-olds into the Hitler Youth.”

The Cave – Mumford and Sons.

Unable to do much for the rest of the day – epically tired. Will probably end up doing 3 Photo365s in one go tomorrow. Oh dear, sometimes I think I put myself on too many schedules…

The problem with last using Last.Fm is that it puts my obsessive music-listening habits out for the world to see. Then again, one could argue that I’m the one putting them up.. :)

I do love the service though – if my laptop got stolen/broken tomorrow and the hard drive got wiped, I’d love my music library. That’s not a massive problem, mind you – I back up my (admittedly small) music library on Dad’s external USB hard-drive pretty regularly.. but that doesn’t save play counts. In what I think is iTunes’ single greatest FAIL, play counts aren’t copied over when you move the files about the place. That’s why Last.FM is so useful for me – remote play counts.

As you can see from the picture – the soundtrack from the musical “Chess” is being listened to a lot in my library these days… the cast wakes me almost without fail most nights around 3am. I’ll get up and stretch my leg by walking to the kitchen for a drink of water before going back to sleep. When I do that I like to listen to music and C for Chess seems to always be selected in my blind mouse jerks in iTunes.

If you wanna connect on Last.FM; I’m TrustTommy on there too.

Stealing the idea from Anthony McGuiness of a Friday Photo series of posts – hope he doesn’t mind :)

Remember when outside looked like this?

Well, the “When I’m old, I’ll talk about the hard winter of 09/10” group on Facebook does have 41,000 members…!

Today I got to enjoy the luxury of a half day, as teachers in my school er, enjoyed an inservice. The sun was streaming down and we decided to go for a drive out to Killaloe. Some pictures:

The road out to Killaloe.

Entering the town.

Jug and glass at the restaurant we ate in.

Gastronomical perfection. Cajun chicken sandwich.

Killaloe lookout. Phenomenal views

John recently linked me to an article by Paul Graham entitled “What You’ll Wish You’d Known” – it’s a phenomenal read. I’m going to summarize and quote from it in this post, but I seriously urge you to read it in full here.

Before being vetoed by the school authorities, Graham was to give a talk for a high school, where he planned to speak about the misconceptions about school and the future that many high school students have.

I’ll start by telling you something you don’t have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life. People are always asking you this, so you think you’re supposed to have an answer. But adults ask this mainly as a conversation starter. They want to know what sort of person you are, and this question is just to get you talking. They ask it the way you might poke a hermit crab in a tide pool, to see what it does.

He goes on to explain why plans per sé aren’t what’s important in high school – they come later. What is important and what you should be focussing on in high school is discovering what you enjoy doing. You have to work on things you like if you want to be good at what you do.

He goes on to explain that one of the difficulties in doing this because it’s hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs – after all, being a doctor is not the way it’s shown on TV. That said, it’s not impossible either – you can watch real doctors by volunteering in hospitals.

One might also run into a problem in that there are some jobs that you can’t learn about, because they don’t exist yet – most of the work I’ve done in the last ten years didn’t exist when I was in high school. The world changes fast, and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a world it’s not a good idea to have fixed plans.

He goes on to talk about how the “Standard Graduation Speech” isn’t so much wrong with its theme of “don’t give up on your dreams”, so much as badly phrased, because it implies you’re mean to be bound by some plan early on. The computer world has a name for this: premature optimization. And it is synonymous with disaster. These speakers would do better to say simply: don’t give up.

The article goes on to talk about college admissions, motivations, the importance of projects and how the successful people aren’t always ridiculously clever.

I think that last point is actually one of the best parts of the article:

I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they’d seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.

Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that’s one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it’s not our fault if we can’t do something as good.

There is some variation in natural ability. Most people overestimate its role, but it does exist. If I were talking to a guy four feet tall whose ambition was to play in the NBA, I’d feel pretty stupid saying “you can do anything if you really try”.

I think this article should be compulsory reading for all those in high school now (or those who will be soon) as well as those who teach in schools. Maybe this generation will be the first whose greatest regret isn’t how much time they wasted.

Full article by Paul Graham here.

What do you wish you’d known in high school?

Today’s post is a guest post from Dad, who reminisces on his own dad (my grandfather) and gardening.

***

All the children’s tales begin with “Long, long ago” or in the Irish Storyteller way “In my father’s time”, so maybe its appropriate that I start some reminiscences about my childhood and my parents in this way.

Yesterday morning “I took a notion” to do some gardening/outdoor work. I have to admit, though, that what I mean by this is not what my father would have called gardening. Nevertheless, I think that if he were still around, he’d approve. It was just a general tidy up outside – sweeping paths, raking stones on the driveway, collecting leaves and pulling grass that grows on the paths (but strangely, is prevented from growing in the lawns by winter frost).

But in his case, gardening was about vegetables. He dug and re-dug the plots allocated to the different vegetables with steady determined ease. It’s not accidental that quite a few of the photos we have of him are with spade in hand.
Why spade? He used both spade and fork for digging. The fork, if the ground had been recently tilled and the “going was easy” but I do remember a lot of use of spade also, probably due to heavy soils which would compact quickly between growing seasons. Also, grasses and weeds – which don’t seem constrained to growing seasons – crept in, requiring the cutting action of the spade to break the ground.
And of course he was a good judge of a spade. I found it intriguing to listen to men used to gardening speak of the qualities of a spade. Lightness of course came high on the list, but also the length and thickness of handle, not to mention size and shape of base which in turn affects the weight of the soil lifted.

In fact, I saw and experienced evidence of the same phenomenon with pitchforks. (For the uninitiated, this is a two pronged fork – or “two grained” as we used to say – used in “saving” hay. Once when I asked one of my sons to bring me the four grained fork from the shed, he asked “why, what other kind of fork is there?” and I, amused, had to explain about the hay fork.)
Making hay the traditional way requires a lot of manpower since, due to the vagaries of Irish weather, time was always of the essence. A “meitheal” of men would come together from neighbouring farms and set about “saving the hay” a term which itself expresses the urgency of the task in hand. When the men would return to work after a break for tea or sandwiches and pick up their forks again, they would do so carefully, picking “their own”. Often it might actually be their own, which they brought with them, but even if not, they would have begun the day measuring the the feel of it – especially its weight and the thickness of the handle – before claiming theirs for the day. I’ve even seen men restart work only to stop, look down and say “this isn’t my fork” and go looking for the “thief” who had theirs.

But back to my father and his spade. It was long handled. None of this modern short ‘D’ top handle… I’ve never quite figured out how one could use this latter short spade for any length of time since it involves bending the back continually. Of equal or even greater importance was the flattened protector part of the base where the foot pressed to drive it into the ground. If this wasn’t flat enough it would hurt the foot, or damage valuable footwear.

I was commenting to Tommy recently how my Dad tried hard but failed to get me interested in vegetable gardening. While I did help him periodically, in particular if anything interesting was being sown, the bug never really bit me and in my mid fifties now, it seems I’m permanently immune. At least to that particular variety of gardening bug. However, alas, a different strain has taken hold and I have found myself looking forward to the simple jobs in the yard and garden and, unlike many people for whom trimming hedges and maintaining lawns is a necessary evil, I actually enjoy it.

Tommy and I were pondering whether it’s an age related condition… “late onset gardening bug”, or the likes but most importantly, he also feels quite immune at this stage of his life. We’ll just have to see how he is in forty years… perhaps medical advances will protect him, but if not, he’ll feel that invisible hand drag him out, and then before you know it, he’ll be reminiscing – “in my father’s time”.

Happy March!

A couple of my friends have been doing this ‘Photo 365′ idea, which is simple enough – one photo per day over 365 days, plus a short caption.

I decided not to do it on the main blog here, instead opting to have it on a side blog – TrustTommy.Posterous.com. If you’re hip to RSS, here’s the RSS link to subscribe in a feed reader.

I’m doing this because I’ve always had an appreciation for great photography (some great examples include Phil, Séamus, Áine and my Mum) and I know from experience that the more you do something, the better you get at it, and I’d like to get better at photography.

That’s the plan anyway.

As to the question of the style of the photos, I’ll quote Áine here:

In keeping with that mantra, the first picture is of the book I’m currently reading :)

If you don’t want to follow the Posterous, they’ll also be in a set on my Flickr. See ‘em here. Otherwise, TrustTommy.Posterous.com is the link.