Love my Mac... one annoyance is if you have an NTFS partition in use for Bootcamp (to run Windows on the Mac), it will be mounted every time the system boots. I don't really need it mounted, it's just clutter that I eject anyway.

Thankfully since OS X is Unix, it's really easy to avoid.

Open or create the file /etc/fstab (with sudo), then paste in the line:

LABEL=BOOTCAMP  none    ntfs    rw,noauto       0       0

Change the text after the = to be whatever your drive is, although I'm not sure it supports spaces (maybe in quotes).

After that when you reboot the drive will not be mounted, however you can still mount it yourself with the disk utility.

I've started a MobileMe trial, to see what it's all about. So far I think it's pretty sweet, works outstanding outside of the web interface. The website is nice, but that's not how I get to things. Gmail is great on the website, but it's very weird through IMAP. Definitely a lot of hoops to jump through. Google Calendar and Contacts work outstanding with the iPhone, but there's no good way to sync them with the system... there is a way, but it's unreliable. MobileMe fixes all of that, works great on the Mac and iPhone and probably a PC, and also on the website... though not as good on there. Still, I'm happy with it.

Getting Gmail and IMAP working right with the Mac Mail.app is a lot easier than I had originally thought, once I discovered a neat, slightly hidden function.

To make Mail.app use [Gmail]/Trash for the trash folder, and thus move deleted emails there (instead of them being lost in the ether and staying in All Mail forever) click on [Gmail]/Trash then the Mailbox menu and Use This Mailbox For > Trash. Do the same thing with Sent, Drafts etc. Way easy!

Got it...

Going back home from Utah soon. Been a long month, lots of fun though. I miss home, but I think I will miss this place too.

Seriously considering the purchase of a 15 inch Macbook Pro in the near future - with the student discount (and hey, I'll also get a free iPod Touch... will probably sell it). My three year old Thinkpad is feeling it's age. I get lots of freezes and overheating issues. It's fine for email and general use, but I tend to work it harder than it can handle. I fell in love with OS X again playing with it a few days in a row at the Apple store. Also think it will be much more useful with a better understanding of the terminal and Unix in general.

I don't know if I'll sell the Thinkpad on ebay or something, maybe give it to someone who could use it for the basics.

Tonight I upgraded my iPhone ot iPhone OS 3.0. I had been holding off since I am currently away from home, and thus the computer that I sync the phone with. I opened up iTunes in VirtualBox and managed to get most of the process going. Was just about done when the system overheated and restarted, so the whole process started over again. Unfortunately the old iPhone backup was also deleted. Not a really big issue. I manually reinstalled all the apps (and managed to fix an annoying issue where iPhone refused to log into my iTunes account), set up contacts to sync with Gmail again, and now am only missing my music and ringtones which I won't be able to get until I get home. Thankfully that's not too far away.


In other news, Adult Swim has the weirdest cartoons in the world.

Gmail's IMAP implementation is very weird. Following their default instructions you will end up with a ton of messages in All Mail, as they are never being deleted, only "hidden". This is a behavior I don't want. when I delete a message I want it put in trash, where I can look and see if I need it for a little bit and it goes away after a longer while.

To do this in Thunderbird you have to change your Account Settings. In Server Settings you have to choose "Move it to the Trash Folder" in the when I delete a message field. You also have to quit thunderbird and modify the configuration to tell it that the trash folder is [Gmail]/Trash. This article says how to change the name.