Posted by Doug
Thu, 25 Jan 2007 20:11:00 GMT
Today I’m officially (and finally) cable TV free! We’ve finally tired of paying the high monthly fees to get content. Sure, there are lower subscription plans, but none of them include a DVR or are High Def. So, we just pulled the plug. We’re simply going to rely on our Blockbuster on-line account plus our local library plus some iTunes plus some “backnet”.
I setup my old Apple G4 Powerbook (not the powerbook I’m selling on eBay) in the living room with the mini-DVI to s-video connector. Using the 1.3.1 version of Enabler (not the 1.3.5 version) I was able to install Apple’s Front Row to use as a front end for selecting and displaying shows.
I have a bunch of video and TV shows that I’ve “aquired” that are in .avi format. Using iSquint I’m able to convert those easily into the format that iTunes prefers. Also using Parsley is Atomically Delicious I can tag these with the special meta-data iTunes needs to recognize the files as TV Shows and Movies.
All in all I’m real happy with the solution. I’ve also got our family iPhoto album with all of the photos we’ve taken since we got a digital camera setup as a screen saver. So now the idle TV shows snapshots from the past! The kids love it. I think they might actually prefer sitting and watching the slide show of photos to some of the stuff they normally watch on TV when bored.
Posted in Mac OS X, House, TV, Movies, Freedom | 3 comments
Posted by Doug
Fri, 19 Jan 2007 14:03:54 GMT
I’m selling my 12” Powerbook on eBay. It has a 1GHz G4 w/768MB RAM, 40GB Hard Disk, and a combo drive. It also has built in bluetooth and an airport extreme. I just got the battery replaced through the recall, so it’s brand new with plenty of life. All that’s installed on it is Mac OS X 10.4.8 Tiger and iLife ‘04. Bid early, bid often!
Posted in Mac OS X | 1 comment
Posted by Doug
Sun, 14 Jan 2007 05:28:00 GMT
One of the sucky things that’s happened at work is a corporate migration to MS Exchange. This is the story about how I’ve survived the migration.
Our IT department has decided to only support two mail clients: MS Outlook and MS Entourage. So I’ve been using Entourage. I resisted at first simply because it was MS and it looked a lot more ugly than Apple’s Mail.app. After several months I can truely say I hate it. The user experience is really awful. Search is slow and cumbersme. I’ve got dialogs popping up all over the place. Configuration is a hasstle. The supposed benefit of Entourage is integraton with the rest of the company. Unfortunately, MS treats Entourage like a red-headed step-child (no offense to all you red-headed step-children out there). The integration with Exchange is clunky at best.
The good news is our IT department also supports the Outlook Web Access (OWA). This is really a WebDAV interface with pretty good functionality. I finally found fetchExc. It’s like fetchmail, but downloads from Exchange via OWA and dumps it into a local mbox file. The bad news is fetchExc is a java app. That means it was kind of a hassle to setup. What you’ll see below is me trying to explain how to get this java app able to run. Please forgive the Java ignorances. This is why I took Java off my resume.
The first big step is getting the SSL certificate of your OWA host available to Java.
openssl s_client -connect your.outlook.web.access.host:https
This will dump a bunch of text to the screen. The important bits are between and including -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- and -----END CERTIFICATE-----. I copy/pasted this text into an outlook.pem file.
sudo keytool -import -alias your.outlook.web.access.host -keystore keystore -file outlook.pem
This creates a keystore file that java uses for validating certificates it receives. I’m not sure how it’s different than a .pem file, but whatever.
Now I edit the fetchExc.properties file appropriately. I think the important bit is setting MboxFile=/var/mail/dalcorn (where dalcorn is my Mac short-name or unix login). I’ve also set Delete=false and All=false. This means the mail will be left in Exchange and marked as read. Only unread messages will be downloaded.
java -Djavax.net.ssl.trustStore=/Users/dalcorn/devel/fetchExc/keystore -jar /Users/dalcorn/devel/fetchExc/fetchExc.jar -p /Users/dalcorn/devel/fetchExc/fetchExc.properties > /tmp/fetchExc.log 2>&1
This is the full command line I use to run the actual fetching of mail. I’m not smart enough to add the .pem file to the global keystore, so I have to specify it explicitly on the command line. Also, I’m explicitly calling out the property file as well. I’ve got this command running in a cron job every 5 minutes.
The next tricky part is getting Apple’s Mail.app to read this mbox file. In the olden days, Mail had an account type of “Unix” that would read from the default system wide mbox file. That’s gone now. My only other option was to use POP.
sudo port install qpopper
This installs a simple POP3 server on my mac. I did zero configuration. Whatever the Portfile said for it to do was fine. I did have to manually start the daemon though.
sudo launchctl load -w /opt/local/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.mail.qpopper.plist-dist
That file in the LaunchDaemons directory will make sure qpopper is started at reboot.
After that, I just created a new account in Mail.app of type POP with mail host set to localhost. Easy, peasy, pumkin weasy.
I can’t tell you how much happier I am not having to spend time in Entourage all day. It’s the little things that count. Big thanks to Juhani Rautiainen who wrote fetchExc!
Posted in Software, Mac OS X, System Administration | Tags email, entourage, fetchexc, howto, java, ssl | 3 comments
