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Sad day for NotifyMail
Monday marked a sad day for NotifyMail. After 13.5 years of using the product that I wrote (it helped launch my career), I have finally stopped using it. Do I still want to be notified instantly of new mail? Absolutely. Do I still believe in the product? Well, sort of. Several months back, I wrote about my switch to IMAP. While I was having an email exchange with a friend, I couldn't understand how he responded so quickly. He said his mail client just kept putting new messages in his mailbox and I soon learned about IMAP IDLE. I found a plugin for Mail.app and sources tell me that this is a standard part of Leopard's Mail.app client. IMAP IDLE basically keeps a connection open to the server and just gets pinged when there is new mail or a new transaction. This is much better than NotifyMail because there is no server configuration required and no separate desktop app to run. It does keep a connection open, but sends/receives very little traffic.
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Four years of going Paperless
I've always been good about keeping receipts, but I just shoved receipts in folders sort of ordered by date. Just over 4 years ago, I was looking for a receipt and got frustrated that I couldn't find one. The idea for ReceiptWallet (now Paperless) was born as there was no other Mac product on the market tailored to receipt management. Two weeks of work later, I had a working version of the software and released it to the world a few weeks later.
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Bluetooth in VMWare Fusion
Yesterday I wanted to update the firmware in my Parrot EasyDrive Bluetooth carkit. Seems simple enough to do it using VMWare Fusion. I started up Fusion, chose the option to connect the "Bluetooth USB device" and found that Windows didn't have the driver. Crap, I remember having to do something with BootCamp to get the drivers, but I couldn't recall. Now that BootCamp wasn't a download (it is part of Leopard), I started poking around at the BootCamp Assistant and got no where. I searched online and couldn't find an answer. Finally, I found a reference to inserting the Leopard DVD while in Windows. I tried this and when I did, the BootCamp driver installer came up and installed my drivers. Perfect; why couldn't VMWare say something about this on their website?
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Review: ParkZone Night Vapor
My interest in RC flying vehicles hasn't stopped at helicopters. My wife bought me a ParkZone Night Vapor
for Hanukkah. This plane is advertised as an intermediate plane, but also could be flown indoors. As I don't have a back yard large enough to fly other planes such as the HobbyZone Champ, I thought that the Night Vapor would be cool to fly.