One of the best bang for buck AMD chips you can get a hold of right now is the AMD64 4000+ (90mn/HT2G) It is a single core chip that beats alot of the multicore's out there. It also costs a whopping $79 bucks. It's and older chip, but it can still hold it's own against machines 2 years younger in most cases. Family constraints have me buying my hardware on that curve, but my rig is as fast or faster then most big-brand boxes 2 or 3 years younger.
i use a mac but do most of my photoshop work on a hp with a amd 3800 chipset with only 1 gig of ram it runs smoothly the imac with the core 2 duo would be all u need
I've been using SpamSieve for quite a while with Apple Mail, and I'm happy with it. They just added Thunderbird support (that's ThunderfoxFirebird for Sid).
Very true, good graphics editors always work in a properly lit (read: dark) environment.
I only use a 21 inch sony CRT & get no reflection that distracts me at all...its got a deep rich colour. Buying another house atm so things could change but im going to build a studio so i wont have a light source other than what i design into it.
And the reports are that if you want to switch your Adobe software license from Windows to Mac or vice versa, Adobe customer service will do it for a very small administrative fee (at least in the USA).
With Adobe's new Lightroom system, versions for both Mac and Windows are on the same disk for the boxed product, and presently availability at introductory pricing.
I used Gyazmail as my e-mail client for more than three years for its stability, very rich feature set, and active enhancement and development, but particularly for its 'conventional' mailbox structure after the experience of mysteriously losing about five months-worth of e-mails from within one folder which I didn't know about until my backup cycle had moved beyond the period concerned.
If Mac applications have a persistent fault, it's Apple's propensity to adopt esoteric file structures that can trip-up the applications and cause undue frustration. In addition to Mail, iPhoto is another case in point, and the reason I never used Aperture (now discarded) until v1.5 when the referenced files capability came along so I knew where my files were at all times.
I came back to Mail with the advent of Tiger, hopeful (so far vindicated) that its stability had improved, and in the light of an almost total slump in Gyazmail development for an extended period, seemingly while the developer was thoroughly consumed by the effort to add IMAP capability (irrelevant for me), since delivered.
Make no mistake, it's a very well-engineered system that integrates well with other Mac applications (for example, Address Book) and is very familiar and intuitive for Mail users, but with the Mail feature set further extended in many ways. To me, $US18 for such an important application is nothing.
I'll continue to reassess my use of Mail, particularly on the impending release of Leopard when an upgraded Mail is expected and, on the basis of my prior experience, I would have no hesitation returning to Gyazmail in the future if the balance of advantage was there for me.
Thanks. Yeah, I don't mind spending some money when it's warranted. I've just always have been happy with Mail, and was interested to hear why someone wouldn't. Or why they wouldn't use another free option, like Thunderbird.
I've been using SpamSieve for quite a while with Apple Mail, and I'm happy with it. They just added Thunderbird support (that's ThunderfoxFirebird for Sid).
I never download e-mail. I keep all of my accounts online. As long as I'm careful about attachments, no worries about foul things entering my domain.
My anti-glare flat MBP screen, now properly calibrated is awesome for colors. I just did my first test print the other day, and it came out as one of my best in terms of getting what I saw out of the printer.
How do I make my glossy screen not glossy? It's not calibrated, and for now all my pics are web-based and not printed, but someday...is there a decent sticker or something for my C2D blacbook glossy screen? I can just tell that it's soooo oversaturated. Thanks!
VI
dgrin.com - making my best shots even better since 2006.
Coatings or stickers probably wouldn't help since the screen is practically an optical device like a lens or filter. You don't want to reduce its performance .Calibration--good calibration, with a hardware puck--is your best option.
I've been using SpamSieve for quite a while with Apple Mail, and I'm happy with it. They just added Thunderbird support (that's ThunderfoxFirebird for Sid).
Thanks for the tip David, I am using it now. I get a few spam emails every day and they are a nuisance.
Problem: My daughter is blissfully unaware of the need to keep free space available on her startup disk. A couple of days ago it actually got down to 140mb of free space (it shouldn't fall below 10%, or 4GB, in her case.)
Solution: An applescript that's triggered by iCal. You make a new event in iCal, tell it to run this applescript at an interval that works for you (daily, weekly, etc.). This script will determine the free space on your startup disk, and if it's less than the target amount (10% in this case) it will send an email saying, "The startup disk has only XX percent of its capacity available," and then show a dialog box with the same message.
Here's the script:
tell application "Finder"
set the percent_free to ¬
(((the free space of the startup disk) / ¬
(the capacity of the startup disk)) * 100) div 1
end tell
if the percent_free is less than 10 then
tell application "Mail"
--Enter the name of the account in Mail you want to send from
set theAccount to "enter account name here"
--Enter your Subject line
set theSubject to "subject of email here"
--Enter the email address you are sending to
set theAddress to "anyone@something.com"
set theContent to "The startup disk has only " & the percent_free & ¬
" percent of its capacity available."
activate
set newMessage to make new outgoing message with properties {account:theAccount, subject:theSubject, content:theContent}
tell newMessage
make new to recipient at end of to recipients with properties {address:theAddress}
set visible to true
end tell
send newMessage
end tell
tell application (path to frontmost application as text)
display dialog "The startup disk has only " & the percent_free & ¬
" percent of its capacity available." & return & return & ¬
"Should this script continue?" with icon 1
end tell
end if
You'll need to set the account name, the subject of the email, and the address you're sending to.
You could probably re-write the applescript to use another mail app, but you could also set up Mail so that it would only send out these messages--i.e., tell it not to check for mail and to quit as soon as the email is sent.
Thanks to devbobo for all the help with searching for a solution to this, and for getting me thinking about using applescript!
NOTE 1: If you don't want to send the email, just lop off that part of the code, and it will just return a dialog box.
NOTE 2: The account name is the name of the email account in Mail. In the attached screengrab, I have 3 mail accounts set up, mac.com, BLT, and gmail. I could enter any of those as the account name. IOW, enter the account name as it appears in that pane of Mail.
Interesting approach DavidTO, thanks for sharing it. I usually do that kind of thing in a unix fashion, so have implemented it with a shell script in a cronjob and sendmail. Nice to see a completely different take on the same issue.
SmugMug Sorcerer - Engineering Team Champion for Commerce, Finance, Security, and Data Support http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
Interesting approach DavidTO, thanks for sharing it. I usually do that kind of thing in a unix fashion, so have implemented it with a shell script in a cronjob and sendmail. Nice to see a completely different take on the same issue.
I would love to know how you did that. I worked with what I have. I was trying PERL, and got completely lost. Can you post a how-to? Or code?
I would love to know how you did that. I worked with what I have. I was trying PERL, and got completely lost. Can you post a how-to? Or code?
Sure thing! Here's a trimmed down version of what I use:
EDIT: updated to add commends trying to explain what a lot of the parts of this do. All the lines that start with # (other than the very first one) are comments. I can't put comments inside the email, so I put all the comments for the email before it. (also fixed a minor copy/paste mistake from when I originally put this here, left off the -t from the sendmail invocation)
#!/bin/sh
#the subshell pipeline we're going to use is:
# df / | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $5}'
# the first part runs "df" the "disk free" command, and specifically asks about the root filesystem (called / in unix)
# df's output will look like:
# Filesystem 512-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
# /dev/disk1s10 489970768 236759336 252699432 48% /
# we send that output into the next command, tail, with an option to print the last line of input as output, this removes the header from what df output
# that output is then sent into the third command in the pipeline, an awk invocation.
# awk is a general purpose programming language which we give a very simple program to: print $5
# this simple awk script prints the 5th value on every line of input to output
# in our case, this 5th value is the Capacity percentage, so it will output "48%" in this case.
#finally we'll execute that and assign the results to a variable named percent
percent=$(df / | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $5}');
#strip off the trailing percent character, so num is now the integer, like "48"
num=${percent/%%}
# we test if the value in num is greater than 90, and if so we do the following block of code in { }s
test $num -gt 90 && {
# this bit of code is complex, but it basically boils down to this:
# we take a chunk of hard coded text here in the script, and shove it into the 'sendmail' command, telling it to take the address to send to from that formatted text.
# within the text, we do a couple of subshells with $() to invoke commands, like hostname, or df -h / which is a variation of our 'disk free' command from above, only with a switch telling it to use 'human readable' formating like "40G".
# later we do a more complex pipeline in three parts, it is: $(du -sk /Users/*/{Documents,Movies,Pictures,Music,Sites,Desktop,Public} | sort -n | head -n 10)
# the first part reports on Disk Usage, in Summary mode, in Kilobytes, for a list of directories.
# the second part does a numeric sort of these reports
# and finally we use the counterpart to tail, head, to keep only the top 10 lines from the sorted output.
cat <<EOF | sendmail -t
To: Person to Bug <machine_owner@cabbey.net>
CC: Me <cabbey@cabbey.net>
CC: other machine users <them@cabbey.net>
Subject: boot volume space on $(hostname) at critical levels!
Put your personal bitch note here, just remember to leave an empty line above it.
Here's df's output for root (boot volume):
$(df -h /)
and here's where all that space is going (top 10):
$(du -sk /Users/*/{Documents,Movies,Pictures,Music,Sites,Desktop,Public} | sort -n | head -n 10)
EOF
#the above EOF ends the block of hardcoded text that is the preformatted email we will send
}
Toss that bit of shell script into a file, say "check.space.sh" in your Home directoy, and make it executable. Then schedule that into cron with "crontab -e". The above assumes a multi-user machine, in which case you'll want to run that cronjob as root. Logged in as an Adminstrator you can do:
If you're not on a multi-user, then this will work fine when run as yourself, just leave it in your home directory, or maybe put it in your local ~/bin/ if you have one. "crontab -e" from a command line will then bring you into editing your cron job list. For those that have never ventured in to this before, it can be a bit... ugly... at first. Regardless of which crontab you're editing, here's what to do in there for the un-initiated:
First off, you're in a vi editor... so hit 'G' to jump to the bottom of the file, yes the case matters, so it's shift-g. Next, 'A' to append to the end of the line, again case matters. Now hit enter to create a new line and fill in the cron specifier for your job. The specifier you want to add to this file will look something like this:
0 4 * * * /usr/local/bin/check.space.sh
that reads as:
zero minutes past, the 4th hour of every day of every month on every day of the week, run /usr/local/bin/check.space.sh. (note that if you are not on a multi-user, adjust the path as needed. A single user machine would use /Users/<your login name>/check.space.sh)
I'm sure there are parts of that that won't make sense, feel free to ask questions on them.
<img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/deal.gif" border="0" alt="" > This post and all content in it are licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2.0, and NOT any newer version. Stallman can kiss my fat ass if he thinks he can try to use my code to enforce his crackpot ideas of how society should be run.
SmugMug Sorcerer - Engineering Team Champion for Commerce, Finance, Security, and Data Support http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
Interesting, cabbey. I'll have to think long and hard about whether I want to delve into something I understand nothing of. Applescript I can't write from scratch, but I know what I'm looking at. I mean, it ain't broke....and if I start messing around with that stuff....it might be!!!
What I'm saying is build it, and they will come. There are plenty of people like Cabbey that would help you out.
I'll even promise that no matter how noobish the question is, I won't hit ya with something destructive, like a fork bomb.
As I said, if there's some part of that code I posted above y'all need explained, just ask. In prepareation for the answer "the whole thing" I'm going to go edit the script to put some comments in it.
SmugMug Sorcerer - Engineering Team Champion for Commerce, Finance, Security, and Data Support http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
Eight cores or four
Opt for the 8-core Mac Pro and you get the power of two Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Clovertown” processors running at 3.0GHz. Or choose a quad-core Mac Pro featuring two Dual-Core Intel Xeon “Woodcrest” processors and decide how fast they fly: 2.0GHz, 2.66GHz, or 3.0GHz. At 3.0GHz, the quad-core Mac Pro runs up to 2x faster than the Power Mac G5 Quad.1
Comments
Dgrin FAQ | Me | Workshops
Why is it worth it to spend $18 on Gyazmail?
Dgrin FAQ | Me | Workshops
If Mac applications have a persistent fault, it's Apple's propensity to adopt esoteric file structures that can trip-up the applications and cause undue frustration. In addition to Mail, iPhoto is another case in point, and the reason I never used Aperture (now discarded) until v1.5 when the referenced files capability came along so I knew where my files were at all times.
I came back to Mail with the advent of Tiger, hopeful (so far vindicated) that its stability had improved, and in the light of an almost total slump in Gyazmail development for an extended period, seemingly while the developer was thoroughly consumed by the effort to add IMAP capability (irrelevant for me), since delivered.
Make no mistake, it's a very well-engineered system that integrates well with other Mac applications (for example, Address Book) and is very familiar and intuitive for Mail users, but with the Mail feature set further extended in many ways. To me, $US18 for such an important application is nothing.
I'll continue to reassess my use of Mail, particularly on the impending release of Leopard when an upgraded Mail is expected and, on the basis of my prior experience, I would have no hesitation returning to Gyazmail in the future if the balance of advantage was there for me.
Thanks for the complete reply!
Dgrin FAQ | Me | Workshops
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam
http://www.mcneel.com/users/jb/foghorn/ill_shut_up.au
How do I make my glossy screen not glossy? It's not calibrated, and for now all my pics are web-based and not printed, but someday...is there a decent sticker or something for my C2D blacbook glossy screen?
VI
Me to!!
Moderator of the Technique Forum and Finishing School on Dgrin
Thanks for the tip David, I am using it now. I get a few spam emails every day and they are a nuisance.
Solution: An applescript that's triggered by iCal. You make a new event in iCal, tell it to run this applescript at an interval that works for you (daily, weekly, etc.). This script will determine the free space on your startup disk, and if it's less than the target amount (10% in this case) it will send an email saying, "The startup disk has only XX percent of its capacity available," and then show a dialog box with the same message.
Here's the script:
tell application "Finder" set the percent_free to ¬ (((the free space of the startup disk) / ¬ (the capacity of the startup disk)) * 100) div 1 end tell if the percent_free is less than 10 then tell application "Mail" --Enter the name of the account in Mail you want to send from set theAccount to "enter account name here" --Enter your Subject line set theSubject to "subject of email here" --Enter the email address you are sending to set theAddress to "anyone@something.com" set theContent to "The startup disk has only " & the percent_free & ¬ " percent of its capacity available." activate set newMessage to make new outgoing message with properties {account:theAccount, subject:theSubject, content:theContent} tell newMessage make new to recipient at end of to recipients with properties {address:theAddress} set visible to true end tell send newMessage end tell tell application (path to frontmost application as text) display dialog "The startup disk has only " & the percent_free & ¬ " percent of its capacity available." & return & return & ¬ "Should this script continue?" with icon 1 end tell end ifYou'll need to set the account name, the subject of the email, and the address you're sending to.
You could probably re-write the applescript to use another mail app, but you could also set up Mail so that it would only send out these messages--i.e., tell it not to check for mail and to quit as soon as the email is sent.
Thanks to devbobo for all the help with searching for a solution to this, and for getting me thinking about using applescript!
NOTE 1: If you don't want to send the email, just lop off that part of the code, and it will just return a dialog box.
NOTE 2: The account name is the name of the email account in Mail. In the attached screengrab, I have 3 mail accounts set up, mac.com, BLT, and gmail. I could enter any of those as the account name. IOW, enter the account name as it appears in that pane of Mail.
Dgrin FAQ | Me | Workshops
Here I've changed the name of the script to "Free Space Report."
Dgrin FAQ | Me | Workshops
http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
I would love to know how you did that. I worked with what I have. I was trying PERL, and got completely lost. Can you post a how-to? Or code?
Dgrin FAQ | Me | Workshops
Sure thing! Here's a trimmed down version of what I use:
EDIT: updated to add commends trying to explain what a lot of the parts of this do. All the lines that start with # (other than the very first one) are comments. I can't put comments inside the email, so I put all the comments for the email before it. (also fixed a minor copy/paste mistake from when I originally put this here, left off the -t from the sendmail invocation)
#!/bin/sh #the subshell pipeline we're going to use is: # df / | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $5}' # the first part runs "df" the "disk free" command, and specifically asks about the root filesystem (called / in unix) # df's output will look like: # Filesystem 512-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on # /dev/disk1s10 489970768 236759336 252699432 48% / # we send that output into the next command, tail, with an option to print the last line of input as output, this removes the header from what df output # that output is then sent into the third command in the pipeline, an awk invocation. # awk is a general purpose programming language which we give a very simple program to: print $5 # this simple awk script prints the 5th value on every line of input to output # in our case, this 5th value is the Capacity percentage, so it will output "48%" in this case. #finally we'll execute that and assign the results to a variable named percent percent=$(df / | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $5}'); #strip off the trailing percent character, so num is now the integer, like "48" num=${percent/%%} # we test if the value in num is greater than 90, and if so we do the following block of code in { }s test $num -gt 90 && { # this bit of code is complex, but it basically boils down to this: # we take a chunk of hard coded text here in the script, and shove it into the 'sendmail' command, telling it to take the address to send to from that formatted text. # within the text, we do a couple of subshells with $() to invoke commands, like hostname, or df -h / which is a variation of our 'disk free' command from above, only with a switch telling it to use 'human readable' formating like "40G". # later we do a more complex pipeline in three parts, it is: $(du -sk /Users/*/{Documents,Movies,Pictures,Music,Sites,Desktop,Public} | sort -n | head -n 10) # the first part reports on Disk Usage, in Summary mode, in Kilobytes, for a list of directories. # the second part does a numeric sort of these reports # and finally we use the counterpart to tail, head, to keep only the top 10 lines from the sorted output. cat <<EOF | sendmail -t To: Person to Bug <machine_owner@cabbey.net> CC: Me <cabbey@cabbey.net> CC: other machine users <them@cabbey.net> Subject: boot volume space on $(hostname) at critical levels! Put your personal bitch note here, just remember to leave an empty line above it. Here's df's output for root (boot volume): $(df -h /) and here's where all that space is going (top 10): $(du -sk /Users/*/{Documents,Movies,Pictures,Music,Sites,Desktop,Public} | sort -n | head -n 10) EOF #the above EOF ends the block of hardcoded text that is the preformatted email we will send }Toss that bit of shell script into a file, say "check.space.sh" in your Home directoy, and make it executable. Then schedule that into cron with "crontab -e". The above assumes a multi-user machine, in which case you'll want to run that cronjob as root. Logged in as an Adminstrator you can do:
If you're not on a multi-user, then this will work fine when run as yourself, just leave it in your home directory, or maybe put it in your local ~/bin/ if you have one. "crontab -e" from a command line will then bring you into editing your cron job list. For those that have never ventured in to this before, it can be a bit... ugly... at first. Regardless of which crontab you're editing, here's what to do in there for the un-initiated:
First off, you're in a vi editor... so hit 'G' to jump to the bottom of the file, yes the case matters, so it's shift-g. Next, 'A' to append to the end of the line, again case matters. Now hit enter to create a new line and fill in the cron specifier for your job. The specifier you want to add to this file will look something like this:
that reads as:
zero minutes past, the 4th hour of every day of every month on every day of the week, run /usr/local/bin/check.space.sh. (note that if you are not on a multi-user, adjust the path as needed. A single user machine would use /Users/<your login name>/check.space.sh)
I'm sure there are parts of that that won't make sense, feel free to ask questions on them.
<img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/deal.gif" border="0" alt="" > This post and all content in it are licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2.0, and NOT any newer version. Stallman can kiss my fat ass if he thinks he can try to use my code to enforce his crackpot ideas of how society should be run.
http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
Dgrin FAQ | Me | Workshops
http://photos.mikelanestudios.com/
Gee, too bad you don't have the powers to make one. Hmmmmm. I wonder what we can do about that?
Dgrin FAQ | Me | Workshops
http://photos.mikelanestudios.com/
What I'm saying is build it, and they will come. There are plenty of people like Cabbey that would help you out.
Dgrin FAQ | Me | Workshops
I'll even promise that no matter how noobish the question is, I won't hit ya with something destructive, like a fork bomb.
As I said, if there's some part of that code I posted above y'all need explained, just ask. In prepareation for the answer "the whole thing" I'm going to go edit the script to put some comments in it.
http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
8 core mac pro!
Eight cores or four
Opt for the 8-core Mac Pro and you get the power of two Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Clovertown” processors running at 3.0GHz. Or choose a quad-core Mac Pro featuring two Dual-Core Intel Xeon “Woodcrest” processors and decide how fast they fly: 2.0GHz, 2.66GHz, or 3.0GHz. At 3.0GHz, the quad-core Mac Pro runs up to 2x faster than the Power Mac G5 Quad.1
when is Andy getting his??
How many yachts can I waterski behind?
I have pretty darn powerful machine right now, Mac Pro w/ 2x3Ghz Dual-Core processors, 6Gb Ram, etc etc...
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
8?
Dgrin FAQ | Me | Workshops
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam
http://www.mcneel.com/users/jb/foghorn/ill_shut_up.au
I don't suppose the wife would mind.
http://photos.mikelanestudios.com/
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam
http://www.mcneel.com/users/jb/foghorn/ill_shut_up.au