Amit Agarwal has some great suggestions on how to trim the size of your saved GMail.

BLOGZOT 2.0 on MacZOT.com is some wacky promotion where, if enough people blog about SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys. MacZOT and TheCodingMonkeys will award $105,000 in Mac software to bloggers.

I’ve not used SubEthaEdit, but from what I know about it, it has some really great collaboration features, but is also a fine text editor if you don’t need those features.

This is an interesting promotion that seems pretty simple on the surface: A percentage of people that get the application for free — if the goals are met — will go on to be future customers and evangelists, while a certain percentage will use it but not ever bother to upgrade to a new version. Another group will dislike it, but only a very small portion will dislike it and complain about the quality: it was free, after all.

And, of course, the nature of the promotion means it will be frequently talked about in the Mac “blogosphere” until the next shiny thing comes along.

Mail.app’s data takes up too much space on my hard drive. I know why — I’m an email packrat. I have mail dating back to 1997 on my other computer, and a lot of that mail includes attachments, because I’m constantly sending them: drafts for articles, layout drafts, art sketches, random pictures of last night’s snowfall … all sorts of attachments. And Mail.app saves those for you right within its own data files, so you don’t lose the attachment if, in the future, you delete the original file.

That means if you send a 1MB PDF to a co-worker, that 1MB PDF is now taking up 2MB+ on your hard drive; once in the original place, and once somewhere in the bowels of ~/Library/Mail/.

Side Tip: As soon as you hit the Choose File button, Mail saves the file you’re attacahing. So if you’re working on a graphic, attach it to your email, and then notice you made a typo, you must delete it from your email before you edit and re-save the document. Even if you edit and re-save overtop of the original file you attached, the first one will be sent!

Aside from taking up hard drive space, this is a potential security/privacy issue, as you may think you’ve deleted confidential files from your hard drive, but still have a copy saved with Mail’s data.

Thankfully, it’s relatively simple to get rid of all of those attachments, or at least re-save them all into a form where they’re more usable. That’s a potential reason to want to save attachments with your mail data — if you accidentally lose the original file somewhere down the road, you have them saved in your mail data and you can retrieve them. But really, that’s a last ditch resort that should be unnecessary given a smart and sane backup plan, and we all have one of those, right?

Alright, let’s go through the steps to archive and delete these files.

1. Create a temporary directory on your hard drive, and inside that directory create directories for each mail account you have. You can get away with just one directory even if you have multiple accounts, but since my accounts often send files related to a single company, I can save sorting time by making these directories in advance and saving the files there.

2. Open your Sent folder, and select the first folder inside it. Turn off Threading so you can see every single email in it, and Select All, then File -> Save Attachments. Select the relevant directory to save your attachments in, and they’ll be saved in there. This step may take a little while and jack up CPU load.

3. With all your messages still selected, select Message -> Remove Attachments.

4. Select Mailbox -> Rebuild.

5. Repeat steps 2-4 with the next mailbox until you have none left.

6. If you just want to get that junk off your hard drive, burn all those attachments to CD and date it, then toss it in the pile of backup CDs full of random junk that aren’t useful and you’ll never use again. Or you can sort out the attachments, delete the ones you’ll no longer need, and safely archive the stuff that might be useful in the future.

You can, of course, do this on any other folder that you have mail in, including a Smart Mailbox — so yes, you can make a Smart Mailbox that only includes emails that have attachments, both incoming and outgoing, and simply save and delete the attachments from there. I tried this for all my incoming attachments, and it took roughly forever, but then again, I did have over three years of attachments built up, and I do find recent attachments to be useful when they’re in-line with the message, so you may want to set it up a smart folder that shows all messages with attachments that are older than, say, 90 days, and then archive and delete those, keeping attachments newer than 90 days in with your messages.

BTW, Mail helpfully adds a notice like “[The attachment file.pdf has been manually removed]” to each message you remove an attachment from, so if you need it to hunt it down at a later date, you at least know what you’re looking for.

Technorati Tags: tiger, mail.app, apple mail, email

Midway City from Spectrum Games & Z-Man Games is one of the projects I worked on this summer, and after an odd delay where it seemed to sit at the printers while they did rain dances or something else that was time consuming but had nothing to do with getting the book printed, it’s been printed and shipped and it should be arriving in game stores late this week or early next week.

In the far future, rich eccentric Clayton Douglas creates a distant planetary colony using elements of technology and architecture from 1920s through 1940s America. Decades of increasingly corrupt and ineffectual Mayors follow Douglas’ death, eventually culminating in the administration of the tyrannical Mayor Hoodler. Hoodler creates an oppressive police state designed to ruthlessly control society, forcing total conformity to Douglas’ original vision. The characters exist in this dystopia amidst cybernetic detectives, mutant mobsters, alien-touched drug lords, vat-bred blue-collar workers, and human hybrids that can see into an alternate dimension known only as the Jade.

The Golden Years are over. Welcome to Midway City, Jack.

Since it’s been finished for awhile, the PDF has been sent around and a few reviews are already available, all on RPG.net so they use the Style/Substance scale:

• Daniel Bayn’s Review — 5/4
• Sean Posey’s Review — 4/5
• Jim Moreland’s Review — 5/4

The website also hosts some preview and source material, most importantly the Quickstart Adventure, which includes basic rules to play a 4 player + GM adventure. There’s also a World Preview and a System Preview. Plus character sheets in the fancy and plain variety.

[Alternate Title: Fixing iChat when Video Breaks]

The Setup: My Dual 2GHZ G5, Master, running OSX 10.4.2. Upon installing the latest point revisions of Quicktime and iTunes, iChat 3.1 is no longer able to use my iSight for video, even though the microphone on it works just fine. I can’t initiate video chats and nobody can initiate a video chat with me. This applies to both 1 or 2 way chats. An upgrade to 10.4.3 didn’t fix this problem, and it didn’t bring me a pony, either.

The Fix: Insert my Tiger CD and reinstall iChat 3.0 overtop iChat 3.1. Instructions Here. Delete all my iChat preference files. Install or re-install the 10.4.3 Combo Update. The Combo Update is a fat-bottomed gal — over 100MB — so you should probably have coffee ready. Reboot. Re-configure iChat with your preferences. Find that hot userpic you use that looks nothing like you really do and put it back into your profile.

The End Result: You should be fixed. Err, you should have working video in iChat again. Maybe you should be fixed, too, but that’s not my call to make.

A side note: I have no conclusive proof that it was the installs of Quicktime or iTunes that broke iChat video for me, but it’s the only logical conclusion I could come to.

Technorati Tags: tiger, ichat, isight, 10.4.3

The Print on Demand version of Beyond the Storm: Shadows of the Big Easy is now out. It’s $19.99, and all proceeds [beyond expenses that have to go to LuLu for using their service] go to the Red Cross for Hurricane Katrina disaster relief. A PDF version is also available for $10.

Beyond the Storm: Shadows of the Big Easy is a collection of short stories, essays, art and role-playing game materials inspired by the culture, landscape, and city of New Orleans. With contributions from three continents and from across the spectrum of role-playing, all the proceeds from the sale of the book will go to support Katrina Disaster Relief. Join the authors and artists as they explore the Big Easy as it could have been and how it might be…

Beyond the Storm features contributors from a bunch of industry all-stars and some that will be, including some short stories, material suitable for dropping into superhero and horror games [including HERO and M&M stats], a complete adventure for Shadowrun, Fourth Edition, and several complete RPGs – some experimental, some more conventional. All wrapped around the theme of New Orleans.

Complete contributor list: Aaron Acevedo, Aaron Axelsen, Scott Bennie, Jason L Blair, Leanne Buckley, Heather “Squish” Cornelius, William Edmonds, Crazy Elf, Matt Forbeck, Caz Granberg, Seth Johnson, Adam Jury, Mischa Damon Krilov, Lindsay Labanca, Mur Lafferty, Jason Mical, Veronica Pare, Jeff Preston, Mikko Rautalahti, Sean Riley, S. John Ross, Janice M. Sellers, Angi Shearstone, Geoff Skellams, Adam Tinworth, Ursula Vernon, David ‘Doc Blue’ Wendt, Stacy S. (Niedecker) Wendt, Michael Wendt, and Brook Willeford.

Ninjalicious, best known for his work on the urban exploration ‘zine Infiltration has passed away at the age of 31. Just before passing, he completed work on Access All Areas, a 350 page book on urban exploration. If you’re interested in urban exploration — or think it may be useful for your Shadowrun campaign — check it out. The entire back-run of Infiltration is also available at a discounted price.

The Ennie nominations are now online.

Very pleased to see Dreaming Cities [which I art directed] nominated for Best Interior Art, and it’s also good to see Authority and Ex Machina nominated for Best Cover Art, plus a best Production Values for Authority.

Some other cool stuff I like was nominated, too — d20SRD.org for Best Fan Site, Vampire: TR for Best Interior Art, Burning Wheel for Best Rules, and World of Darkness Core Book for Best Writing. All good stuff.

Voting is here.

Dear Apple,

I don’t have time to install 10.4.2 today, but I would like to thank you in advance:

If iChat is logged in to your AIM account in Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.4.1, logging in to the same account on a different computer disconnects the Tiger computer without warning—this update adds a preference choice to iChat to avoid this, if desired.

Woo!

Full 10.4.2 Update Details

love,
Adam

Dear Reader[s],

What can I say? Busier than hell!

cheers,
Adam

As a brief followup to my initial impressions on Tiger:

• They’ve added a dimensions field to the preview pane, which is something I wanted under 10.3. Unfortunately it doesn’t show the resolution of the image.
• I’ve messed around with how I invoke Dashboard — now I use the bottom-left corner as the “Active Corner”, combined with the shift key. It works much more nicely and “flows” more easily than a keyboard shortcut.
• I’ve used Spotlight a little bit more, and it’s certainly faster and more configurable than the old Find method in the Finder. Why, for the love of all that is holy, is the 10.3 Find window not resizable? If you have more than a half-dozen entries in the “Search in Specific Places” menu, you get a scroll bar, with no way to make the window bigger. Ridiculous!