The MacBook Air
Wow, did I make a good choice.
In late August I upgraded from my trusty 15″ MacBook Pro (late 2008) to a 11″ MacBook Air (mid-2011). I was pretty nervous about the switch. I’ve been the productive owner of a 17″ Power Book so this represented a fundamental change.
ExpanDrive allows Mac users to mount remote storage as though it was local. While this alone isn’t rocket science, the variety of supported remote storages and the reliability of the software have made it a nearly indispensable tool.
I routinely use it to mount:
ExpanDrive relies on the MacFUSE kernel extension. MacFUSE is a Mac variant of the FUSE which allows programmers to implement complete filesystems as a user-space (i.e., not in the operating system kernel) application. This is a huge advantage the technical bits of which are beyond the scope of this post. Curious technical readers should check out the FUSE article at Wikipedia.
As a total bonus ExpanDrive supports and preserves OpenMeta metadata on the ssh and Amazon S3 volumes I’ve used. I’ll be writing another post on OpenMeta soon. Until then go get yourself a copy of ExpanDrive!
Every now and again you find a little piece of software that, in hindsight, you wonder how you lived without. A while ago I found just such a piece of software, MsgFiler. The developer recently released an upgrade exclusively through the Apple App Store which provoked me to purchase the upgrade and renew my appreciation for what I begun to think was a feature built-in to Apple Mail!
MsgFiler makes filing email messages as efficient as possible.
A few things make this a great match for me:
MsgFiler is invoked with a (configurable) hotkey (I used the suggested Apple-9 combination). You then get a dialog box for searching your folders (using an “incremental search” interface). When the search has narrowed your list you press your down arrow to drop into the selection box. Select the destination folder and press Enter. Message(s) is/are filed. Done. You can select multiple messages and file them. You can Copy messages (i.e., as opposed to moving them).
Highly recommended!
Sometimes it’s the small things that make a difference. In this case a friend of mine referred me to a very clever little utility called Caffeine. From the product’s webpage:
Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Hold down the Command key while clicking to show the menu.
Run and get some.
