Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Google Push Mail and default sender address

Google just enabled push email today for the iphone and it's pretty cool. Unfortunately it does not appear to honor the default sender address setting which is useful if you receive to multiple addresses but want to send from a specific one. A search shows other people are encountering this so I thought I'd post a workaround I found: I left the imap account active but went in and turned off its fetch schedule and made sure everything about it was set to manual, etc. I only interact with the imap account, the push one exits only to receive the new mail notifications. It's pretty smooth, although if you leave unread messages when exiting mail, the mail badge will be twice the actual number. It also has the benefit that the imap version actually deletes deleted emails while the sync version moves them into "All Mail"

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Mac Mini HDMI Detection Woes

I have a mac mini as a media player connected via HDMI to my tv. I recently added a cool auto-detecting HDMI switch to the works and everything seemed great, except I'd get no video when switching from one of the other inputs to the mac. If I slept and woke the mac, video would appear, but that was a lame option.
I searched around and found lots of forums where people had similar problems. Some were resorting to buying a $60 "DVI Detective" which sits between the mac and display and tricks the mac so it never sees the display go away.
Aside from blowing another 60 bucks I was bothered by the notion of adding yet another device to the mounting list of boxes and contraptions it seems to take just to watch some tv these days. I decided to try a software approach. The result is a tiny program I've attached (source included) that I call HDMI Reviver. It watches for when the physical display goes away at which point it asks the graphics hardware to check for a new display every 5 seconds. So when the mac is connected to the display or the switch input is set, within 5 seconds the picture returns.
UPDATE 2010/02/23 With feedback from a couple commenters to allow for use on macs with different hardware I modified the program to take the graphic hardware and display device as parameters. You'll need to know a bit about the "ioreg" command though to figure out what those values might be for your hardware. Also, use at your own risk- I can't think of any reason why there would be a problem, but there's no guarantees.

hdmireviver.zip

Q*bert


I wrote Q*bert for the Gameboy Color...can it really be 10 years ago!? Well, here's the link to the pages where I described that endeavor, in case someone finds it interesting.

New 1000Klub

I haven't updated my 1000klub website with new content in just about 10 years. I've wanted to put various things up over the years it was always too much of a hassle to dust of my ancient html skills and edit the site. So now I'm going to try using the blogger interface to allow for faster and easier updating. Hopefully that will inspire me to make better use of my site.