Tagtroubleshooting

Mavericks Gmail Horror

Oh, shiny new Mavericks. Seems okay. Then, you use Mail.app with your Gmail account. You had gone through the list of tweaks that were necessary to make it “just work” up until yesterday. Now, you go about your business dragging messages to their resting places, have a look at what’s in another folder for a moment, and return to your inbox – to find yourself blinking for because there are all those messages you just moved. Hm, some wonky sync, and you do it again. Upon return to your inbox the blink becomes a twitch of annoyance, but a google search provides an irritant balm in the form a TidBits article by Joe Kissell, “Mail in Mavericks Changes the Gmail Equation.” Basically you must expose the All Mail tag in your Gmail account to IMAP (Gmail:Settings:Labels>>All Mail>>Show in IMAP). I share his sentiment:

I find it particularly upsetting that Mail doesn’t tell you about the need to enable All Mail. Mail could pop up a little message saying, “Hey there! I noticed that you have a Gmail account and I’m not seeing All Mail. That’s going to be a problem from now on; here’s how you fix it.” But this is something you just have to work out for yourself — a major architectural change that isn’t even mentioned when you choose Help > What’s New in Mail?, let alone addressed in a helpful error message.

NOTE:  This is not a nice solution and will cause Mail to freak for quite some time, but it settles itself down … eventually … I am told. All your folders will seem to be empty. Have a look at Activity under Window to see all the unnecessary.

UPDATE: This situation has led me to Airmail, and I’m really quite impressed. The beta is free and the full app is in the store for just $1.99. I may just stay with this even when Apple gets around to bandaging themselves.

Snow Leopard Install Failure

After being excited about Snow Leopard for quite some time now and getting it the day after release. I’m pissed off. It just won’t install. I’ve tried for hours on several computers for days and it just hangs. Now reading, I see that dozens upon dozens are having this problem, and it is indeed as I suspected. Faulty duplication. Upon examination of my disk I see that the culprit is the same as all other reports … Mediagate something or other “Recorded in Singapore!” mine is B09 000124, but I’ve seen reports of 000119. I guess I get to make another trip down to Ginza to see if they’ll deign to replace this thing (though I hear from most all that stocks are sold out and in many instances Apple blamed the user in the earliest cases – though have now backed off of that – and just have been saying to keep checking). After all this, the Air has zero OS because, of course, clean install is the best idea if the install DVD does not fail. This “master” DVD even fails verification in Disk Utility! I never thought to check that. URGH!

A Screw Loose

I’ve been having a problem with the page down key on the MacBook Pro. It wouldn’t go down when pressed. I examined it more closely and say something under the key holding it up. I tried tweezers with no luck. I thought it must be a sesame seed or something. I pressed the key some more and it just popped right off revealing a tiny screw. At that point I freaked a bit, not relishing the idea of another trip to the genius bar. Where could that screw have come from? I didn’t think Apple used that in keyboards. To my chagrin it struck me when the side-piece of my glasses fell straight off. I have a habit of laying my computer glasses on the keyboard when I’m not using them and apparently the screw worked it’s way loose just enough and just at the perfect moment to lodge itself under the key. Now I have a lovely ziploc bag containing said key awaiting the time when I can figure how to stick it back on (it’s not like past keyboards I’ve had that just have this circle that the key pops onto – this has a tab and hinges that are tinyest tiny). Going to Yodobashi to get one of those plastic sheets that go over keyboards to prevent further travesties of the mac variety