Should I dump .Mac for other services that I can get for free?

I just got my email from Apple saying that in 30 days my account will automatically renew. This has been a year of Mac diehards getting a bit testy (and perhaps that number was small, but quite digged). So, should I pay the $99 for the email address (I do really like it: cjudson), the homepage feature (which I use flickr now anyway) and the iDisk space?

I’m having a hard time justifying the money for services that are available for free (or, for a nominal cost for more features).

BTW, the bandwagon to dump all things Apple is not where I am headed; it seems that I use different platforms for different purposes. At home, I will continue to use my Mac (and when the ol’ eMac gives way, we’ll get another); at school, I will continue to endure the silly Dells and their Win XP OS (which works fine for my purposes); I will continue to play with Linux (and the Darwin core in OS X) because I can.

Last long run; First two weeks

In the “catch-up-after-a-few-weeks” department of excuses:

Last week’s 12-miler went fine; did the CR32 to CR11 and back route and the run was nice. No, “oops, I pulled it again” business this time. This week I ran twice: a 3-miler and some Lassos (3 bookended by mile there and back). Tomorrow is 8 miles and I’ll probably play it safe and do the loop once (all flat surfaces).

Today marks the end of the first two weeks of school and thus far there’s nothing to complain too much about. In fact, I’m finding that I thinking of trying some new stuff. First thing is playing with yet another organizational road…this time, I’ve gone with the GTD (Getting things done) crowd. I stumbled across GTD when I found a cool little Unix utility called Remind. The site was 43 Folders and I found the stuff that I was reading hit a chord. (I’m also playing with a shell script called ToDoTxt because I like the idea of stripping back the coding and the GUI and going with pure plain text). I’ll write another post or two regarding how I’m doing my lesson planning this year.

This holiday weekend is about priming and painting the kitchen and grading some summer reading essays. Oh yes, I think I’ll close the pool too. Besides that, Lego time with the boys and Netflix with Lori (we’re working through the Brit comedy, Cold Feet).

BTW, I think I’ll start a myspace account for my newspaper students. More about that later.

Using Pine to read .Mac mail

I’m posting this here because I couldn’t find it else where and it would have been really nice to have the answer pop up in a google search.

So here it is:

When using the text mail program Pine and you have a @mac account, you will not just be able to put in your usual info for set up:

mail server: mail.mac.com

smtp server: smtp.mac.com

(BTW, I got hooked on Pine after reading Dave Taylor’s Learning Unix for Mac OS X Tiger…a very cool book if you want to dabble under the hood of OS X).

Anyway, if you actually follow Pine’s suggestions, you’ll get it right…I didn’t read very well, so for a long time I wasn’t able to send mail.

So here’s how your settings should look like under Config in Pine

smtp-server: smtp.mac.com/user-yourusername/novalidate-cert

inbox-path: {mail.mac.com/user-yourusername/novalidate-cert}Inbox

NOTE: yourusername is your username…the stuff to the left of your @mac.com address. Also, you don’t enter the Inbox stuff as Pine will ask you what the name of your Inbox is after enter the “novalidate-cert” stuff.

And now, you should be able to send (and receive) your .mac mail with Pine. (Note: I’m using Pine 4.64).

technorati tags:pine, osx