My Mac Fixes

Probably because, as I was, you're triggering your cookie Javascript with "onunload" or "onbeforeunload." That won't work on Safari for iPad or iPhone. Modern browsers work differently from older ones -- they want to save your page off-screen, or "cache" it, rather than unload it completely. In some browsers, your use of "onunload" or "onbeforeunload" rules out caching, leading to slower performance for your site. Safari on iOS, on the other hand, caches the page anyway and just ignores your script! The solution is simple. In place of "onunload" or "onbeforeunload," use "onpagehide." That's right, just substitute that one term for either of the other two. Then your script will be triggered whenever the page is unloaded OR just cached. Not only will Safari now write your cookies, but this will speed up navigation back to your page in all other modern browsers! By the same token, you may wan

Apple Mail uses a more restrictive standard than Thunderbird or Postbox do when looking for the start of a new message, so it simply misses many or most of them. On one attempted mailbox import, I saw the message count drop about 95%! The scary part is, if I hadn't checked the count in Postbox against the count in Mail, I might not even have realized I'd lost anything. Eudora Mailbox Cleaner, a commonly recommended solution for importing from Thunderbird to Mail, did exactly the same thing, for the exact same message count. (I ran it on Snow Leopard Server in a virtual machine.) So, how do you import without loss? I'm going to make this very simple for you. Use Weird Kid Software's Emailchemy , a brilliant app for converting from one email format to another. In the Preferences, on the "Standard mbox" tab, select "Relaxed" for "Compliance to mbox standard when reading." I also suggest you choose "UNIX and Mac OS X: LF" for &quo

Instructions for repairing your mailboxes commonly tell you to edit the files in a text editor, and BBEdit is usually recommended for the Mac. Unfortunately, for Thunderbird or Postbox mailboxes, this is about the worst advice you can get. More often than not, merely editing and saving the file in BBEdit will seriously corrupt the mailbox. Why is that? The problem lies in how both the text editor and the email apps work, and in how those ways interact. Thunderbird and Postbox store received email messages with Unix line endings -- "LF" or "line feed" -- as they should. But when you compose a message, those apps create and store it with Windows line endings -- "CRLF" or "carriage return, line feed." So, unless you keep your sent and received messages in separate mailboxes, you get mixed line endings in the same file. (Postbox was built on Thunderbird code, so the similarities should be no surprise.) As the folks at BBEdit explained it to me, s

Update, Feb. 10, 2019—As Anonymous points out in the comments below, you can now delete your Wordpress account here: www.wordpress.com/me/account/close It works! But in case you're still interested, here's my original post: ________________________________________ Well, you can't, but you can nuke them so they're as good as closed. In the spirit of overkill, here's how to do it with Gravatar, which is actually a feature of WordPress. 1. Go to Gravatar and sign in. 2. Delete your image. 3. Find your Gravatar profile, and click "Hide" at the bottom right. 4. Go to WordPress.com and sign in. 5. Click on the personal settings icon at upper right. (It looks like a head and shoulders in a circle.) 6. Go to the Security tab. 7. Under "Connected Applications," remove Gravatar. For your WordPress.com account: 1. Sign in to WordPress.com. 2. Click on "My Site" at upper left and then on "WP Admin" to find t

It's easy to find instructions on the Web for removing Dropbox from a Mac. But they all seem to leave out the crucial first steps -- and without them, you may not be able to remove a file. Here are those steps: 1. With Dropbox running, call up the app's preferences. In version 3, you can find them by clicking on the Dropbox menu bar icon and using the gear menu at lower right. 2. On the General tab, uncheck all the following: "Show desktop notifications." "Start Dropbox on system startup." "Enable Finder integration." 3. Close the preferences and restart your computer. You should now be able to remove any Dropbox file or folder with no trouble. My own way was to use TinkerTool to show all normally invisible files and folders, then to search for "dropbox" with EasyFind and use its contextual menu to "Reveal in Finder." Lesson: Think twice about installing an app that doesn't supply its own uninstaller. (And there

Recently, after updating my Mac from Snow Leopard to Yosemite, I was chagrined to find that Adobe Photoshop's Save for Web -- a feature I rely on heavily -- would not save a file. Every time I tried it, I got the message, "Could not complete this operation. An unknown operating system error has occurred." Scouting around the Web, I found that the common solution was to delete the two Adobe Photoshop Save for Web preference files. Sometimes that worked for people, and sometimes it didn't, and it certainly didn't for me. But digging into my system, I found why: There are three possible locations for Adobe Photoshop Save for Web preference files, not two! And once I knew that, I fixed it easily. So, for a guaranteed fix, close Photoshop and delete all the following files and folders, and any others that look like them -- for different versions or even different Adobe apps. Users/[Username]/Library/Preferences/Adobe Save For Web 13.0 Prefs Users/[Username]