TheNitai

I am a huge fan of making my life “simple” and not complicated. After all, life around us is already complicated with all that is going on, so why bother taking it home, right?

That is also one of the reasons, why I use Apple Hardware and, to some extend, Apple Software. Not that I don’t know how to work with Linux or Windows, but Apple has one thing going for them, that is “It simply works”. That is true when it comes down to their Hardware, Operating System and Phone. You could argue, that this and that feature is not there and Apple is mediocre in their feature set (thought, this is mainly true), but I think because their not overloaded with features they have less to worry about and again it boils down that “it simply works”.

In that regard, I set out the other day to get my sound and TV setup right in my house. Something which I thought will take a long time, took merely minutes to get everything up and running. I took a new Mac Mini as the center of my “Hub”, meaning I have iTunes running on it, got it connected to my Apple Airport Extreme (with 2 Airport Express devices on other levels in the house) and have my Stereo connected to another Airport Express device. Then I also hooked up the Mac Mini to my TV Set.

Now, the best part of this setup is that I can control iTunes and the Mac Mini from everywhere in my house with my MacBook Pro, or from my wife’s MacBook or from my iPhone. Yes, iPhone!

Did you know that Apple has a great little iPhone app that allows you to control iTunes directly from your iPhone? I didn’t and so I as totally blown away when I found this little gem of software, called “Remote“. Once installed, again it took a minute to install and setup, you can control iTunes and Apple TV right there from your iPhone.

I remember when I was invited by Apple to come over to a MacWorld keynote and I saw Steve Jobs talking on the Apple Hub idea. His vision was that Apple devices become the Hub, the center of your life. Well, I have to say that they achieved it. Well done and thank you.

Usually, I’m a happy camper with my MacOS X and with the built in applications (not that I use them a lot, but when I do I like how well they are built and “feel”). The only application I use a lot of the built in applications is Apple Mail.

Lately, Apple Mail, has been acting up a lot. As such, that when it tried to sync with my mail server it just hang up and sucked in all available CPU and my MacBook was heating up like anything. The only remedy was to Force Quit Apple Mail (if you don’t know, just press the “Apple Key (cmd) & Alt (option) & Esc and you get a handy dialog to force quit any running application).

How I got my Apple Mail running healthy again? Here are the following steps I did;

1. Repair Permissions
   Actually, repairing permission should be done at least once a month. It just keeps your system healthy and rules out any problems. What “Repair Permissions” does, is to simply correct all permissions on files that system owns and needs to run smoothly. To repair permissions lunch the Disk Utility application, select your startup disk and click on “Repair Permissions”.
2. Remove the cache files of Apple Mail
   If you see a problem with syncing and updating the cache directory within Mail it could be that the cache files are corrupt. Go to your home Library folder, then to the Mail folder and remove the “DefaultCounts”, “Envelope Index” and the “LSMMap” files. Some have reported that removing the “MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded3″ as well. So you will have to experiment a bit.

The next time you start up Apple Mail it should ask you to reimport all messages and it will rebuilt the index. Hopefully, you are back up and all is well.