There's a better way to access your emails from everywhere - use IMAP

If you haven't heard yet, IMAP is the best method for accessing and organizing your email.

Here's why:

• You can access and modify your email from web, phone or local computer applications and have the changes synced automatically.
• It's faster and more efficient to access emails and email headers.
• Folders are synced between the server and all clients.
• Move an email to a folder and it gets moved everywhere.
• Most popular email clients support IMAP.
• Emails can be copied between server and locally very easily using drag and drop (even large volumes).

These reasons were enough to convince me. So turn off your POP3 access and convert to IMAP. I use gmail as my mail client, but yahoo supports IMAP as well. The iPhone, Android and Blackberry use IMAP. Mail.app, Outlook and Thunderbird all support IMAP too so there's no excuse. And you can connect to your IMAP account and copy your existing POP3 emails over.

Do it, do it now. Or when you've got a few hours to kill. You won't regret it.

iPhone apps worth looking at

These apps have worked their way into my life and are worth checking out.

Everyday or frequently:

Safari, Tweetie 2, Now Playing, Amazon.com, YoContacts, iTalk, IMDB, Squarespace, Analytics, Tumblr, Mint, Kindle, Google, RedLaser, AroundMe, Files, Labyrinth 2, Dragon's Lair, TheDeep, Kayak, Zenbe, Facebook, Todo

Sometimes but good:

1Password, BeejiveIM, Darkroom, Driver, Flickr, GPS Drive, GoodReader, Google Earth, Gowalla, Instapaper, Lose It!, Matches, NOVA, OpenTable, PAC-MAN, Pandora, Postman, Pzizz Relax, Remote, Rotton Tomatoes, Shazam, Skype, Taxi Magic, Trails, TripIt, Yelp, Zipcar, iTimeLapse, iWant

Upgrading? Archive your old iPhone backup folders and save space

I upgraded my old iPhone 3G to a 3GS and lost about 8 gig of disk space. If you have successfully upgraded your iPhone to a new version the old backups are retained here:

$HOME/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup

Look at in Finder, sort by date and then just move those folders to an external backup drive you aren't using any more. Note, you will definitely want to keep the most recent folder as that is the active backup of your iPhone. This worked for my setup, but please use caution cause these are your iPhone backups - move, don't delete!

It's worth it to get 8 gig or so back.

Finding open files on a Mac: lsof

If you want a way to find open files on a Mac, you can use the "lsof" command at the terminal (located: /usr/sbin/lsof). Open Terminal (under Applications | Utilities) and type:

lsof | more

This will list all open files and be a long list. To restrict the list, say, to all files on mounted volumes, use grep:

lsof | grep "Volumes"

I wanted an alternative to the useful windows "handle" command-line utility to locate open file handles. The new Snow Leopard finder tells you what program has open files on a mounted volume, but earlier versions of Mac OS/X won't.

The application name is the first item in the list and the file is the last.