teravoxel

For some reason all of Google’s documention on how to change your Google Mail Exchange (Sync) settings say to visit http://m.google.com/sync if you want to change your sync settings. You’ll notice this will redirect you to their general help site, which doesn’t provide any helpful settings.

The correct place to go is http://m.google.com/sync/settings/

This took me a little while to figure out, so there ya go…

There is a lot of incorrect documentation floating around about this. Here is the status of border-radius property support as of today.

Note: This includes all the vendor prefixes as well.

Gmail: Yes (Elsewhere you will see documentation denying this. Perhaps Google changed this recently?)
Outlook.com: Yes
Outlook for Mac: Yes
Apple Mail (Mac and iOS): Yes
Yahoo web mail: No
Outlook for Windows (all versions): No

In non-supported clients, your rounded rectangles and squares will simply be sharp-edged rectangles and squares. Not the end of the world.

The lack of consistency among Outlook versions (Windows vs Mac vs web) is interesting. Outlook for Windows uses the Microsoft Word HTML renderer which is horrible, so I’m glad to see that development decision didn’t make it over to the Mac or web team.

And of course the Apple Mail clients work here. Apple uses their standard WebKit rendering engine for email markup and its so nice — if your newsletter looks good on Safari you can bet it will look good when emailed to Apple’s mail clients.

I’ve replaced the logo and a few other images with “retina” quality resolution versions on qualifying devices.

Currently this is implemented by uploading an asset with twice the needed resolution and then using the CSS height: XXXpx; width: YYYpx; tag to set them at exactly 50% their actual resolution. Hi-DPI devices will fill in the space with the extra pixels their screens allow.

Downside: I realize this is a somewhat inefficient method as far as bandwidth goes and doesn’t scale, but the file sizes are fairly small for just the logo and few other images in this case.

View this site on your 2x DPI device (those with “Retina display” in marketing-speak), and the logo should look nice and sharp.

My custom WordPress theme is live as of a minute ago, at last freed from the confines of localhost! It will always be a work in progress, but for the next few days especially…

Please pardon the dust (CSS errors)!

A unfortunate design choice by Google in their Gmail mobile application which has not been noted elsewhere:

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Here’s a fix for when HTML emails sent to Google Mail accounts entirely omit some table cells during rendering. If you’re like me, you were probably tearing your hair out since your HTML/CSS is  100% valid. The table cells are there — they’re just collapsed and need to be forced to show. It’s a strange fix, so the explanation below is a little lengthy. Bear with me…

Example in Gmail:

Example in Outlook:

In gmail, the table cells are collapsed around the text. In Outlook (or Apple Mail, or any other clients really) this is not the case.

When this happens:

It occurs only with table cells that contain no content, or text content that does not fill the entire height of the cell. This is why these top and bottom titlebar cells have disappeared, and the center cell (with the title text) contains less vertical space than expected.

Why this happens:

Gmail will collapse table cells with empty space defined only with height. In this case, we have three cells: the top, middle, bottom. The middle contains text, so it has content, but it is still collapsed around the text. The top and bottom have no content and are completely collapsed as a result.

When Gmail does this, it actually changes the code, so it’s nothing caused by the HTML currently in the template. height is changed to max-height, meaning our 10px height becomes a max-height, and thus is actually 0px (since there is no min-height or height to set a low-end).

Proposed fix:

For these collapsed cells, we can trick gmail into displaying them by using line-height. However line-height will *only* work for them if the cells are given content. A single space works fine here. The space forces the table cells to remain non-collapsed, and the line-height attribute defines how much many vertical pixels to associate with the space. Admittedly, this is awkward, but this is basically a hack in the first place.

If you see this error “files cannot be moved” when partitioning a drive using OS X’s boot camp assistant, here’s the fix:

1. Boot into Single User mode (hold cmd-s on boot)
2. Type the following after all the crazy white text is done loading:
   /sbin/fsck -fy
exit

This works for all modern OS X versions, from my experience.

Previously the only method I knew of was to restore the entire computer via a Time Machine backup, so this saves a solid 4 hours. I hope you find it useful too.

Here’s a problem I’ve encountered at work a few times: You are given a .pages file, but can’t open it because you don’t have iWork’s Pages installed.

What is iWork or Pages?
Apple’s Pages application is part of the iWork software suite for Mac. It is meant to compete with Microsoft Office Word. Pages can open word “.docx or .doc” files, but Word can’t open Pages’ “.pages” files.

How to work around this problem:
Luckily, a PDF of each document is embedded within the file, and we can extract that PDF file with a little work.

From a PC:

Step 1: save the file somewhere on the computer, such as the desktop. In this example, “resume” is the filename, and “.pages” is the file extension.

Step 2: change the file extension from “.pages” to “.zip”. This will cause the icon to change appearance.

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Recently I’ve been having the issue where my PC says “You need to format this drive before you can use it” whenever I plugged in my USB stick.

And when I did click “Format Disk”, it would show up as a 200MB capacity disk! My USB stick is 16GB, so that is definitely not good enough.

The thing that confused me was that I was formatting this USB device as FAT using the Mac OS X Disk Utility, so it should have worked right?… well it turns out there are a few more steps.

Step 1: Open Disk Utility, and select your device on the left hand panel (of course).

Step 2: Under disk utility, you actually have to click the “Partition” section, and then select “1 partition” from the Volume Scheme drop down menu

Step 3: After that, click “Options” and select “Master Boot Record.” Otherwise OS X might use GUID which Windows doesn’t like.

Then you just hit apply, and you’re done with that business. That’s what got my 16GB USB stick to actually show up as a 16GB device under windows.

Note: this guide is for Disk Utility in OS X 10.5 and 10.6. If you’re running 10.4 or earlier you might have to do some exploring on your own

I upgraded Leopard to Snow Leopard a few weeks ago, and it’s been great except my trash would take a friggin’ eternity to empty when I was deleting a lot of stuff. I searched around online for solutions in various forum postings about snow leopard to no avial, thinking I was the victim of some random bug that affected nobody else.

As it turns out, the solution is simple. For whatever reason, “Empty trash securely” had become checked in finder preferences during the snow leopard upgrade-install process, which meant that that finder was secure-erasing everything (even when I clicked “empty trash” as opposed to “empty securely”). All I had to do was uncheck it, and voila! Problem solved!

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