James' Ubiquitous Blog

This all came about because of work. I got a call from a client that we regularly work with asking if it's possible to consolidate his some 20 email accounts into one of his Google Apps accounts (this also works with regular Gmail accounts too) while still being able to reply and send from the individual addresses. As it turns out this can be quite tricky but I managed to find an article that outlined the steps perfectly, or so I thought to begin with. 

Firstly, a very quick word on my clients set up so far. With his multple accounts he has set them to forward all messages received to his one Google Apps account. I haven't had any experience with using Google's "Mail Fetcher" so I can't speak to how this will work with that system. I've just tested Gmail/Google Apps' "Mail Fetcher" and it works a ok as well.

The original article is by Nick Cernis on his website Modern Nerd. Let me just say that you should first head over to the article, this is the article, and read it because it's all layed out nice and neatly with pretty screenshots. Once you're done there, come back here and I'll explain the rest. I'll preface the article by saying that on your iOS device you'll need to set up your Gmail/Google Apps account using IMAP and not Exchange. It might be an idea to set up your Mail with IMAP and you Contacts & Calendars with Exchange if you need them.

Are you back? Good, let's procede.

Once you've added the addition addresses into your Mail Settings you might need to restart your device. Now when you go to reply or send a message if you tap on the "From:" field you will be presented with a list of email addresses to send messages from.

At this stage if you tried to send an email from one of these additional address they would still be received on the other end as originating from your master Gmail/Google Apps account. This is where the fun part comes in. I will say that I'm not quite sure why or how this works, but it does :).

Log into your Gmail/Google Apps account, the one that you're using as the catch all account, and procede to Settings -> Accounts. There you will see an option to "Send mail as:". What you need to do is to add in all the addition email accounts that you wish to send email messages from. Here is the relevant Google Help article which explains all the ins and outs of adding multiple "Send mail as:" addresses. If you're sending mail on behalf of someone else it might also pay to read this Google Help article on treating addresses as aliases or not. I chose to add in each additional email accounts own SMTP server and this seems to be working perfectly. You will be sent an email to each of the accounts that you add as confirmation that you actually have the rights to access it.

Once that is all done, when you try to send an email from one of these additonal accounts, it will show up correctly in their inbox as coming from the correct account.

As an added bonus, because all those other accounts are forwarding their messages into the one Gmail/Google Apps account, when you hit reply, Mail automatically fills in the correct "From:" address, just like if you had previously set up multiple inboxes on your device.

If you would like to set this up in Mail.app on your Mac, the process is just as simple. Open up your account settings and add the additional emails separated by commas in the "Email Address:" section.

If this isn't working for you feel free to leave a comment or send me an email :).

As always, hope this helps you.

What happend this morning when I woke up to read my twitter feed? I saw a nice little note from @UseClear saying "Hello New Zealand and Australia :-)". What could this mean? Well, it meant that Clear, the todo app that has had quite a bit of hype surrounding it, had launched.

After using it most of the morning I can say that the video does not do it justice and you need to download it and try it for yourself. Playing with the app on an iPhone 4S is very quick, I mean REALLY REALLY REALLY quick. Adding tasks is a cinch. Just pull down from the top of the screen and start typing. When you check an item off your list you are rewarded with a chime and subtle vibration, both of which can be changed in the settings. 

I'm not going to say anything further about Clear or all the tips & tricks of using it because it is way too much fun finding them out for yourself and I'm sure someone else will do a nice indepth review later today. All I can say is that you should turn your volume up while playing around with it. You'll thank me later :)

Depending on which country you are in it may or may not be available now. Check it out here!

Bonus tip - If you have Tweetbot installed you will get an extra theme :D

To capture and keep track of all my notes I uses nvALT on the Mac and Notesy on my iPhone and iPad. I sync these two using Dropbox and it only takes a couple of minutes to set up. Before discovering Notesy I used Simplenote on iOS and syncronised nvALT with that but much prefer my current setup. Firstly I opened up the preferences of nvALT, turned off the Syncronization with Simple note and pointed it to read notes from a folder that I'd created on Dropbox.

I then changed nvALT to store the notes as plain text files rather than a single database so that Notesy could read it. Depending on your personal preferences you can choose to store your notes as rich text or even HTML formatted documents but I don't really have a need for this as I am choosing to store them all as markdown documents which gives me the ability to have formatting if I need it but also lets me read them on anything that can view plain text files.

Depending on how you want to work with your notes you can choose a variety of formats that nvALT can save as. Under the Notes Storage section click the blank space to the left of the "-" and you can add in the format that you would like to save notes as by default. 

Finally I set up Notesy on my iOS device which requires me to select the Dropbox folder that I am storing my notes in and it will go through and download them to the device. On another note, Notesy will also handle folders within the main note folder and also handles symbolic links quite well.

To change the default format that Notey saves as, go to the advanced settings and you will find the option there. 

Enjoy!

If you're wanting to record audio on your Mac be it in a video or just straight audio and are trying to figure out why the quality may still be lacking after plugging in an external microphone, take a quick detour into your System Preferences and click onto the Sound Preference Pane. Then click on Input and select the source that you want to record from, in my case a Samson C01U USB microphone. Here you can also adjust the audio levels and make sure that everything is working.

Pretty simply tip here, all you need to do is edit a couple of config files and you're good to go. You'll want to shutdown Sick Beard before you do this as otherwise the changes don't hold. Navigate to wherever you've got Sick Beard installed on your computer and open up the config.ini file located at /Sick\ Beard/config.ini

On about line 121 you'll find the Twitter section. What you want to change is the option marked twitter_prefix. I've changed mine to "Hey @smithjw" so that every time Sick Beard sends a notification on Twitter it will @ reply me from the account that I've set up for my server @_SteveSmith_

If you also want to change what Sick Beard says when it notifies you when it starts and completes files open up common.py located in  /Sick\ Beard/sickbeard/common.py. Down on line 42 you can set the text that you would like to be displayed.

Enjoy!