Suddenly, radio is fun again
Jun/090
Rebecca and I took our car to the body shop yesterday morning, and rented a Dodge Caliber. Rebecca noticed a “Sirius” logo near the radio, and wondered if the car really had satellite radio. This morning on the way to work we turned it on to find out.
Yes, our rental car has satellite radio.
This shouldn’t matter much, considering we never—except when I’m driving somewhere alone, like to Scouts—turn on our radio in our own car. This morning, however, we listened to music from the 40s on our rented satellite radio.
Enabling postfix (sendmail) on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
Jun/092
Edited 2009-06-28 to include myhostname information.
I recently migrated off a web server running Ubuntu onto a server running Mac OS X 10.5 (client, not server). Everything has been working except sending email. On Ubuntu, when someone left a comment on my blog, the web server sent me an email. I hadn’t received any email from the server since I moved to OS X. Today I found out why.
Mac OS X 10.5 comes with a mail-sending program called postfix, but it is not turned on by default. Today, while diagnosing the problem, I found an excellent article explaining how to enable postfix on OS X.
If you just want to send all of your outgoing mail to some relay server, like the SMTP server of your Internet service provider, you usually need to have a host name for the computer that is sending the mail. This configuration is for a server that is not being used to receive mail.
Open Terminal and enter the following commands, each on a single line. After the first command you will be prompted for your password. (Oh, you need to be logged on as a user with administrative privileges.)
First, you want to set postfix to run when your computer tries to send mail:
% sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master.plist
% sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master OnDemand -bool true
% sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master.plist
Next, you want to tell postfix what the host name of the computer is:
% sudo postconf -e myhostname=<host-name-of-computer>
Next, tell postfix what SMTP server to use to send email:
% sudo postconf -e relayhost=<your-isp's-smtp-server>
At this point, if postfix tries to send email to someone@<host-name-of-computer>, the email will be delivered locally. If your email for this host name is handled by some other server, tell postfix that this is not the final destination for email sent to that host name:
% sudo postconf -e mydestination=localhost
I used the following specifically for my environment:
% sudo postconf -e myhostname=subtlecoolness.com
% sudo postconf -e relayhost=smtp-server.austin.rr.com
There! You should now be running postfix and your web server will send emails (again)!
Been Busy
Feb/090
My online creative efforts have been directed elsewhere for some time now. I feel a little sad when I think about what this blog once was, and what it has now become.
But I get over that fairly quickly. On to some announcements:
Most of the news about what is going on recently with my wife and me can be found over at our blog, Accio Jacksons!
If you can’t get enough of food and cooking blogs, you should subscribe to My Wife’s Food Blog.
My most recent personal programming project fills my need to be reminded of birthdays in a natural and familiar way: in my feed reader! Check out birthdayfeed for details.
The Texas Hayfield Maze
Oct/080
On Saturday Rebecca and I went to Sweet Berry Farm in Marble Falls, Texas. We got a lift on a hayride to the Texas Maze. This is a huge “hayfield maze” shaped like Texas.
The point of the maze is to go in, find nine points that represent the geographical locations of certain Texas cities, and punch a hole in a card with the hole puncher at each point. If one found every city, one got a free drink when one came out.
We probably spent close to an hour searching for cities, and we came out once to consult the map for a few cities that we couldn’t find at first. Rebecca’s mother Ann called me (probably because Rebecca did not have her phone with her) and asked me where we were.
“We are lost in a giant maze the shape of Texas,” I replied.
With Ann’s well-wishes, we succeeded in the end and Rebecca got her bottle of water and I got my pink lemonade.
This is a fire
Sep/083
Last night was my first camping trip as a Scout leader.
At first I was hesitant to go. I remember camping only reluctantly as a youth. I always preferred a house to a tent. It always rained whenever I camped.
But last night the weather was beautiful and I helped build a fire. After only three hours of the smells and the sounds I wanted to stay, but Rebecca and I already had commitments today so I left early.