How to get gorgeous new Apple TV screensaver on your Mac

One of the coolest features of the new Apple TV is its absolutely stunning new screensavers, which fly you through some of the most gorgeous locations in the world.
Apple hasn’t announced any plans to bring the screensavers over to the Mac yet, but they’re such a perfect fit that developer John Coates created a new Swift app that lets anyone get the beautiful backdrops on their desktop.
Here’s how to do it:

1. Download Aerial from Github.
2. Open the .zip file and double-click Aerial.saver to install.
3. Go to System Preferences >> Desktop & Screen Saver >> Screen Saver
4. Select Aerial
5. Click Screen Saver Options to customize which scenes Aerial uses.

The app has a couple of nice extras, like Auto Load Latest Aerials to keep you up to date. There’s an option to play a different aerial on each display if you use multiple screens, and you can pick favorites to have only certain aerials play.

Via: GitHub

How to Start the Mac Screen Saver with a Keyboard Shortcut in OS X

Now, after you've installed the new Aerials screensaver, wouldn't it be nice to have a keyboard shortcut to start the screensaver. Though it's possible with hot corners, I prefer keyboard shortcuts.

Part 1: Create a Screen Saver Automator Service for OS X

1. Launch Automator, found in the /Applications/ directory
2. Choose to create a new “Service”

3. Use the search box to find “Start Screen Saver” and drag that into the right side panel
4. Change “Service receives” to “no input”

5. Go to the File menu and choose “Save” naming it something obvious like “Start Screen Saver”

Now that you have created a service that starts the default screen saver, you need to assign a keystroke combination to initiate the service. Be sure to pick a keyboard shortcut that is unique and easy to remember.

Part 2: Set the “Start Screen Saver” Keystroke for Mac OS X

1. Open System Preferences from the  Apple menu
2. Choose the “Keyboard” preference panel then go to the “Shortcuts” tab
3. Select “Services” from the left side menu
4. Locate the newly created “Start Screen Saver” service you made, and click on the ‘add shortcut’ button to set your keyboard shortcut to use – in this example we used  Control + ⌘ Command + Option + ↓ , but you can set whatever you want

5. Exit out of System Preferences and test out your new screen saver keystroke

You can try it out by hitting the set keyboard shortcut sequence, which will now initiate the screen saver immediately

Above instructions are sourced from the below web pages:

• http://www.cultofmac.com/394501/how-to-get-gorgeous-new-apple-tv-screen-savers-on-your-mac/
• http://osxdaily.com/2014/07/10/set-screen-saver-keyboard-shortcut-mac/

Thanks to the original authors

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Import mails from Apple Mail.app to Microsoft Outlook.app

First of all, why I wanted to move from Apple Mail.app to Microsoft Outlook?

Personally I like Apple Mail.app very much for its simplicity and clean UI. But using it for work has some hick-ups:

1. There's at least a minute delay in receiving emails. So when there's a very active conversation happening via email, my response sometimes gets delayed.
2. The main problem is that I had to rely on many other internal portals to a) check for availability and room booking, b) view members of a delivery list, c) view a person's contact details.
3. Also I like the Lync (MS Communicator) integration in Outlook. I can see if a person is available on Lync before I send any email.

Basically I feel Mail.app is efficient only for emails.

Though I've already decided to move to Outlook.app, I couldn't switch immediately because I had to move my seven years of work emails (> 6GB) properly to Outlook before I start using it actively.

I had serious problem importing the native mailbox (.mbox) file format used by Mail.app. There were a lot of work-arounds I found on the web, but nothing worked perfectly for me. Finally I had almost made up my mind to purchase the software emailchemy, which was recommended by many people for this mail migration. But I was a bit hesitant to spend $50 for a software that I would be using only once.

Then the great google guided me to a Microsoft forum where I found a perfect solution for my problem. Here's how I migrated my emails from Mail.app to Outlook.app

Converting the Mail.app's .mbox packs to the .mbox format that's understandable by MS Outlook

• Download a small app called emlxconvert located here: emlx to mbox
• Your Mail.app mbox folders will be in /Users/<your user name>/Library/Mail/V2/Mailboxes
• Go to that directory in Finder and then search for all .emlx files in that directory.
• Select all the .emlx files in that directory and drag them into the emlxconvert window and click 'Save Mbox'
• After choosing a destination for the .mbox file the email messages are saved as a single .mbox file that can now be imported in to Outlook 2011

Now importing the mbox to Outlook

• In Outlook 2011, go 'File' -> Import -> Select 'Contacts and messages from a text file' and click the right arrow at the bottom of the window.
• In the next step, choose 'Import messages from an MBOX-format text file' and click the right arrow at the bottom of the window.
• Now select the mbox file that we earlier saved using emlxconvert and click 'Import'
• Outlook then will import all your old email in to a folder called mbox. You can then rename the folder or move the emails to a different folder.

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Disable Inline Attachment in Mail.app

The Mail.app in Mac, by default, adds the image attachments as inline in the email message. This could be very much annoying, sometimes, when we need to send a bigger sized images as such.

There's no straight way, in settings, to disable this. But we can use command-line for this. Here's the command for it.

Quit your Mail.app before you try this command on Terminal

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -bool yes

If you would like to revert back to inline image attachment

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -bool no

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Spotlight Indexing Search Disabled - Solution

Having changed my office laptop to a MacBook Pro, I noticed that there were quite a lot of options that were disabled for some internal IT reasons. One such feature, which I like and use the most in Mac is the Spotlight feature.

Here's the steps that I followed to enable the feature, without having to reach my very busy IT team.

The first thing to check if SpotLight is enabled is to look at the file /etc/hostconfig

Check if the highlighted property "SPOTLIGHT" is enabled in this file. If not, add it.

 AFPSERVER=-NO-
 AUTHSERVER=-NO-
 TIMESYNC=-NO-
 QTSSERVER=-NO-
 SPOTLIGHT=-YES-

After you have verified the hostconfig, check if the file ".metadata_never_index" is there in the root directory. If the file exist, delete it. This is a ZERO byte file but exist just to disable the index functionality.

d--x--x--x   8 root  wheel          272 Oct  3 07:22 .DocumentRevisions-V100
drwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel           68 Jul 26 02:20 .PKInstallSandboxManager
drwx------   5 root  wheel          170 Oct  1 14:15 .Spotlight-V100
d-wx-wx-wt   3 root  100035085      102 Oct  1 14:23 .Trashes
drwx------   5 root  wheel          170 Oct  1 14:21 .com.apple.NetBootX
----------   1 root  admin            0 Jun 21 03:17 .file
drwx------  27 root  wheel          918 Oct  4 15:15 .fseventsd
-rw-------   1 root  wheel        65536 Oct  1 14:15 .hotfiles.btree
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel            0 Oct  1 15:26 .metadata_never_index
drwxr-xr-x@  2 root  wheel           68 Jun 21 04:13 .vol
drwxrwxr-x+ 51 root  admin         1734 Oct  2 23:02 Applications
drwxr-xr-x+ 63 root  wheel         2142 Oct  3 09:19 Library
drwxr-xr-x@  3 root  wheel          102 Oct  4 09:19 Network
drwxr-xr-x+  4 root  wheel          136 Oct  1 14:48 System
drwxr-xr-x   7 root  admin          238 Oct  2 21:29 Users
drwxrwxrwt@  3 root  admin          102 Oct  4 11:32 Volumes

Just to be on the safer side, I moved the file to my desktop.

 $sudo mv .metadata_never_index ~/Desktop/

Now, having removed all the configurations that blocks indexing, just start the indexing using the below command:

 $sudo mdutil -i on /

That's it, now I could see the Spotlight already started indexing :)

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