On my PowerBook I run quite a few sharing services, things like Web Sharing, Bonjour for file sharing and Screen Sharing. But the thing is, I only need these services running when I am at home; I’d rather not “publish” theses services when I am surfing at my local Internet cafe.

I’d also like to enable some sort of password protection for when I walk away from my PowerBook momentarily.

Enter MarcoPolo

MarcoPolo lets you switch your Mac between locations; Which it can do automatically or you can manually switch it. This means that when I am at home, I can switch to my “Home” location profile have any password protection disabled and all my services flipped on. When I am at a cafe, I can switch to my “Public” profile I can enable a screensaver password protection and have all my services flipped off.

Rules enable automatic switching between locations.

The only problem I found with MarcoPolo was the poor help documentation and poor verbage within the app itself. So, here is…

How to use MarcoPolo to enable a screensaver password

Once downloaded and installed, click the compass icon on the menu bar and select “Preferences…”.

1. Click the context tab and then the plus symbol and add a profile named “Public”.

2. Click the actions tab, then the plus symbol and select “Add ScreenSaver Password Action…” and enter info as below:

3. You will now want to create another “Add ScreenSaver Password Action…”, but with the context set to “Automatic” that is set to disable the screensaver password so you don’t have the password prompt when at home.

That’s it. Now when you flip to your “Public” location there will be a password that flips on when your screensaver kicks in.

There are actually quite a few actions your Mac can take, based on your location:

• Setting your default printer
• Changing your desktop background
• Enable or disable particular firewall rules
• Setting iChat status message
• Setting the default IMAP or SMTP server for Mail.app
• Mounting network shares (smb://, afp://, etc.)
• Muting or Unmuting system audio
• Changing OS X network location
• Opening a file (an application, a document, etc.)
• Quit an application
• Enabling or disabling screen saver password
• Start/stop screen saver
• Changing screen saver idle timeout
• Running a shell script (or any other kind of script, via Platypus)
• Turning on or off Bluetooth
• Turning on or off WiFi (AirPort)
• Establish or disconnect VPN

You can also set you Mac to automatically switch between locations automatically based on quite a few rules

• Visible WiFi networks
• Current Audio Output device (headphones/internal speakers)
• Discoverable Bluetooth devices
• Advertised Bonjour (Zeroconf) services
• Attached FireWire devices
• Assigned IP addresses
• Ambient Light level
• Attached Monitors
• Active Network Links
• Power source (power adapter/battery)
• Running Applications
• Current Time Of Day
• Attached USB devices

You can even run AppleScript or shell script actions when switching between locations…

Very cool!

Have an EML file that you want to import into your Outlook mailbox? No problem.

It’s real easy and everything you need is already built into all versions of Windows. Here’s how:

1. Open the folder with the EML file in it. Set aside.
2. Open Outlook Express. (Does not need to be a “real” account so if you get any prompts, just fill it with some bogus info. Consequentially, if Outlook Express does have emails in the inbox, you will need to remove them if you do not want them added to Outlook.)
3. Drag the EML messages in question over into the Inbox of Outlook Express. (Hint: If you want any of the messages to be marked as “un-read” within Outlook you will need to mark them as “un-read” within Outlook Express)
4. Open Outlook, select File > Import > Import Internet Mail and Addresses > Select Outlook Express 4.x, 5.x, 6.x (Remove Check marks from Address Book and Rules) > Click OK (Not Save in Inbox)

Done.

Or, how to migrate your Outlook 2003 mailbox, contacts and calendar items to Mac OS X.

1. Do yourself a favor, spent $10, save your self hours and hours of extra work, and buy Little Machine’s Outlook-to-Mac (O2M). It will convert your outlook profile/.PST to Mac friendly standards perfectly. Download and install.

2. From you PC with your Outlook 2003 profile open, run O2M and follow the prompts, asking you nicely to place a check mark next which folders you want to convert. YES. This does include sub-folders, sent items, drafts, etc. You can also select your contacts and you calendar for conversion as well.

3. Copy the folders created by O2M to a thumb drive or maybe a CD and then copy them on to your Mac OS X machine.

4. From your Mac you can now go through each app, mail, address book and ical, and import your stuff. File > Import > Mailboxes, vCards or iCal file.

Done.

UPDATE (25 August 2010): Please note that this post is well over 2 years old and as Tim pointed out in the comments below, this method may not be the best solution for restoring emails. According to his restore efforts, changes where made to the timestamp from the date in which they were received to the date in which they were restored. I have not tested this myself.
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The hard drive on my PowerBook completely died the other day, but I luckily had been running Time Machine backups since upgrading to Leopard. (I wasn’t all that pissed off seeing as I was eager for an excuse to replace my wimpy 40Gb hard drive with a new 160Gb drive). I fumbled a bit, looking for a specific Apple Mail restore tool. I knew where all my emails lived, but I thought that Apple would have a specific means for restoring apps like Mail. So I created this mini-tutorial on how to restore Apple Mail from Time Machine simply because I could not find this method elsewhere.

Supposedly, If you attach your Time Machine backup drive, open Apple Mail then launch the Time Machine application, you are presented with historical views of Apple Mail. This did not work for me, the historical views were just blank, so the steps below do not take this approach.

Restoring Your Emails from a Time Machine Backup

Warning: If you have already setup Apple Mail with your accounts and preferences, this will negate ALL your doings.

Note: This process will restore all your email accounts, preferences, passwords, smart mailboxes, etc.

The How-To

1. Before loading Time Machine, open the Finder and navigate to Home Folder (username) -> Library. In there will be a folder name “Mail”. Rename it to “Mail (default)” (Select the folder then hit the Return key to rename).
2. Mount your Time Machine Backup Drive (ahem, plug it in).
3. Control + Click the Time Machine Application and chose “Browse Other Time Machine disks…”. This, of course, brings up the historical view of your backups.
4. Go back to your most recent backup (2nd window back) and navigate to Home Folder (username) -> Library. Select the “Mail” folder and click the restore button (bottom right).
5. Once the restore is completed, open Apple Mail and you will be presented with an import wizard (below). Simply follow through the prompts and you will be good to go.

That’s it!

UPDATE (20-January-2009): After step 4., also restore ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist

Thanks Jon C.

If you have multiple mail accounts, you should also restore the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist file as well. This will ensure all of your account settings are imported. – Jon C.

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