First, they don’t allow passwords longer than 8 characters. A financial site limiting password length? Smart. Not to worry, there’s sound reasoning for that:

The length of the password is limited to 8 characters to reduce keyboard contact. Some softwares can decipher a password based on the information of “most common keys pressed”.

Therefore, lesser keys punched in a given frame of time lessen the possibility of the password being cracked.

Phew! I was worried for a minute, there. Sounds like they’ve got some smart folks coding this stuff up.

The worst part, though, is how they enforce that unnecessary length-limit. While they could have set the maxlength property on the password field to 8 characters and called it a day, they instead left it set at an appropriate 32 characters and implemented the following obnoxious javascript check:

1. On key press, check password length
   
2. If password length > 8, show a panel scolding the user for typing more than 8 characters.
   
3. Clear password box.

   

Seriously, Amex?

Looks normal and ok, right? Auto detect those settings. Why not?

Yesterday, I was shocked to find out that if you actually specify your broadband type and line settings—mine were DSL and RJ-11, respectively—the difference you will notice in your U-verse DSL speed will make your jaw drop. I discovered this little tidbit while on the line to AT&T’s surprisingly awesome technical support, and it makes me wonder how many people out there are silently dissatisfied with their AT&T U-verse performance, when a solution is so close to home. Honestly, with this much of a performance boost, why didn’t the AT&T installer set up the router this way to begin with?

I had no idea that having the hardware auto-detect the line connections would impact performance so negatively. Consider me informed.

⇧⎇ + T gets me this:

I select the project I want to launch, and I’m on my way.

First create a saved spotlight search. Open up a finder window, and type a search into the search box to get additional search criteria, and save the search after you’ve filled in the criteria you want. My search looked like this:

You might have to restart QuickSilver in order to get that saved search to show up, but after you do you should be able to type in the name of that saved search in QuickSilver to retrieve it. Now you just need to create a trigger to pull that up, and you’ll be all set.

Select Triggers under the QuickSilver menu, and add a new HotKey command. Mine looks like this:

Save it, assign the shortcut you want to it, and you’ll be launching documents in fewer clicks than before.

Alignment on the Mac: WTF? The checkbox and star line up, but past that, things are off kilter.

This is annoying, to me.

My requirements:

• Only emails that I deem worthy to arrive in my inbox buzz my blackberry.
• I have access to the other emails, if need-be.
• When I send or reply to a message, it shows in GMail, keeping conversations intact, and providing an archive for all sent mail.

Achieving #2 is easy — you get the GMail application. While I’d prefer not to use it alone, it serves this purpose quite well. I can search all of my messages, and dig around my auto-filtered mail, if I should choose.

#1 and #3 seem straight forward, but require a few key tricks.

First, set up a blackberry email address. You know, something like yourname@mycingular.blackberry.net. In it, put your reply-to address as something you’d like to actually be contacted at. Either your plain ol’ gmail account, or an alias that forwards to it. For me, I chose the latter. Now set Auto BCC to your gmail account. This is key for keeping your conversations in tact. So it should look like:

Email Account: Blackberry
Your Name: Joe Mama
Email: joemama@mycingular.blackberry.net
Reply To: joe@joemama.com
AutoBC.C: joemama@gmail.com

Now we need GMail to forward you all mail that gets to your inbox, unless it’s from you. You can do this by creating a filter, like so:

“Matches: in:inbox -{from:joe@joemama.com}”
Do this: Forward to joemama@mycingular.blackberry.net

Now we need to make sure any email that is from you gets archived and doesn’t arrive in your inbox. We can make this happen by creating one more filter, like so:

Matches: from:(joe@joemama.com) in:inbox
Do this: Skip Inbox

And that’s it! This setup works perfectly for me. It took lots of experimenting to finally figure out a really good solution, but this seems to be it. I hope the next version of BIS allows you to choose one email account to send all email through, which would eliminate the need for the AutoBCC trick.