Pesches Schlauch

Many years after most users I have jumped on the iCal train too. I’ve dumped my very old Palm and started using iCal as my main calendar.

But iCal itself is not good enough:

• it doesn’t know how to calculate Easter. For this I have subscribed (free!) to project24, which is very nice for Swiss holidays (for German and Austrian ones too).
• it doesn’t show the week number. project24 comes to the rescue again.
• I want to print/export real lists, not just empty boxes with a date. Some calenders have less than one event per week and I wanted a list with all events. All iCal does is filling pages with empty days and once in a while a day with an event.
  Clay Spinuzzi mentions the Ruby iCal module, which did the trick for me.

What I haven’t got working yet: iSync limits the calendar period that is copied to my mobile to 8 weeks and I haven’t found any hidden plist entry or any other hack to fix that.

I just installed Postfix Enabler to be able to send my emails through a SMTP server on my own powerbook. I didn’t want the hassle to configure the postfix server myself, so I went for a software doing it the Macintosh way.

The default configuration was a little too open for my taste. I want others (that is me on the PC nearby) to use the postfix server only if they know a password. Using the Postfix Enabler configuration tab to setup password authentication still lets anybody on the same subnet send mail without a password.

Bernard Teo (the author of Postfix Enabler) was very helpful and immediately answered my request: enter this line in the Custom Postfix Settings field:

smtpd_recipient_restrictions=permit_sasl_authenticated, reject_unauth_destination

There is only one downside using your own SMTP server: depending on where you are linked to the internet, your IP address might raise suspicion with spam filters, thanks to the many worms using any “available” PC as spam relay.