October 2019 - Bad Coffee Club

Remove the Sent from my iPhone Email Signature

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone back in 2007, he introduced the device as three things, an iPod, a phone and an internet communicator.

Indeed the iPhone is a more than capable internet communicator. Doing emails on an iPhone is so easy it almost makes work tolerable. Almost.

Did you know though that emails sent from an iPhone could potentially drive someone with OCD crazy?

The problem is, sometimes when an email gets sent from an iPhone with an attachment, say a photo, or a PDF file, to a recipient over a Microsoft Exchange server, the Exchange server converts the text in the email into a separate attachment, naming it something like ATT00001.txt, or ATT00001.htm.

Even if the sender only wanted to send a file using the Mail app and did not type in any text, by default, the email still comes with a signature that Apple very helpfully creates for their users, and that signature gets converted into a separate attachment.

People with OCD will open and look at each and every attachment in an email. If the attachment just says “Sent from my iPhone”, we’ll grind our teeth but we’ll still open it. This is our cross to bear. We also meticulously adjust cards in our wallet until they make perfect sense to us, or nonsense, to normal people.

Want to make things just a bit easier for your email recipients? Delete the “Sent from my iPhone” signature. Here’s how.

Open the Settings app, scroll down and tap Mail, scroll to the bottom and tap Signature, and finally remove everything there.

Your recipients will be thankful, even if they didn’t know.

Do you find this iPhone email tip helpful? Are you suffering from OCD too or do you rather enjoy it? Let us know by dropping us a comment!

How to Extract Images from A .webarchive File Using Terminal

One way to extract content from a .webarchive file is through the Terminal app. The command to use is textutil convert -html.

Saving webpage as a .webarchive file in Safari

The Ariel Atom and Ariel Nomad are unique and beautiful cars. In fact, they are so unique and beautiful I wanted to use images of them for desktop wallpapers.

While there must be other places to look for the images, for me the most obvious choice was Ariel North America’s website. They make the cars, so if anyone’s got great photos it’s them.

A lot of the high-resolution images on the website are available for download and they make for amazing wallpapers too. You just simply need to click on them.

That’s the easy part.

The difficult part is getting those beautiful images the site uses in the banners. You can click on them all you want, but you just don’t get a download or save option.

By now I should mention I was using Safari on my Mac.

First, I tried to save the whole web page in hopes I could somehow maybe get a Zip file with the images in it. However, Safari only allows web pages to be saved in two formats, Page Source and Web Archive. The first one merely saves the source text, while the second one saves the source text as well as the images and other contents. I went with the second format and got a .webarchive file.

Saving Page with Safari Format One: Page Source

Saving Page with Safari Format Two: Web Archive

Now the .webarchive file is not something that you can open using the stock Archive Utility app, or the commonly used third party app “The Unarchiver”.

Also, you might wonder if it helps to change the file’s extension name to .zip. Well, it doesn’t.

Extracting content from .webarchive file

One way to extract the images from the .webarchive file is through the Terminal app. Here’s how.

1 – First, press Command and space to launch Spotlight, type in “Terminal” and hit Enter. That’ll open the Terminal app.

2 – Then type in this command without hitting Enter. Note there is a space at the end after “html”.

textutil -convert html

3 – Lastly, drag the .webarchive folder into Terminal. Hit Enter and you’ll find all the extracted files in the same folder where the .webarchive file is located. Using Terminal Command to Extract Images from .webarchive File Oh, one more thing, did I mention I was using Safari to visit the site and download images? It turns out it’s much easier with Google’s Chrome.

With Chrome, you can simply save the web page using the “Webpage, Complete” format and that’ll give you a folder with all the page content in it, including the images.

 
 
Saving Web Page with Chrome

Lesson of the day?

If there’s anything that I learnt from this experience, it’s that Chrome is a better web browser. I mean, Safari and Edge are great too, especially when you use them to download Chrome.

How to Quickly Free Up Large Amount of Storage Space on Your Mac

The Dreadful Not Enough Space Prompt

Of all the prompts an operating system can throw at you, “not enough space” is probably the most dreadful and annoying. In my attempt to upgrade to macOS Catalina public beta 9 today, I had the displeasure of seeing this very message. As you could imagine, I tried having the operating system itself fix the issue. It didn’t work, as you probably could also imagine.

There is really not much the operating system could do. After all, I did cheap out on storage space in the first place. Third-party apps aren’t much help either. Dr. Cleaner could free up a bit over 500 MB, but that is not nearly enough.

Optimizing iCloud Photos

If you look at the very useful visual display of a typical Mac’s storage space, you’ll notice the Photos app is usually eating up a big chunk of it, in my case, 18.5 GB of the measly 121 GB. The Photos library does not necessarily have to live on the hard drive. Apple recommends putting the originals on iCloud while keeping smaller-sized copies locally, with the originals available for download when necessary, and thus optimizing the storage space. Apple calls this Optimizing iCloud Photos.

Optimizing iCloud Photos gives us a lot of free space to work with, and we are now able to download the macOS public beta.

One More Thing

Optimizing iCloud Photos does not always get you where you want to be. If you need even more space, you could completely delete the Photos library, do whatever you need to do with the space, and then create a new Photos library from scratch once you are done.

However, deleting the Photos library is only meant to be used as a last resort workaround. Even though I consider it safe, you’ll need to do this at your own risk.

Before trying this, make sure all your photos and videos have been uploaded to iCloud. Open the Photos application, scroll down to the very bottom, if you see anything being uploaded, wait for it to complete.

With everything uploaded to iCloud, go to Preferences to locate your Photos library and delete it. Empty the trashcan too.

You’ll get a prompt saying the Photos app needs to quit. Worry not and quit the app. We’ll create a new Photos library next. Once you are done having fun with the extra space, launch Photos. The app will remind you that the library could not be opened. Click on Open Other and then Create New.

In the next window, create the new Photos library in the default Pictures folder. If there’s already a file named “Photos Library” in the folder, go ahead and delete it.

Set the newly created library as the “System Photo Library“. You’ll get a warning saying this will turn off iCloud Photos. Click on OK and again worry not because we’ll turn it back on next. Go to iCloud in the Photos app Preferences window. Make sure “iCloud Photos” is selected. Feel free to select either “Download Originals to this Mac” or “Optimize Mac Storage“.

Your photos and videos will download in the background even if you don’t have the Photos app open.

If you came across this post because you were looking to quickly free up a large amount of storage space on your Mac, let us know how it worked out by leaving a comment!