Leaf HD Antenna review

When we moved to our new house, I needed to buy a new HD TV antenna. My previous approach wouldn’t work without drilling a new hole through the stone exterior of our new abode, so I began looking for an indoor option. Finally, I settled on the Leaf. There are two options: powered and basic. I purchased the powered version based on the combined reviews of both models.

The box arrived in our mailbox and seemed unimpressive. The box was ridiculously light and the body of the antenna is a thin, laminated sheet a touch larger than a standard 8 1/2” x 11” piece of paper. I began wondering what the return policy was. Undeterred, I screwed the Leaf coaxial cable into the TiVo and taped the unit to the wall. I scanned the airwaves for available channels and to my surprise, about thirty-seven were found.

Your mileage may vary. My setup consists of a Series 3 TiVo with a Western Digital 1TB DVR expander. According to antennaweb.org, our house in Benbrook is in a zone with all channels in blue zone or closer except for one.

I figured most of these would be unwatchable, but in my testing, I was able to view each channel clearly for several moments as I flipped. Most of these channels are things I don’t watch regularly such as hispanic and religious channels, but FOX, ABC, CBS, TXA-21, PBS, and CW, are all fully functional and so far reliable. NBC is flaky, but it was flaky with our previous antenna too. I will likely need to experiment with some alternate positioning.

Experiment with the wall positioning. Initially, I thought I’d put it as high on the wall as possible, but the sweet spot turned out to be about a third of the way from the top of the wall. You might want a helper to check the signal as you move the antenna around. Then, use something like these 3M command cable hooks to secure the cable. The cable needs to point straight down from the antenna body. The best I can ascertain is that the coaxial cable is actually a part of the antenna much like the iPhone 4 and 4S body serves as part of its antenna.

To my surprise, the Leaf from Mohu is a great HD antenna. It’s not as robust as the Terk we used previously, but it works great and prevented my having to drill a new hole in the exterior. The Leaf is a pleasantly surprising feat of engineering, and if you’re looking to cut the cord from cable or satellite, you should definitely give it a try.

1Password 1Click Bookmarks and OmniFocus

A couple months ago, there were a few blog posts and toots about a little-known feature of 1Password: the 1Click bookmark.

If you’re also an OmniFocus user, here’s a next-level usage for 1Click bookmarks. Enter a task you’re to complete online that also requires a login. Drag that 1Click bookmark into the notes field like so:

(By default it will create a link with the title of the 1Password login, but I’ve pasted in the raw URL for illustration purposes.)

Now, when you’re ready to complete the task, the URL is there ready to automatically log you in, leaving you an extra 1.5s to savor another sip of that beverage you’re quaffing.

Using Mail Act-On for Painless Spam Training

Today I’m going to explain how I manage spam across all my email accounts using some built-in features of Mail.app and Gmail and one keyboard shortcut in Mail Act-On.

Spam

I use SpamSieve for spam filtering on the client side and I have Google spam filtering on the sever side for all my accounts. This gives me some infrastructure I can leverage.

There’s one rule per account and they all look like this:

The rule criteria are simple: this message is part of a particular account and is not in that account’s Spam folder. If those criteria are matched, then the rule marks the message as spam locally with SpamSieve via an Applescript (I’ll include the Applescript at the end of this post.) and moves it to the Spam mailbox for the account. The reason for this last step is so that Google server side spam filtering will know this message is spam.

Ham

As smart as spam filters like Gmail’s and SpamSieve’s are, sometimes they mistakenly flag something as spam when it shouldn’t be. Here’s how I handle this with a smart mailbox and Mail Act-On.

I have a smart mailbox in Mail.app that aggregates the spam from all my mailboxes

and I have a Mail Act-On rule for each account to handle these as well. They all look like this:

When I find false positives, I fire the Mail Act-On command to move them out of the Spam folder and train them as good in SpamSieve via Applescript. (The special non-Mail-Act-On key for actual spam is ⌦.)

Mail Act-On Ninja Move

The astute reader will have noticed that the Act-On Key is set to “S” (for Spam) in both of the screenshots. This takes advantage of one of Mail Act-On’s most powerful features—it allows shortcuts to be overloaded. The criteria of the rules will determine which of the actions is actually performed. I assign ⌃S to each rule related to Spam. If I select several spam messages in my inbox, I just press ⌃S and Mail Act-On takes care of moving the accounts’ spam messages to their respective accounts’ [Gmail]/Spam folder, marking it as read, and training it as spam in SpamSieve. But, if I look in my Spambox smart mailbox and select some non-spam messages, I still press ⌃S but the shortcut has a different meaning because of the way Mail Act-On is designed based on rules. This minimizes the number of shortcuts I have to remember. All I have to remember is that I’m doing something with spam and the shortcut is immediately obvious.

So, that’s how I’m using Mail Act-On and built-in features of Mail.app and Gmail to efficiently manage spam messages that have managed to land in my inbox or false positives that need rescuing from the bowels of the spam folder.

SpamSieve training Applescripts:

• Train as Good
• Train as Spam

IFTTT Recipe for Back to Work Live Stream Notifications

I got tired of missing Back to Work’s live stream because of late notice scheduling changes, so I put the series of tubes known as The Internet to work for me. I created an IFTTT recipe that will send an SMS alert when Back to Work is going live as indicated by the 5by5 Twitter account. The SMS has a link as well to the http://5by5.fm stream in RadioBOX, which is my preferred app for live streaming.

Enjoy!

Money, meet mouth

I’ve deactivated my Facebook account. If you want to keep in touch or need to contact me, email, iMessage, or Jabber/Google Talk at my main email address.



Better yet, let’s grab coffee or lunch if it’s been too long since we had a real conversation.



Until we talk again, please remember: sharing isn’t a mouse click, friendship isn’t the vacant observation of timelines, and digital soapboxes only serve to drive us further apart.



Be excellent to each other.