mac diddy

Remember a couple of weeks ago when Apple said they were “surprised” to find that the formula they used to calculate reception bars was faulty and “in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength”? While I remain skeptical that this was truly a surprise to Apple, it appears that they’ve adjusted their formula with the new iOS 4.0.1 update.

I haven’t lost any bars yet, but apparently I live on top of a cell tower. What I did notice is that Apple’s signal bars have become taller. So while you may soon get hit with the reality that your three bars are really one bar, you can at least take comfort in the fact that it’s represented by a taller bar.

In semi-related news, Apple will be holding a press conference tomorrow, most likely about the iPhone 4′s antenna woes. Could this be related to a report from TheStreet that the problem is related to an internal insulator and an internal “bumper” fix may be coming? It’s an enticing thought for those of us who love our iPhone 4s, but fear the consequences of touching them inappropriately.

Bouncing a message is a tricksy little feature in Mail that not a lot of people seem to know about. Usually when a message is “bounced”, it means that it was sent to a bad email address. For example, if you were to send a message to lothar@macdiddy.com, you’d receive a message in return that looks like this:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at p3plsmtpa01-08.prod.phx3. secureserver.net. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses. This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.

:
216.69.186.201 does not like recipient. Remote host said: 550 #5.1.0 Address rejected lothar@macdiddy.com
Giving up on 216.69.186.201.

However, Mail also lets us bounce a message when we want it to appear that the address was entered incorrectly, which can be useful in trying to throw off a spammer, a stalker, or a Nigerian prince. Simply highlight the message you want to bounce in the message list and right-click it to choose Bounce on the little pop-up menu. Or if you prefer, you can select the message and then go to the Message menu and choose Boulder. Keyboard shortcut: Command-Shift-B.

Unfortunately, spammers usually don’t give their real return addresses, so bouncing doesn’t always work with them, but keep this trick in your arsenal and it will surely come in handy on occasion.