Wednesday 29 October 2008

Stopping all OSX Google background 'updater' apps

Once you install Google software you get lumbered with various 'updater' daemons running on your machine. If you want to stop 'em running the Google way then you're obliged to uninstall all Google apps... However there always another way... Here are all the offending processes listed by process name as seen in Activity monitor:
  • "Google Updater Helper" - Firstly started by /Library/Preferences/loginwindow.plist (from here) and subsequently by launchd - (seen by running launchctl list | grep com.google.Updater.helper) - more info on startup from Apple.
    Removal: edit/remove the google item in that file using property editor/textedit/Pacifist
  • "googleml-modwatch" - Started by launchd from: /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.google.GoogleML.plist.
    Removal: rename com.google.GoogleML.plist to com.google.GoogleML.plist.off e.g.:
    sudo mv /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.google.GoogleML.plist /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.google.GoogleML.plist.off
  • "GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon" - another launchd startup
    Removal: sudo mv /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.google.keystone.daemon.plist /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.google.keystone.daemon.plist.off
  • "GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent" - another launchd startup
    Removal: sudo mv /Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.agent.plist /Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.agent.plist.off

Then Restart and they should all be gone.... You can still manually run the updates when you want to by running:"/Library/Google/Google Updater/Google Updater.app".

Friday 17 October 2008

How to open .eml [outlook] email attachments

To read an email sent as an attachment from another email client (e.g. Outlook) you just save the file and give it an .eml extension - then you can open it using Mozilla's Thunderbird (on Windows, Linux or OSX) - Just go to the 'File' menu and select 'Open Saved Message...'. I assume you should also be able to use Outlook on Windows.

You can just open the message in a text editor - like Gedit, Notepad, Notepad++, Textedit, etc

There are also some utilities out there to convert .eml to mbox format.