The Transvaal Amateur Computer Club …

Tac2 (the Traansvaal Amateur Computer Club) was a group of nerds and geeks that met in the basement of Senate House at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. I served as Editor of their newsletter for several years and also as Chairman for a good many more.

The club, as I recall, started out with folk who built their own Motorola 6800 computers from kits put out by Southwest Technical Products Corporation. Many of us also soldered together Sinclair ZX80’s. Then the tide turned against hardware and our soldering irons towards software and keyboards: We started buying ready built machines like the Sinclair ZX81, Commodore PET, Radio Shack’s TRS80 and the Apple II. The software revolution had begun and the Apple took a big lead eventually to be overtaken, not by the latecomer IBM PC itself, but by the generic PC.

iPhone issues using GMail’s alternative “from” address …

This post describes a procedure to access a GMail account on your iPhone and (a) specify a FROM address which has a domain other than @google.com and (b) prevents the iPhone from reading ALL recent email, whether read, archived or already deleted! iPhone’s default Mail settings ignore the “from” addresses you’ve configured at GMail’s website.

Problem: iPhone doesn’t honour any of your FROM settings configured at GMail — it locks down the domain to either Yahoo! GMail or AIM, depending on which of the pre-configured accounts you choose to set up.

The solution is to set up an “Other” type of POP accessible account, first to a non Yahoo! GMail or AIM account and then to edit in the GMail details after the fact.