I just discovered Instapaper

I first thought it was no different than using a bookmark. I was wrong. It is way better, at least if you have a mobile device of some sort. Even with just a wifi Kindle 3 I find this service amazing. I highly recommend it.

One thing Wolfram Alpha is great for...

is doing calculations with big numbers. Unlike Google, which always only gives you an exponentiated number,Wolfram Alpha gives you the real number too (and writes it out for you in English!). Much more useful for those of us who aren't math majors.

Two Ways to Get RSS feeds for Twitter Timelines

It is really a shame that Twitter removed the ability to subscribe to an individual users timeline RSS feed on the page (either through a button on the page or through metadata that produces the RSS icon in the address bar). Here's a pessimistic blog post on what this forebodes for the future of RSS. The good thing is that the feeds still work and there are fairly painless ways to find them:

1. Use "Add a Subscription" in Google Reader and paste in the old-style address of the user's profile page. To get the old-style url, just remove the slash-shebang (/#!) from the current url (e.g., http://twitter.com/#!/isaachummel becomes http://twitter.com/isaachummel).


2. Search for the person's twitter handle in Google Reader. The feed should appear even if no one has ever subscribed to it (way to go Google Reader!). To find the feed search feature in Google Reader, select Browse for Stuff and then click on search at the top of the page. Or just click this link.


3. Follow this blog post's instructions.

 

Speaking of Thunderbird: There's an easier way to backup

Skip the copying to local steps until you actually need to restore the mail. Just tar or zip the whole backup profile after the download has finished and keep the archive for later. Then when you need it, unzip it, replace your current backup profile directory with what you just unzipped, and open Thunderbird. Since you last closed Thunderbird in offline mode it should still be in offline mode, so Use Profile Manager to start the Backup profile in offline mode and you shouldn't have a problem viewing and copying your old emails without Thunderbird trying to sync with whatever's on the IMAP server now. Until they kill Profile Manager in Thunderbird, that is. Then you'll need the standalone Profile Manager app as well.

I finally shifted the menu buttons

As you no doubt know if you've ever used Ubuntu Linux, they have a weird setup by default where the close, minimize, and maximize buttons on every standard window are in the upper-left corner instead of the upper-right. By the time I found out how to change that, I had already gotten used to that button layout. But now that I'm using Windows occasionally I find switching between the button layouts to be confusing, so I made them standard.

Tip: p7zip/7za for Linux CAN extract multiple encrypted files

The trick is that the password entered on the command line cannot have a space in between it and the -p flag. So "7za x -p12345 filename.7z" will work, but "7za x -p 12345 filename.7z" won't. No need to bring Wine and zmud into it after all. My mistake.

Tip: Adding a unlinked Menu to the WordPress Navbar

If you want to have an item on the navbar that is purely a menu and not also a link, add a custom link with any old url in it and then edit the item and delete it. Then you can put anything you want under it in the Custom Menu interface and the now-empty link will act purely as a menu heading.

Mozilla Archive Format add-on rocks

I've long wished that Firefox would get compatibility with Microsoft's longstanding MHT format for saving complete webpages as single files. Not only does this extension do that, it also provides an open version that basically works by zipping up the product of the it's own version of the standard Save Webpage Complete feature of Firefox (though you can, as an option, make it use the browser's own version of said feature if you want to, or the Save Complete extension's). This makes the resulting files readable by anyone: all you have to do is unzip them and then open the html page inside like normal. The extension also has a useful conversion utility that will seek out all your Firefox webpage complete saves and turn them into .maff archives.

The only downside in Linux is that Gnome thinks that the resulting .maff file is a zipfile and tries to open it as such. I worked around this by adding Firefox as an option for opening zip files. It would be better if they could find a way to produce zip files that look like a distinct file format in Unix environments like OpenOffice does so you could cleanly associate the file format with Firefox. Still, it's a great extension. BTW, be sure to get the 1.0.0 preview version if you're using Firefox 4.

Update: It is possible to differentiate .maff files from .zip files in Gnome/Linux. This mailing list post has everything you need to know to figure it out. I might post detailed step-by-step instructions later.

If you want Firefox 4 for Ubuntu...

forget about the Daily Builds PPA. Go with the Mozilla Team Firefox Next PPA. That will give you a much more stable beta. Plus you won't have to fool around with pinning Thunderbird in Synaptic to prevent it from updating to a daily build too.

Shifting the minimize, maximize, and close buttons in Ubuntu

As an added extra, here's an article on how to make the aforementioned buttons appear on the right, like in Windows, rather than the left. Note: make sure to run gconf-editor using your own user. If you run it as root using sudo or gksudo, it will affect where root's buttons are displayed, not yours. I learned that one the hard way.

Getting back the old Ubuntu 10.04 theme in 10.10

It caused me some consternation that I wasn't able to easily "downgrade" from the new Ubuntu desktop theme, which I loath, to the old one. Fortunately I finally figured it out. First download these two packaged. Then manually install them with "dpkg -i". Then open Synaptic and select the lock command from the menus on both of them to prevent them from "updating" to the new theme. Voila, problem solved.

I've found a serious flaw in 7zip

There is no way to enter a password on the command line automatically when decompressing. The -p flag doesn't work. Sooo, if you have a large number of files with the same password, you're screwed.

I recently found that out the hard way when I decided to mirror my online backups, or some of them, that I keep on SkyDrive on Dreamhost's backup server. The solution I came up with was to set up a temporary local telnet server and use a MUD client to automatically send the password on a periodic basis. I tried setting a trigger to send it when prompted, but the client--the free 16 bit version of Zmud running under Wine--choked on the prompt, something to due with parentheses I think. I first tried setting it to just a colon, which worked but had the tendency to create unending loops under certain conditions, and settled on the periodic sending. I really wish normal terminals had a trigger features (the ability to automatically send a command when a certain string of text is displayed) like MUD clients do. Actually, it was that thought that gave me my idea.

Lifehacker is awesome

Where else do you get a how-to on making secret compartments in books quickly and efficiently?

Using Thunderbird to Back Up IMAP Email

The main problem with keeping all your email in the cloud is the possibility that it will be lost. Yes, generally Google and others are reliable, but things do happen, and accounts get wrongly deleted, so having a backup is always handy. Unfortunately Gmail doesn't come with easy to use Import/Export features that let you upload and download zip files containing your entire tree, nor do others. The good news is that with IMAP, it isn't too intolerably difficult to use IMAP to backup your mail and restore it using the free Thunderbird Mail client.

First, I recommend that you start a new profile entitled "Backup" (or whatever) using the Thunderbird Profile Manager (thunderbird -ProfileManager). Now that your in your new Backup Profile in Thunderbird 3.x, do this:

1. Set up your IMAP account. Thunderbird makes this as painless as possible (including by prompting you to do it when you start a new profile), unless you're using something like Google Apps, in which case you'll have to do it manually.

 

2. Turn off indexing and smart folders. Not absolutely necessary, but helpful, since we don't need it and it will get in the way. Uncheck Edit->Preferences->Advanced ->General->Enable Global Search and Indexer. As for Smart Folders, hit View->Folders->All.

 

3. Go offline and say yes when it asks you to sync. Standard procedure in Thunderbird 3 is to set new accounts to download everything by default, so it should proceed to download everything. File->Offline->Work Offline.

 

4. Create a folder under Local Folders entitled Backup.

 

5. Select all folders in the account you want to backup (except the [Gmail] folder and its subfolders if you're using Gmail) and drag-n-drop them in the folder you just created. They will be copied.
   
   
   
   1. If you are using Gmail, and you followed my instructions, go ahead and copy [Gmail] over now. If you didn't, you'll probably notice that the copy stopped after [Gmail]. Why? I have no idea. But it does, which is why I told you not to copy it with the rest.
   
    
   
    

 

6. Right click on Local Folders and select Settings. Click Browse (next to the path where Local Folders is stored on your computer). Zip up all files and directories named "Backup".

 

7. Delete the Backup folder in Thunderbird.

 

8. Launch the Thunderbird Profile Manager again, delete the Backup profile if you want to (or save it for next time if you're not worried about disk space), and start your normal profile.

 

Restoration involves simply dropping the saved files into Local Folders again (while Thunderbird isn't running).

You could have just copied the files out of the IMAPMail directory, but I find that that has issues associated with it (some messages don't come through right, read data is lost). This method avoids those. And it also doesn't require the use of any extensions.

Note: If you have a lot of mail on the server, expect this to take a long time. Also it will take a lot of space, especially if you're using Gmail. Each message will have to be downloaded multiple times: once for each label it has and another for All Mail, which means you can expect to have it download and store every message at least twice (unless you archive everything and avoid labels like the plague).