Misbehaving TiVo November 27, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentTiVo, why didn’t you record Good News Week on Monday?! Good thing they put their episodes on the web.
Switching browsers November 17, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , 2commentsI recently switched from Safari to Firefox at home. Firefox is my preferred browser on Windows and Linux and these days it is integrated with Mac OS well enough for me to be happy with it. Most importantly, it brings me to feature parity with the other platforms I use. Extensions are primarily what made me switch.
Force Re-download November 17, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentSo I have noticed that Thunderbird will sometimes corrupt the offline copy of an IMAP message. The symptoms I’ve seen are attachments that are incomplete.
Most people answering inquiries of this nature seem to go on about how it’s the IMAP server’s fault and how certain hidden prefs should make the problem happen less often. I am not satisfied with this buck passing attitude (the prefs didn’t help me anyway) and sought a better solution.
This thread got me thinking. A simple right-click menu with a “Force re-download” option shouldn’t be too hard to write, should it?
Well here it is. Force Re-download.
This is far from polished. It works for me but I can’t warrant that it’ll work for you too. It adds a right-click menu entry to force a message to be re-downloaded. This actually works and can be used to fix incomplete attachments. It uses the same mechanism that Thunderbird uses but it ignores the existing local copy.
Caveats:
- I cannot find a way to invalidate the in-memory cache that Thunderbird has so you may need to restart Thunderbird to see the freshly-downloaded copy.
- I don’t know how to tell when the download has finished so even if I could invalidate the in-memory cache I wouldn’t know when to do this.
- Your offline cache may end up containing multiple copies of the messages you force re-download so you might want to manually compact the folders afterwards. This could be automated but it’s not much use until the above are fixed.
There’s a forum over here with more details. If you’re familiar with Thunderbird development and can help me overcome these limitations I’d love to hear from you!
Video camera update November 17, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentThe ZIF to CF adaptor just didn’t work. I don’t know if it was the adaptor or the CF card that the camera didn’t like but it refused to boot. We needed a camera recently so we now have a JVC GZ-MS120, which is basically the same but with 2 SD card slots and no hard disk.
Consolidation of my online presence November 17, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , 1 comment so farThere’s trouble in the world of social networking.
twitter? too much follower-spam and no real integration with my blog.
facebook? doesn’t work outside the walled garden.
blogger? there were always niggles and they haven’t gone away.
So I had to buy a domain and hosting a while back. I setup a Wordpress install on it and today the switch was flipped. I’m going to consolidate now from my sprawling online presence back to something a bit more manageable.
So the home of me on the internet is now yasmar.net. I’m going to stop using twitter and probably facebook too. The old ramsay.webhop.org redirect will continue to work for old links.
My blogger blog is redirecting here through some template magic and a PHP script I put together. That’s what held this up for so long. There used to be a blogger feature combined with a wordpress plugin to make this seamless but Google started putting up a big warning before redirecting and the wordpress plugin doesn’t work anymore. So I’m going old school and using meta refresh tags to get people from the old blog to the new one. The PHP script is given a blogger post id which it uses to look up a wordpress post id, then it creates a redirect.
Hosting your own blog means being more careful with backups. I setup a daily backup job months ago now so that angle is covered.
Despite flipping the switch, the new blog is very much a work in progress. I’ve barely started to play with things. Please bear with me during the ongoing work. Hopefully I won’t break things too badly.