I noticed something interesting the other day. As of now, searching for ’search’ on Google yields an interesting order of web pages.
This is interesting in a number of ways.
Today I saw this post on Lifehacker about color coding messages addressed to you in Microsoft Outlook. It made me think that I should share a slight modification in Thunderbird that I have been doing for quite some time. I reverse the method that is proposed in the post. I choose to ‘un-highlight’ messages that are not explicitly for me, by turning them a lighter color. This way I can scan my emails very quickly and see those are that more than likely something I need to pay attention to.
I had the idea of sending myself an SMS message anytime I received an email. I know that can be overbearing for some, and even me for my non-personal email. Since I don’t really get anything but person-to-person emails there, I figured it would be worth it to try. Also, I got my cellphone before AT&T Wireless was bought up by Cingular. Therefore I’m still on an old AT&T plan which doesn’t charge for incoming SMS messages, so it wouldn’t cost me anything. I’m running my personal email through a hosting company (DreamHost), so I decided to try using procmail to do it. Another option was to rely on a client to forward the messages. While this may be straightforward for some, I had no experience at all in procmail. Read on to see how I got it to work.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve had a problem with my Motorola V551 for quite awhile. It was difficult to get it to charge. I don’t mean “to hold a charge” because it lasted for a couple days just fine. I mean that I couldn’t get it to charge. The charger wouldn’t make a good connection. The Motorola chargers aren’t like Nokias that actually plug in. They clip in near the curved edge. From the first time that I tried with the phone, I noticed that the charger didn’t quite clip in solidly and it would wiggle around. Then about a month ago I noticed that it would take some fiddling with the charger connection to get it to start charging. This progressively got worse until earlier this week it took me 10 to 15 minutes of playing with it until it would start charging. Today the problem came to a head and had to be solved.
Read the rest of this entry »
In my previous post about my laptop I had described some stability problems. I was finally able to figure out what was causing it. I found eventually that it is most likely the Netgear WG111v2 wireless USB network adapter. It all started when the computer crashed occasionally. Originally I thought it was the new memory that I installed. I ruled that out after I installed some different memory. The strange thing was that the blue screen was sometimes not showing any driver and sometimes showing synTP.sys (touchpad), wg111v2.sys (wireless usb), and a couple others. I detail below my process for figuring this out.
Quick update on my new Dell B120 laptop. CompUSA had a sale this past weekend on Netgear 802.11g USB adapters so I picked one up for $30 (after rebate). I also got 512MB of off-brand memory, which I returned last night to get some much cheaper Kingston memory from CircuitCity ($40 after rebate). Everything seems to be going okay so far. I’m trying to do this “the right way” by having a user account and an administrator account. It’s actually a real pain in the ass to have to jump over the admin account all the time to do any installing. At least fast user switch is accessible with WINDOWS-L.
My old laptop has been on a steady decline so I finally decided to jump on a deal from Dell. I got a refurbished Inspiron B120 for just over $400. It is their lowest end budget model but it should last for a few years. It’s a 14-inch widescreen 1.4GHz Celeron M with 256MB of RAM, a 40GB drive, and a CD-RW & DVD combo drive. Unfortunately this computer didn’t come with built-in wireless and it doesn’t have a PCMCIA slot. It only has an ExpressCard slot and there are no wireless ExpressCard products yet. This leaves me with either getting a USB wireless adapter or a Mini-PCI wireless card. Unfortunately if you don’t order the internal wireless, Dell doesn’t bother to put in the internal antenna. I found some instructions on how to install the antenna into a ThinkPad so I may give it a shot. Of course I should wait until my 90-day warranty is over. For now I’m using a Linksys WGA11B that I don’t with my TiVo anymore.
Read the rest of this entry »
By now most people are aware of Firefox Quick Searches (Keyword Searches) are and how to use them. In brief, they are a bookmark that you can access by using a keyword while passing additional information. The standard quick search is to search Google. I have mine assigned to “g“, the obvious one letter abbreviation. When I want to search Google for something, I type CTRL-L to get to the address bar, then type “g my search terms” (no quotes) and hit ENTER. Behind the scenes, Firefox takes my bookmark assigned to that keyword and replaces the string “%s” with whatever is typed after the keyword.
After seeing the LiquidBlaze Desktop featured on LifeHacker, I was intrigued. I had been looking for a good way to have my wife’s calendar visible for me at work. As if reading my mind, LifeHacker had another featured desktop using Active Desktop. This was was by awhite and shows a calendar downloaded from the web. Unfortunately, I didn’t already use Yahoo! Calendar and I really wasn’t keen on making my calendar public. Besides, my wife already uses iCal on her iMac and I had it set up to synchronize via WebDAV to my web host. I had already been able to get PHP iCalendar (site seems to be down sometimes) to show her uploaded calendars. Thus I figured I should try to combine awhite’s idea with PHP iCalendar. The web host can have password protected directories so the whole world wouldn’t be aware of our appointments. 
Read the rest of this entry »
Like just about every other Firefox user, I have a set of extensions installed to customize my browsing experience. Not all of these extensions are useful for everyone, so I’ll try to detail what each one is good for.