David Graff – davidgraff.com Today with Dave, Downunder it's Tuesday, March 19th, 2024 @ 4:04 PM

Entries Tagged as 'Tech'

Canada, will you Berry me?

Finally… After two weeks of trying to sort things out, I have got my Blackberry back and going, and it’s set up the way I had originally planned… Bell Mobility seems to have a call-30-times-and-then-you-get-what-you-need program.

This post is in fact even written with the berry… So nice to have a full keyboard on the phone.

So my regular number, 778 773 0728 still rings here, but the number of the phone is actually 403 559 6767 because hopefully my dad will be able to get use out of it while I’m gone again.

The only thing left to find out is what kind of nightmare the billing will actually be…

How to use ThunderBird Portable Databases on Ubuntu Linux the easy way

Mozilla Thunderbird Portable is a great invention and I’ve used it for some time, on both Windows and Ubuntu Linux under wine.  While it works just fine for email, the whole integration thing was lacking under Ubuntu.  The things like opening attachments and clicking links didn’t work under Linux.  A small price to pay to have all your mail show up in your inbox, just as you left it, regardless which OS you choose to boot at the time (Especially when I was using POP).  But why pay that price if you don’t have to?

I use gmail behind the scenes for my mail, and use the IMAP feature to keep my inbox sync’d.  This means that all my mail is there, even if I just use two separate installs of Thunderbird.  But it also means you have to re-download messages, and waste twice the disc space, and time, and bandwidth (especially precious if you’re on mobile broadband).  Plus, keeping a backup copy is easy, as the files stay in the portable format, just drag and drop the folder to somewhere else.

So this is how I worked it out, many months later than I would have liked.  I keep this here in case I need to do it again sometime.

Tech Warning: there is jargon and commands behind this link!

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My very own Chronophage

I have recently added a clock on the right side of my page here that shows two date-and-times.  It’s pretty obvious what they are.  The reason I put this up is because I am acutely aware of this time of my life as a fixed period.  There is a start date and an end date to all this, and it’s coming up one second at a time.  I have often thought this of many situations I have been in, both good and bad, so I wanted a way to show time slip from one side of the present to the other.  A river of time, and me stuck on a bridge spanning it, watching it pass below.

It was apparently also on minds at Cambridge who made this clock.  Mind you, mine cost slightly less than their quoted $2 Million pricetag (How the heck does that even happen?).  I understand Stephen Hawking presented the clock as part of his theoretical commitment that the forward movement of time is inevitable. I just presented mine myself. I kept that article and a video showing the clock behind this link.

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To be fair to the Prettiest Killer

So, after all the good I said about the new Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04, it turns out that it has been slightly harmful.  A Pretty Killer.  It has been turning on and off my harddrive very fast while running it.  This behaviour ended up making a clicking noise on my shiny new Dell M1530 laptop.  For fairness sake I will put that info here, and say that Windows used to do it too, and that there is a way to fix it.  I noticed it in January, and thought it would go away with the newest version, which didn’t happen.  I actually found out about it at the link above and followed the links to make the fix as well, so it is no longer happening.  The details of the fix are behind the link for my own record of what I needed to do. [Read more →]

Friday Morning Coffee, Google News. Nice Combo

I’m just having a coffee in the kitchen and reading the news, as I do from time to time.  An article popped out at me and I thought I would put it here. People sometimes don’t really understand why I don’t like Microsoft, so this is a little tidbit of stuff that makes me think that way.

The context is, last night I booted to Linux on my laptop and clicked the update button, to update to the new Ubuntu I talked about here. I kinda tossed and turned thinking I might be risking my working install of everything else.  It probably took a couple hours to do, but thats only because it would have taken that long to download the 750 MB of stuff it needed to update.  In the morning, I woke up to one dialogue box saying click to reboot and finish update.  It worked perfectly.  Wireless card works now, everything, and all my customizations from the other install remain.  Perfect.

Not so perfect for M$ business customers who found that updates that were forced on their systems automatically CORRUPTED their business data. Good luck getting that back, I hope it doesn’t cost you too much time, money and productivity!  It’s called work for a reason!  Thanks Redmond.

Read the article here.  That’s a little bit why I don’t like M$.  Who needs that? [Read more →]


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