If you have a linux machine and haven’t ever made use of sed (stream editor) you’re missing out on a great automation utility. I’ve saved myself probably 20 hours of manual editing with about an hour of work TWICE today. Here’s how…. over on the North Carolina Genealogy site I was opening forums for each county in the state of North Carolina (100 counties.) Now, I could have gone through and typed out a description, slug (address) and name for each one, but that looked too tedious. So…
Search results for: “feed”
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Miro – rss/videocast aggregator/player
I’ve just been using miro the last few days and I ought to mention it here. It’s a multiplatform program (windows/ mac/ linux) that let’s you subscribe to video feeds (much like a podcast catcher does for audio.) It also plays video within the player (you can organize your local video clips through it as well.) You can also search/download from youtube/etc. and you can add custom rss feeds such as those from tvrss.net for instance. It’s also bittorrent aware, so it can make use of bittorrent for downloading.
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Black backgrounds use less power?
At least that’s the theory…. someone has done a google sponsored search with a black background thinking they’ll save 750 megawatt hours a year. Blackle.com is the site. Of course, I don’t know if there REALLY would be that significant a difference in consumption (margin of error in observation equipment?) I REALLY would like to know how long they estimated traffic stays at google as that would make the result vary widely anyway. If the average house used 24kwh per day (I have NO idea, just a number that seems like a decent baseline… that’s 8Mwh/year… so that would be the equivalent of less than 100 houses power consumption… of course, these are just off the cuff estimates as well (just like theirs.)
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Daylight Savings Changes on linux systems
Might should have typed this up sooner, but… a while back I did an article on the daylight savings changes with regards to Windows 98 and how timezone editor tzedit could be used to make sure these OS’s kept the correct time. Well, on the linux side of things there’s not a lot to the fix either. Depending on the age of the install you may have an update available that addresses your daylight savings change, but if not… here’s how to do it. wget ‘ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2007c.tar.gz’ – then tar -xzvf tzdata2007c.tar.gz……. then…
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More postfix spam blocking….
Postfix has a NUMBER of tools for rejecting unwanted messages before they get in the door and waste your CPU time on deciding “hey this mail is spam”. Up until recently I’ve mostly used the relays.ordb.org check (which in the last couple months has now gone defunct.) When we started noticing problems with ordb.org’s responsiveness I planned to investigate other blacklisting options and found several. Obviously there are advantages and disadvantages to blacklisting. The first disadvantage is you have turned over control of blocking mail senders to an outside authority and you should familiarize yourself with THEIR policies for listing (and delisting) a server.
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Windows lost administrator password rundown….
I’ve done one or two mentions in the past of ways to recover/reset lost windows passwords and thought it was probably time for another “brain dump/web research dump” of things that I’ve run across. This is not just for lost administrator passwords, but could apply to a lost user account password as well. (I’ve found that the mileage varies on the system. NT/2000/XP/2003 are not the only variations, there seem to be variations related to certain Windows updates/etc.) I should also put a disclaimer here that this information is not so you can break into someone else’s windows installation (without their permission), at the very least that’s a privacy violation and at the worst, against the law and unethical. What this is for is a guide to someone that has accidentally locked themself out of their windows install (or in some cases where someone ELSE has locked you out of your own pc.) In other words – don’t use this to crack.
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Happy New Year
Yes, I’m still around and even though I haven’t posted, it’s been a busy few months. In some ways it’s been very nice to not force myself to read through a couple hundred news feeds a day to keep up with what’s out in the world. (Before Christmas I had started forcing myself to close the RSS reader after I “cleared” new stories and only check one or two times a day.) For a news junkie like me…. that was a bit difficult. But, right this minute I don’t know how many days it’s been SINCE I opened the news reader. Although I suspect I will in a day or two here, if for no other reason than to clean the slate… and maybe prune my feeds a bit. Some are just TOO frequent.
Let me take this opportunity to send a belated Happy New Year to anyone that’s wandering through.
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Firefox 2.0
Mozilla has released the 2.0 release of the Firefox web browser. Among the new features is built in spellcheck and javascript 1.7 support. However, there are critiques that are critical of the User Interface. (The blank bar, I thought, was the bookmarks toolbar folder area where you could put bookmarks of rss feeds or most frequently visited sites… I could be wrong…)
I do think George is right in one respect, tabbed browsing needs to be “more evident” in firefox.
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Watch what things you store in public places…. part 342
Not too long ago there was an article about how people reveal too much about their lives in Google (or other web) calendars AND MAKE PUBLIC…. well I think this takes it a step further. Gmail let’s you access your mail through an RSS feed…. well there are online services that let you subscribe/watch feeds and apparently the feeds are put in the public access folder…. (oooops.) Be careful what you make public….
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Google Maps and package tracking
I saw this over the weekend and saw it as marginally more useful than traditional package tracking…. This is called packagemapping.com and is a mashup of package tracking and google maps. I don’t know, I mean, when I read that a package is in Cincinnati, I have a pretty good idea of WHERE that is, Knoxville, etc…. the idea of an RSS feed for your tracking number is interesting – that could be useful. (Although I wonder how quickly that feed would be updated.)