Rudkin On Linux, Mac and Tech

Remember Steve Jobs this way, in his own words: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

For sometime now I have wondered why Apple had missed out the ability to set multiple identities for email accounts in their Mail.app on Mac OS X and iOS.

Yesterday I had the need to send an email from a different identity on my iPad, so I could do this I simply changed the email address in the settings, sent the email and then changed it back. This seemed a little cumbersome so I did a bit of searching on DuckDuckGo.

I discovered this 5 year old article that detailed that all you need to do is enter a comma-separated list of addresses in the “Email Address”. How simple is that?

Having got this working in Mail.app in Mac OS X I wondered if this would work in iOS on my iPhone and iPad, and guess what, it does!

It was a little tricky to setup on my iPhone as the comma character does not appear on any of the soft keyboards when editing the email address. The work around was to cut cut & paste the comma character from another app!

I am not sure if this is a well known feature or not, but as I didn’t know about it I figured that I would share it.

I recent versions of Ubuntu a handy little utility call apt-add-repository was created to make it easier and more friendly to add Launchpad PPAs to your Ubuntu installation. I recently discovered that this utility is not installed by default on the Ubuntu Server Edition (certainly this is the case for Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS).

To add this useful utility, just run the following command from the command line or your server:-

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

Once installed you will be able to add the Launchpad PPA of your choice as follows:-

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:nameofppa

You can add a PPA manually, but I find this a lot easier to remember!

Here is the first of my ‘I use this’ type of blog posts. I spend a lot of time finding software that I am comfortable with and make me more productive so I would like to think I am saving you the effort!

Despite having the Mac for several months, I have only recently discovered Speed Download from Yazoft

I wanted to find a download manager for Mac that handled MetaLink files (for mainly downloading Ubuntu ISO images) but also I wanted it to integrate with both Safari and Chrome. After trying several I found that Speed Download 5 was that one that ticked all the boxes. Not only that it also has the ability to download YouTube videos for offline viewing, great if you want to download them to your iPhone or iPod for watching on a plane!

There are many other neat features to Speed Download 5, including MobileMe, WebDav and a secure way to share files with other Speed Download 5 users…something I have yet to try but can see exciting uses.

So, if you are looking for a download manager for your Mac then I would recommend you give Speed Download 5 a try, there is a free 21 day demo.

I cannot believe I have not written a blog post for well over a year, so now I will make an effort to further document my life with tech.

About 6 months ago now I decided I needed to buy a new laptop as my Dell was a little worse for wear. Having succumbed to the draw of the iPhone and iPad I decided that I would invest in a nice 15″ MacBook Pro so I could continue life in the Apple ecosystem, something that the online community seems to despise but for me I am finding it a slick environment to wake up to.

Many of you may see this as turning my back on Linux, but that is not strictly the case. Having used my Mac for the last 6 months I have found the desktop experience rather polished and find that I’m more productive than I was using the Ubuntu desktop. So even though my day to day computing is now on OS X, I still maintain numerous servers that are all running various flavours of Ubuntu Linux so my future posts will probably have a server slant.

So lets get this started……

For several years now I have been using GMail to store my email and Google Reader to manage my RSS news feeds.  Although I was content with this, in the back of my mind I was always concerned about Google having access to all my data and the unhealthy relationship they appear to have with the US government.

I don’t actually have anything to hide, however the recent privacy screw up by Google when they released Buzz really rammed home to me that all my data is with Google and I am trusting them to keep it safe!  I do not believe the Buzz fiasco was an error by Google.  Most Google products go through several years of beta testing (remember GMail just recently came out of beta) and all of a sudden a new product called Buzz was thrust upon us.  I think this was all very intentional, and Google were just testing the water to see what they could get away with.

So with this in mind I set out to see how I could live life without GMail and Google Reader, and I found it extremely easy especially as I have a couple of VPSs which I have full root access to.

Email

Moving all my email to a Dovecot email server was a breeze.  I used isync to connect to GMail via IMAP and create the equivalent MailDir format.  Job done.

I predominantly use Thunderbird 3 as my email client, though occasionally when I am on the road it is handy to access the mail via a webmail client, and this where RoundCube comes to the rescue.   Don’t be fooled by it’s low version number, it is feature rich and a more than suitable replacement.

News Reader

This was bit harder to find, but I found a fantastic project called Tiny Tiny RSS Reader, it’s a breeze to install and use and even has a mobile interface for accessing from you phone.   It was easy as pie to export my subscriptions from Google Reader and import them to Tiny Tiny RSS Reader, and after using it for a week or so in many ways  I prefer the interface to that of Google Reader, lets face it Google are not renowned for their UI design.

So my online life is no longer tied to Google, and best of all I have achieved the same functionality using free, libre and open source software.  I would like to thank the developers and community of both RoundCube and Tiny Tiny RSS for making this all possible.  From the 1st March 2010, I will terminate my GMail account and presumably all the data associated with it will be sent to the big bit bucket in the sky….or will it?  I guess I will never know.

Taken from http://gpodder.org/news:

The second gPodder release in this month brings updated translations, lots of bug fixes and some UI clean-ups to your open source podcast aggregator. Here are some highlights of this release:

• “All episodes” in “View” menu and enabled by default
• Episodes are passed to the media player in chronological order
• Try to use mimetype-based file icons (using GIO) for episodes
• Make sure the podcast list is correctly updated all the time
• Disable feed_update_skipping by default (+expose in UI on Maemo)
• Default cover art for podcasts with no cover art
• Re-designed preferences dialog for Maemo 5 (Fremantle)
• gPodder rotates to landscape on Maemo 5 when the keyboard is open
• Better button captions in shownotes window (“Cancel download”)
• Remove podcast.de search option (this was broken for some weeks)
• Hide “Download folder” preferences option (see User Manual)
• Flush gPodder database after MP3 player sync has finished
• Updated translations (Galician, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Ukrainian, Finnish, Polish and German)
• New translations: Romanian (by Gherhardt Mathisz)

The source package is now available from the downloads page and packages for Ubuntu, Maemo and Windows should be available soon.

I first must apologise for not blogging for ages, I have no excuse other than laziness!

I recently created a new server at home and install Ubuntu 9.10 Server on it.   As a consequence all the SSH keys I used to access my old server were lost and I needed to add them back again….one at a time from each machine I use to access it.

Although this does not seem a big deal, the method I was using previously was as follows:-

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh <user>@<host>
'dd of=.ssh/authorized_keys oflag=append conv=notrunc'

Although this worked fine, I was catching up on my Linux reading and in Linux Journal #184 (August 2009) another reader Mark K. Zanfardino wrote in withe following more simplified command which works great on Ubuntu:-

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub <user>@<host>

This is not only easier to remember, it also checks that the key being added doesn’t already exist on the server! Brilliant!

Taken from gPodder.org:-

After a productive weekend in Copenhagen with improvements in the UI for portable devices we are ready to surprise you with another fine release of the most enjoyable podcast client so far. Some highlights:

• Download pausing, resuming and better error reporting
• “Paste from clipboard” button in add subscription dialog
• Auto-detect run path (makes –local obsolete)
• Better screen space usage for the Maemo UI (no more tabs)
• Newly supported target: Maemo 5 (Fremantle)
• Newly supported target: Mer (Maemo Reconstructed)
• Newly supported target: Windows (Tested with XP/Vista)
• A HUGE set of bug fixes and performance improvements
• Transition to GtkBuilder means removal of Glade dependency

See the detailed changelog for more information.

For the last couple of weeks I have been running the 64bit beta version of Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope which will be released on 23rd April.

The computer I am using is a Dell 1525n which has an Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller. After my initial install of Jaunty Jackalope beta all was well, the graphics card was detected and Compiz enabled. This however was short lived as some days later I applied some updates and Compiz could no longer be enabled.

On investigation I discovered that Compiz had ‘blacklisted’ my video card. I have yet to find out why because Compiz has worked without complaint on every version of Ubuntu since Gutsy Gibbon.

I was initially gutted and planned to downgrade to Intrepid, but not to be defeated I did some searching and found out that you can force Compiz to skip the black list checks. To do this you need to create the following file:-

~/.config/compiz/compiz-manager

and add the following line:-

SKIP_CHECKS=yes

After this I was then able to enable Compiz and continue working as I have done for the last year or so. So far I have not seen any issues, so it is still a mystery as to why the GM965/GL960 was blacklisted.

I hope this helps somebody!