All things tech » software

Put birthdays on your Google Calendar

Jon — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 00:22:57 +0000

Ever since I first got into PDAs back in 2000, it’s been really important to me to be able to keep track of my contacts’ birthdays. When I got my Pocket PC (basically Windows for PDAs), I loved that it automatically placed birthdays on my calendar. But since then, I haven’t had a solution that would flawlessly do this.

Today, I discovered that Google Calendar does this exact thing! And since I sync my calendar with my Android phone, I get the birthdays placed on my phone’s calendar too. I absolutely love this feature, but it’s sort of obscure to get to. There are instructions on how to do it at Nicholas Overstreet.

LMGTFY now for 64 bit Linux

Jon — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:39:01 +0000

A few months ago, I did a build of the STFW Pidgin plugin for Windows. Recently I started using Ubuntu but found that STFW didn’t work on my system. So I did a 64-bit build of the plugin for Pidgin 2.6.x. Here it is!

To install, just copy that file over to /usr/lib64/purple-2/ . If you don’t have root access, copy it to ~/.purple/plugins/ instead. Then restart Pidgin, enable the plugin, and you’re good to go!

Adblock+ for Chrome: one less excuse not to use Chrome

Jon — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:12:30 +0000

There’s some exciting news in the adblocking/Chrome world!

Over the past year, I’ve been using Adsweep for my ad blocking needs. Adsweep actually worked really well, but the only problem was that its ad definitions weren’t very comprehensive (false positives every now and then). I was disappointed when I went to the site and found that the owner decided to stop maintaining the project. Which means no new ad definitions. But I just went back to the site and was excited to find that somebody else has taken over and it is now being maintained. Woot! So I installed the latest (2.0.1) but it didn’t seem to work at all. So for right now if you decide to use it, grab the legacy version (1.6.18.8). It works pretty well most of the time.

In other news, there is now an Adblock+ extension! It has many similarities to the original Firefox Adblock+ plugin. Most notable of which is the ability to subscribe to ad block lists (so your ad definitions are always current). I installed it and it appeared to work (put an icon in my browser, successfully allowed me to subscribe to ad definitions). But some of my ads weren’t being blocked. It looks like they just released about a month ago so I’ll wait patiently for them to work out the kinks.

LMGTFY plugin for Pidgin in Windows

Jon — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:07:56 +0000

All too often people ask me questions that are just as easily looked up on Google. Things like “How do I burn a CD?” or “What does HTML stand for?” Sometimes I use lmgtfy.com (short for letmegooglethatforyou) to show them how easy it could have been to just Goggle it. But it takes too much work to go to the website, do the search, then copy and paste the URL.

Luckily Kim Stebel created a Pidgin plugin to make the process easier and he’s gracious enough to share it. It’s called STFW. I was eager to install it and try it out, but there were no binaries compiled for Windows (yes, I use Windows). So I decided to compile them myself. I’ve never compiled any open source software before so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Luckily, the Pidgin website had plenty of help. All you have to do is follow the tutorial for building Pidgin and then follow the instructions for compiling Windows plugins.

If you want to grab the plugin without compiling it yourself, you can just download it here. After you download it, move it to the “plugins” directory of your Pidgin install, restart Pidgin, then enable it in the “plugins” menu. To use it in conversation, just say /lmgtfy stuff to search for and when you send the message, it will convert it to the necessary link. It’s as easy as that!

Finally on Google Reader!

Jon — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 07:13:23 +0000

I finally got around to configuring Google Reader for all the tech/programming/personal blogs that I read. It was a little scary, but I’m glad I finally made the move. It’s already saving me a lot of time. I fired up Facebook to grab a lot of my friends’ blog addresses. It very tedious but I finally managed to get through all 613 friends. In addition, I added several of the tech websites I visit often, but I just did that from memory.

While I was adding all the feeds, I made a couple interesting observations. Firstly, the majority of the feeds I added were hosted by Blogspot. I had no idea so many people used Blogspot. Next I noticed that all the tech and startup blogs I added were using the WordPress platform. And practically none of the non-tech blogs were using WordPress…interesting…

My computer ate my Red Robin birthday coupon

Jon — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 06:57:29 +0000

It was my birthday this week and I got a coupon in my email from Red Robin for a free burger. Since I never lose emails but tend to misplace papers, I kept the coupon in my email until the day that we were supposed to go use it. Half an hour before we were to go out, I fired up my email to print off the coupon and was dismayed to find this:

Apparently I was over my viewing limit. Yes, I know I should have read the text at the top that says that I can only view the offer twice. But I have a multi-pass system of sorting through emails since I get hundreds per day.

So we didn’t have a coupon and we didn’t go to Red Robin for dinner. I know that Red Robin is under no obligation to give birthday coupons. I was frustrated that their system was designed so poorly and I’d imagine hundreds of other people are experiencing this same issue. Red Robin probably implemented this to stop coupons from being redeemed multiple times.

Here are the weaknesses in this process:
-People who (like me) load their email several times and will therefore be prevented from legitimately loading the coupon when they need it
-Somebody who actually wants to “beat the system” could easily print the coupon to pdf (on the first viewing) and send that to friends. Or merely print several copies of the coupon.
-It’s not very user-friendly. What about people who aren’t connected to a printer the first time they try to load it and whose printer doesn’t work when they try to print it on the second view?

Update: I emailed customer service about the issue. They responded by resetting the counter and re-emailing the coupon. We used the coupon and had some great hamburgers. Props to Red Robin! If only it didn’t have to be an issue in the first place…

Adsweep plugin gets discontinued

Jon — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:35:30 +0000

A number of weeks ago, I was ecstatic when I found out about the Adsweep plugin for Google Chrome. From the homepage, it looked promising. I installed it and found that it worked pretty okay. It’d get better over time, right? Apparently not.

My biggest problem with the plugin was that there were so many false positives. When I went to do an advanced search on eBay, I found that the Adsweep plugin had removed the search box! I emailed the creator of Adsweep and was surprised that he emailed back saying he added the exception to the plugin. Woot! Impressive!

It happened again to me on another webpage so I went back to the Adsweep website, only to find the notice that the developer was discontinuing work on Adsweep. Sad day! Apparently too many people were asking for exceptions to be programmed into the plugin and not enough people were volunteering their time. I admit, I’m guilty of this. But I didn’t know–I wasn’t subscribed to the list. I’d contribute a bit of my time if there were others that could help get this going again. Any takers?

My Chrome wishlist: just 3 features to perfection

Jon — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 22:18:35 +0000

I have to say: I’ve loved Chrome from the minute I started using it. What do I like about it? Mostly the speed. Throughout the day, I have racing thoughts–things I want to look up, news I want to read, friends’ statuses I want to check. Firefox was much too slow (even though I keep my plugins to a minimum), finally opening a browser window in 5-10 seconds. Chrome on the other hand, happily gives me a window in half a second (maybe even less!).

Since Chrome came out, I’ve changed my usage to about 90% Chrome. I use Firefox every now and then for some occasional debugging. And Safari sometimes when I want to register for free stuff online but have already used Chrome and Firefox and I’m too lazy to go locate and clear the cookie.

With the somewhat recent advent of Adsweep, there are only three features that are keeping Chrome from being my 100% perfect browser:

Print Preview
I’m so cheap! Even though my printer has automatic duplexing (that means it automatically prints to both sides of the paper), I like to make sure what I print is still in my budget. I’ll even tweak the margins and zoom to make sure it’s cheap enough. Give me Print Preview so I know what I’m getting!

Smooth Scrolling
This has irritated me ever since I made the move from Internet Explorer to Firefox back in 2006. It hurts my eyes–I do tons of scrolling and it’d be a lot nicer to have the pages gently gliding across my screen rather than jumping a line at a time.

Right-click Properties
A lot of times I’ll see a graphic and think “I wonder what they named that” or “I wonder if there’s more where that came from”. In Firefox or IE, I would just right-click on the element and then “properties”. Bam! I would see what the file is named and the dimensions. Having this feature would be pretty useful on websites that don’t include a caption or don’t tell where the photo was taken.

So if any Chromium developers are reading this: please develop these features!! Then my life will be complete!

Gmail Undo Send feature

Jon — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 23:02:12 +0000

I just saw in the Gmail blog that they added an Undo Send feature. Seems like a pretty cool feature, but not as useful as the Outlook (Exchange) feature. This Gmail Undo Send only gives you 5 seconds. It does not, however, let you suck back an email a day later after you’ve had time to sleep on it. I’m sure some people will find this pretty useful (I’m definitely keeping this enabled on mine), but I think having a larger undo window would be more useful.

Set TweetDeck links to open in Chrome (or FireFox)

Jon — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 21:20:24 +0000

For some reason, when I clicked links in TweetDeck, they would open in FireFox even though my default browser is Chrome. Here’s how to change that on XP.

Click “Start”->”Settings”->”Control Panel”->”Add or Remove Programs”
Click the “Set Program Access and Defaults” button on the left
Expand the selected configuration
Set Chrome (or whatever browser you want to use) as the default Web browser

I don’t know why TweetDeck doesn’t automatically direct it to the default browser (maybe it’s an Adobe AIR problem), but that’s how to fix it.