Software

Two posts on the same day and both techie – don’t be put off, normal ranty service may well be resumed soon…

I’ve used my Windows Mobile in the past as a tethered modem for me eee pc when out and about without WiFi or o2 mobile broadband, it’s not always been easy but has been handy to have around!

I reinstalled my eee today, and was looking around for how I’m going to achieve this same functionality with the Milestone on Android, almost everything screamed “root your device” at me. I’m not a fan of rooting it for a lot of reasons the biggest being I don’t want to brick the device – so that’s a non-starter.

Then I spotted a handy guide from linux magazine on Tethering Android, it didn’t work straight off which was a little disappointing. So a little more digging on the Android forums, produced some additional instructions. I’m producing them here for my own benefit as well as yours – as I’m bound to forget.

1. Install “Proxoid” app from Marketplace.
   
   
2. Turn on USB debugging mode on your phone:
   
   Settings – > Application -> Development -> Enable USB Debugging
   
   
3. On your Ubuntu machine create a 90-android.rules file:
   
   gksudo gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/90-android.rules
   
   
4. Add the following to it (note this is the difference from the linux magazine tutorial):
   
   
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0bb4", ATTRS{idProduct} =="0c01", MODE="0666", OWNER="*insertyourusername"
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0bb4", ATTRS{idProduct} =="0c02", MODE="0666", OWNER="*insertyourusername"
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="22b8", ATTRS{idProduct} =="41db", MODE="0666", OWNER="*insertyourusername"

   * insert your username as appropriate!
   
   
5. Download and unpack the latest release of the Android SDK: http://developer.android.com/sdk/
   
   
6. Connect the phone to the Ubuntu machine with your USB cable and start Proxoid on the phone.
   
   
7. Open a Terminal, navigate to the tools directory in the Android SDK folder and run the following command:
   ./adb forward tcp:8080 tcp:8080
   
   

The proxy server should now be running, but to be able to use it with Firefox, you have to modify the browser’s proxy settings:

1. In Firefox, choose Edit -> Preferences and switch to the Advanced -> Network section.
   
   
2. Press the Settings button in the Configure how Firefox connects to the Internet group.
   
   
3. Select the Manual proxy configuration option, then enter localhost in the HTTP Proxy field and 8080 in the Port field. Press OK to save the settings and close the window.
   
   

Now you can browse the Web using the created connection.

Given that I’ll need to remember how to do this, when I don’t have a connection. Here’s a handy PDF with the above guide to tethering android to put on your android device!!

If you can see this, all has gone well – if you can’t I’m probably talking to myself (nothing unusual there!!).

My current permalink structure has not sat well with me for the last year or so, it’s kind of thrown together and doesn’t look particularly nice… I’ve been itching to change it, but never dared (after all this blog has a reasonable PageRank and gets a decent amount of traffic!). The time has come to bite the bullet.

I know what you’re saying:

“Just go ahead – change the damned things – why should we care?”

Well it’s not quite that simple, changing them has a few knock on effects:

1. All my internal links to older posts referencing them will be broken.
2. All links by other people to my older posts will be broken (this is really bad in my opinion as I can’t contact them all to fix them!).
3. The search engines probably won’t like me much any more (and I quite like them, so this is also quite bad!).

Solutions

Well I put out my request on Twitter and got all of two responses (and one retweet), the first didn’t understand the question at all and suggested I just change them and install All-in-one SEO. The second was more useful and suggested the Platinum SEO plugin (my concern with this is how it might react with my already install All-in-one SEO).

This really leaves me with the Permalink Redirect plugin which sounds like it might do exactly what I want through 301 redirects. I’ve heard good things about Dean Lee’s Permalink Migration plugin, so I think we’ll give that one a go!

Well it seems to have worked – but I’m convinced that the databae should be updated – that would make more sense to me than a permanent 301 redirect… Is that possible?

I normally login to my admin site to find “Spam: 3,472” comments (or some such other high and random number!!).

Confession time. I broke my blog last week whilst doing an upgrade (trying to auto-upgrade post suPHP being activated may have been a mistake) and it forced me to audit my plugins.

I’ve always like the idea of Akismet, group filtering etc. However I spotted some of the comments over at the WP-SpamFree plugin page and decided I’d got nothing to lose (other than a lot of time wasted looking at comment spam!

Installed earlier in the week and 3 days later I have JUST 3 Spam comments…

Elizabeth: The Golden Age psp I’m a happy man – Matt you should think about this plugin!

I’ve just gone to install yet another app on my iPod Touch and noticed my hard drive fill up again in seconds as hundreds of Podcasts came down that I haven’t had a chance to listen too yet. So, something has to be done:

download White Noise 2: The Light

1. I have to listen to more Podcasts!
2. I have to move my iTunes library to an external drive.

#1 I just need to do, #2 makes me a little nervous – but let’s give it a go!

1. First things first give your iTunes a spring clean, get rid of anything you don’t really need.
2. Give iTunes the new location where your media is going to live
   Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man film
   (Under Windows: Edit –> Preferences –> Advanced)
3. Make sure that “Copy files to iTunes Music folder” is selected.
4. Click OK, iTunes may offer to move your files for you (mine didn’t).
5. Tell iTunes to consolidate your libary (File->Library->Consolidate Library).
6. Go out for the day…

At this point iTunes has migrated it’s library to your external hard drive (it hasn’t deleted it, just copied it) you can check that everything has copied across by selecting a song and doing a File->Get Info to see where it’s being served from).

Now apparently…

A long as your external hard drive is connected and powered on files will be served from it. If it isn’t connected iTunes will default to the original location until it’s connected again (this could be useful for subset data and the like – I guess?!).

You can of course choose to keep your old library around as a backup – I’m not going to as I was doing this to free up space on my laptop! So I’ve deleted the iTunes Music folder (NOT any of the other folders around it like the itl file etc!).

Useful Tip!

If you start iTunes in future and your external hard drive isn’t switched on then you won’t be able to play an of the music from that drive (obviously), but you can download new stuff and simply “Consolidate Library” again when you reconnect your external Hard Drive! Now that I like!!! I’m not sure if I then synced my iPod with it that it wouldn’t wipe everything except the new stuff – has anyone tried this?

Going off at a Tangent

So far what we’ve done is to just move the Music library (and is the official Apple way of doing this). But what about the other stuff (databases, playlist, alburm art, ratings), surely it would be good to have all that in a secure offsite location to?

1. Copy Album Artwork, iTunes Library.itl and iTunes Library.xml files to the folder above your iTunes library you just created.
2. Point iTunes to this new library by holding down shift as you start it and selecting your iTunes Library.itl

Now you should be able to point any iTunes on your network at this library – outstanding!

photo credit: William Hook

You may have read earlier that I had written a funky script to remove email that I’d never ever read from my inbox, and it had all gone horribly wrong when I passed a null string into the function and it deleted the whole inbox along with 700+ messages in it. Disaster to some extent!

Then I sat and had a think about how long it would take to import all 700+ headers every time Thunderbird wanted to read my inbox. That wouldn’t be efficient – surely Thunderbird does some caching?

Lo and behold it does, and I’ve recovered everything (and a little bit more besides!) – let me explain.

Bratz movie Recovering Deleted Mail – Thunderbird!

• As soon as I got back to my machine with Thunderbird on, I turned off the Internet, unplugged cables and routers. The machine was no completely independent (it hasn’t been this way in a long time!).
• I located the Thunderbird data files.
  (in my case: c:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\<profile name>)
• Under this directory I located where IMAP does it’s caching (ImapMail\<imap servername>).
• I copied the INBOX and the INBOX.msf to a directory under Mail\Local Folders (in the Profile directory).
• I loaded Thunderbird, and there in my local folders was all my old mail (minus attachments I suspect!)
• I plugged in the Internet again and let the IMAP account download any new mail since I’d made my screw up.
• Then dragged and dropped all the messages to the IMAP folder!

Only one slight concern is it’s still going and says there’s 16,000 emails in there. Looking at what’s being uploaded there are a fair amount of duplicates and also the deleted mail is still in there (so it’s probably because I haven’t compacted that folder in some time!

R’coon Dawg release

The duplicates are easy to dispose of via the Remove Duplicates Add-on for Thunderbird. Deletions I’ll just have to delete again Maybe that script can help!

The Prisoner video I hope this helps somebody in a blind panic one day!

A word to the wise, always make backups….. Particularly when you are testing a script that has the ability to delete emails!!!!!!!

I was writing a script to delete some of my emails whilst I’m away, regular newsletters, advertising from holiday companies, you know the sort of stuff I’m talking about? Not spam, and not stuff I want to unsubscribe from – just stuff – stuff that I’ll only delete when I get home anyway.

Anyway, I screwed it up and an empty variable got passed into the cleanup script and has blown away my entire inbox. Luckily it’s my more spammy account that I signup to most things with, however I’m quite good at pruning it normally and it had over 700 posts in! GRR!

So a lesson, backup files and mailboxes before you run ANY automated scripts against them!
photo credit: alvy

You may remember many moons ago, I posted about what a bind it could be to put YouTube videos into WordPress Blogs (because WordPress got all excitable and corrected the HTML).

Today I discovered a post from Caroline about a plugin that does the job!

YouTube Brackets means that to insert a video I now do this:

[ youtube=xxxxx]

Where xxxxx is the URL of the video!

This is the video posted yesterday about RFID cloning and how it was tagged!

[ youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9isKnDiJNPk]

And I can now insert this video that made me laugh yesterday: