Thanks to Lifehacker I have discovered this extension which add missing piece of GMail functionality: This very simple extension allows you to enter multiple sets of text (such as e-mail signatures) and paste them into forms simply by right-clicking.
Why is this such a big deal ? I am using GMail for both my personal and work stuff. To make sure my work related email appear as coming from company email address, I set the proper From address when composing an email. GMail can be configured to stay with the recipient address when replying. The only problem is signature. In private emails, I want to have link to the blog, in work emails, to company site. And GMail offers only one signature. With this extension, I do not use any signature from GMail, just simply insert correct one from the Clippings buffer.
Well, as it looks like, I was prematurely ecstatic about the new open source based NAS server. While the hardware works great, I had not much luck so far with setting up the software on top of that.
My original idea was to use FreeNAS, let it boot and install into USB drive and use all 4 SATA disks in RAID 5 set up by BIOS. It did not work. FreeNAS does not see the RAID5 volume created by BIOS and keeps referring to 4 separate SATA drives. So does Openfiles and few other distributions. After the USB key was initialized, the system did not boot and stopped with error message 'No Ufs'.
If you have digital camera or digital camcorder, you probably have a problem where to store the pictures and video so that they are readily available for viewing and protected against loss caused by hardware failure. How much storage you need depends on how many and how large pictures do you take and how heavy camcorder user you are. In my case, I have switched to shooting RAW on my D70, doing about 2000-4000 shots a year and the camcorder produces about 4-5 GB unprocessed video per hour of recording. After adding some free capacity for the document archives, some MP3 files, anything smaller than 500 GB will be probably too small. To have some space, I decided I better go for 1 Terrabyte of space.
Since over 1 month I am using Web based tools for calendar, email, task management, bookmark management and note taking. One problem that these tools have is that as soon as your connection goes down, you are done. Game over. Few days ago I have discovered Scrybe, a tool which maybe can address this problem. Unfortunately, I cannot tell from my own experience, because the system is in private Beta and does allow you to register. But if you can believe the sneak peek video (linked from the site), it should combine calendar which is even better than Google Calendar, task manager and note taking program that would make Google Notes look like second class citizen.
For Jack, Manju and Michel: here is the poem we talked about.
Eye have a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.
If it ever happens to you that you need to restart old computer which you have not logged on for 2-3 months and you find out you have no clue what the password could be, do not panick. Exactly this happened to me yesterday. Fortunately I have remembered reading something on lifehacker few days ago about bootable CD which contains live Linux distribution with password cracking open source software Ophcrack. It runs from CD only, does not touch your file system, only loads local SAM and tries cracking the hashes. And boy, it works !
With great horror I have discovered that from my 80 GB hardrive in Macbook already over 76 GB was full. Mostly because of the hidden activity of iTunes and silent downloading of new podcast episodes. Especially video podcasts - such as Mac break - are disk heavy, since they are produced in HD - and as result, look remarkably beautiful on the screen.
While cleaning up, I have decided to burn few of my very favorite podcasts to the MP3 CD and keep it in the car. Doing that is really easy in iTunes - all you have to do is to select MP3 CD in Preferences -> Advanced -> Burning, create a playlist that will contain all MP3's you want to burn, control-click it and select Burn. So far so good. There are some situations when yu want to have more control over the process: for example you want to put the files to subfolders or need to adjust / cleanup the names of files before burning.
I found today something that (after long time) make me to say Wow! - and it had nothing to do with Apple or OS-X. Simple small system management utility for Windows modestly named System info, written by fellow Canadian Gabriel Topala (originally from Romania, but living in Toronto, as I found out from his resume on his web site).
So what is so fantastic about this program:
- it is small (single file, 1.3 MB)
- portable no installer required
- free (although author welcomes donations and encourages registration)
- amazing depth. It gives you more information than you expected, often more than you were aware you may get!
The main (and only) window of the program has three panes:
Lot's of things happening this week - Macworld and CES generated lots of activity in podcasts. Macbreak has interesting series of interviews done (mostly) by Leo Laporte and Merlin Mann with various people from Macworld. If you are interested how the author of Cocoalicious looks like in flesh, go and grab the few Macbreak episodes. There is also interesting interview with creators of the Modbook (Macbook based tablet), the Omni group, makers of the great OmniOutliner who recently release OmniPlan. It should be the first project management tool that does not suck. It is hard to believe that there can be a piece of software that contains Gantt diagram and is logical and usable <grin/> - it certainly does not apply to MS Project. I am really curious how the OmniFocus - the new GTD tool in preparation - will look like when it is done.