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Paul's Time Sink

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Xcast

Paul Westbrook | 31 August, 2006 23:37

XcastXcast is a great podcatcher for Mac OS X.  With the best iTunes integration that I have seen.  Instead of just adding the downloaded content to a playlist, Xcast adds the tracks to iTunes, in the Podcast section, under the correct podcast entry.  This allows an it to appear on the iPod in the Podcast section of the UI.

The developer has created a screencast of Xcast, that really shows how well integrated this is with iTunes.

Now, I have told iTunes not to download podcasts, but will do it from Xcast.

[via TUAW]

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Google Reader suggestions

Paul Westbrook | 31 August, 2006 22:18

I have been using Google Reader a little bit, and there are some things that I would love to see. (I have sent this feedback to Google Labs, but I wanted to post it here so if some Googler had extra 20% time)

  1. Personal url for the mobile version of the interface.  Google already does this for rss feeds of "starred" items in Google Reader, and for sharing calendars in Google Calendar.  This will make it easier view on a cell phone, where if may be hard to keep entering email address and password.
  2. Provide a way, on the regular and mobile version, to mark the posts that are in the current view as read.
  3. Be able to only have certain rss feeds appear in the mobile view.  For example, there isn't any reason to show podcast on a cell phone.

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Akismet effectiveness

Paul Westbrook | 31 August, 2006 21:33

I have been using the Akismet plugin for LifeType for a while, and I have been pretty impressed.  It has worked well  enough for me to disable the captcha plugin for comments. 

I also modified the plugin to call the akismet service for trackbacks.  I found that it didn't block all of the spam trackbacks.  I re-enabled the Validate Trackbacks plugin and this has blocked all spam trackbacks.

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Mon.itor.us notifications

Paul Westbrook | 31 August, 2006 21:05

A while ago, I mentioned how I was going to try mon.itor.us since I was getting spurious downtime messages from SiteUptime, even though the servers are up.  For the past few days, I have been getting downtime notifications from mon.itor.us, event though the servers are up.  I think that the are having networking problems.

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using wget

Paul Westbrook | 28 August, 2006 02:54

This page has some great examples of using wget.

[via digg]

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disabled QoS

Paul Westbrook | 28 August, 2006 02:37

I had been noticing we haven't been getting as much bandwidth, as I was expecting from our Cable Modem connection.  Out of curiosity, I turned off the QoS setting that I talked about before, and our download speed went from 3000kbs to 6500kbs.

I tried adjusting the settings, but I wasn't able to get it working well.  I don't really want to spend the time now to upgrade to a later version of the sveasoft software or try OpenWRT, so I am just going to leave QoS turned off.  This isn't a big deal, since we don't run a server at home or use VoIP any more.

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Akismet for LifeType

Paul Westbrook | 28 August, 2006 01:55

Today I saw a few posts that mentioned Akismet.  This is a service to help stop blog comment and trackback spams.  The contents of each comment is sent to Akismet's servers in an HTTP POST request and then the response is whether Akismet considers the comment spam.

Akismet started out as a WordPress plugin, and it has been ported to several other blogging systems.  I have ported it to LifeType.  This was pretty easy, especially with Bret Kuhns' Akismet php class.
 (More)

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Amazon EC2

Paul Westbrook | 26 August, 2006 23:27

I just finally got around to checking out Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud).  This service, that is currently in limited beta, looks very interesting. 

Essentially what Amazon is offering is a Virtual Dedicated Server on top of their S3 storage service.  This service seems like it could be an option for someone who is looking at a dedicated server.  The prices are competive.  (If you assume no data is transmitted or received, running one of these server instances would cost $72/month. the rate for data transfer is $0.20 per GB.)
 (More)

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more ssh tunnels

Paul Westbrook | 26 August, 2006 14:15

Here is a page that describes how to use ssh tunnels to get through firewalls.  This goes in to more detail than the previous page that I mentioned.

[via digg]

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mytop

Paul Westbrook | 26 August, 2006 00:26

I have been using mytop for a while, and it is a great way to view the queries running on a MySQL database installation.  It provides this information with a "top" like interface.

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pyzor patches

Paul Westbrook | 25 August, 2006 23:53

This wiki page describes some patches for Pyzor 0.4.0 that fix some bugs.

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FuzzyOCR

Paul Westbrook | 25 August, 2006 23:41

A while ago, I wrote about the ocrtext SpamAssassin plugin.  There is a version of this plugin that is still in active development.  The FuzzyOCR plugin is very similar to the older text plugin,  but instead of using regular expressions to handle the inaccuracies of OCR, it uses String::Approx to do the fuzzy matching.

This wiki page has some pretty good steps on setting this plugin up.

Also see:
http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/FuzzyOcrPlugin

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wp-ecto Plugin

Paul Westbrook | 23 August, 2006 02:25

I saw this post about the wp-ecto WordPress plugin, and I though that it was a pretty neat idea.  This plugin adds a icon similar to the social bookmarking links that appear on blog post.  But instead of navigating to a social bookmarking site, it launches ecto and creates a new post and fills in the title and url.

This inspired me to add this functionality to the sociable plugin for LifeType.

[via TUAW]

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Attachment Scanner Plugin

Paul Westbrook | 21 August, 2006 22:22

Have you ever sent an email intending to attach a file, but forgot to actually include the document.  The Attachment Scanner Plugin will help to solve this problem.  When you press Send, it scans the message to see if you mention a file or an attachment, and didn't actually attach the file, and will present a dialog warning you.

Attachement Scanner

[via TUAW]

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MailTags 2.0

Paul Westbrook | 21 August, 2006 21:29

mailTagsIcon.jpg A while ago, I wrote about MailTags.  At that point it didn't work with IMAP accounts, so I couldn't use it.  MailTags 2.0 is now in public beta, which adds IMAP support.  It adds "X-MailTags" headers to the messages to keep the tag information.

I am hoping that I can use this to help keep track of the emails that I currently just "Mark As Flagged", for software that I need to upgrade, or other things that I need to be reminded of.

[via Hawk Wings]

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