j.mo, letting Google solve my computer problems

VirtualBox Upgrade Required ‘Guest Additions’ Upgrade in Linux Mint

justin — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 22:15:00 +0000

Install Guest Additions

I upgraded to VirtualBox 4.1.10 today (Windows 7 host) and when I booted up my Linux Mint 12 guest OS I had no menu bars, couldn’t right click, couldn’t interact at all and only the Linux Mint wallpaper was visible. I shutdown Mint, disabled 3D Acceleration under Display settings for the guest OS, booted Mint again and got my menu bars back. Once back in Mint go to the Devices menu in VirtualBox, choose ‘Install Guest Additions’ and go through the re-install process for them. Shutdown the VM, re-enable 3D Acceleration, boot the VM again and all the Compiz-based display elements should be back. I assume this would work for the other Ubuntu variants as well.

The problem was a little different than other posts I found online, mainly I was seeing the Mint desktop wallpaper with no menus but others reported only a black screen in their guest VM window.

LastPass Security on iPhone Is a Joke

justin — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 22:59:51 +0000

I’ve been looking for a replacement for KeePass now that I’m using OS X more (and the KeePass options on Mac are terrible). I figured I’d just import my KeePass database into LastPass because several friends use it and it receives favorable reviews online. I paid for the Premium version of LastPass so I could access my passwords on my iPhone, and I couldn’t believe what I found:

LastPass does not secure your password vault when the app closes.

Look at that again, once you log into LastPass all your passwords are indefinitely available to anyone who gains access to your iPhone. Directly from the LastPass FAQ:

Q: Why doesn’t my LastPass session log off when I have logout on close selected?

A: Logoff on close will only logoff your LastPass session when the LastPass application has been completely ended or ‘killed.’ This can be done by killing the LastPass app through the multitasking option. Consider using the pin code option here.

Are you kidding me??? Beyond having to force quit the app to make it prompt for your master password again, they recommend using a 4 digit numeric pin to bypass your master password completely! Suggesting a 4-digit password (10,000 permutations) is enough security to guard access to every computer you use is more than irresponsible, it’s complete idiocy.

So I’ll stick with my KeePass setup for now, at least MiniKeePass lets you set a timeout and forces you to enter your master password again. Time to start exploring 1Password, a bit expensive but hopefully their cross platform apps are of higher quality than KeePass and offer much more serious protection than LastPass.

Autofilled Email Addresses in iPhone Are Permanent Fixture

justin — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 20:29:54 +0000

While composing an email on my iPhone I noticed that a bunch of ancient email addresses were showing up when I click the to: field. At first I thought they were saved in my contacts somewhere and I could delete them, but they weren’t, and I couldn’t. Turns out the iPhone is saving all the email addresses you send to and has no method for clearing them out. So after you send a few hundred emails over the course of a few years the chances of auto-fill accidentally causing you to send to the wrong recipient increases exponentially.

Apparently this problem has been evident for years with no resolution in sight. Even if you buy a new iPhone, as soon as you restore from your old phone’s backup all the auto-saved email addresses come along with it! The only way to clear them out is to factory reset your phone and set it up as a new unit, not restoring from backup. Some people have had success with iBackupBot and deleting the auto-fill data from a backup, then restoring their phone with that new file. Still it involves wiping out your phone each time you want to get rid of an old email addy.

Obviously this is a giant hassle and it’s hard to believe Apple is storing this information and not giving the user any way of deleting it. Oh wait, no it isn’t!

Download All Inline Images in Gmail? NEIN!

justin — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:07:20 +0000

I just got an email with about 40 inlined images (not attachments) and noticed Gmail doesn’t have an option to save them all locally! If the images were attachments Gmail has a very nice Download All option where you get a zip file of everything, but no such option exists for inline images. Apparently Yahoo! Mail has had this feature for years but in Gmail you have to right-click and Save As for each individual image. A plethora of threads on Google Groups offer no resolution.

Somewhere I did see a mention of enabling POP and downloading the email in Thunderbird and saving images from there, but that’s a pretty huge hassle to get around this limitation. Gmail is still the best email service in existence of course but hopefully they can enable the Download All function for inlines as well as attachments.

Ctrl+Shift+P to Print Selection in Google Chrome

justin — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:59:31 +0000

Ever since switching to Chrome a few years ago I’ve missed the ‘print selection’ feature where you can print just a highlighted block of text. You can choose to print only certain page numbers in Chrome, but if the piece you want spans a page break you end up with a bunch of superfluous garbage printed.

Luckily someone posted a “hack” around this limitation by using the system print dialog instead of Chrome’s: Ctrl+Shift+P. It would be nice if Google made this feature native but until then this gets the job done nicely.

ChunkVNC Will Ensure I Provide More Free Technical Support Than Ever!

justin — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 04:30:15 +0000

ChunkVNC Session Window

I’ve used UltraVNC for some time to handle remote access of my own machines, but it is less than ideal for providing support to friends/family. Primarily because their WAN IP may change or the UVNC server gets removed from the startup programs list or a hundred other reasons. With ChunkVNC I can move all the maintenance for the server to my end, keeping everything centralized instead of on a dozen friends’ computers.

To set this up for yourself:

Setup DynDNS account using this handy Lifehacker guide
Follow the ChunkVNC installation guide
Place the resulting InstantSupport.exe program in your Dropbox ‘Public’ folder, so you can email people who need support the link to it. Place the ChunkViewer.exe file in a private folder on your Dropbox, it will be how you connect to the remote machine.

That’s the gist of it, the ChunkVNC installation guide is very good so just follow it closely. You’ll have an even easier time if you have already setup your router with Tomato, a topic I’ve hit several times. Obsessed Much?

TiVo iPhone App in Worse Shape Than Greece

justin — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 01:40:28 +0000

Get used to this screen

So I’ve been a TiVo user for most of the last decade, recently retiring my old Series 2 boxes and picking up a Premiere. It’s got a lot of good things going for it but has some strange polish problems too, like why do some of the menus still show up in the old 4:3 format lose the channel preview window? It seems like half of the old interface has been updated to take advantage of the widescreen TVs which is strange since anyone who owns a modern TiVo is going to have a widescreen TV.

All that aside what is really terrible about TiVo right now is their iPhone app. It is rife with show stopper bugs and hasn’t been updated in three months, v1.5(3148) as of this writing. I can crash it every time on my iPhone 3GS by:

Select my DVR (Vercingetorix)
Choose “More …”
Choose Selected DVR
Click More (aka the Back button)
Click Season Pass Manager…Problem Occured!

But You're Connected to a TiVo Premiere!

Well that is super fun, also notice in the screencaps that My Shows has an “X” icon on it. Even though the app is connected to a TiVo Premiere, trying to select advanced options like scheduling recordings or browsing recorded content produces the “Season Pass Manager” warning.

Other strange problems include the Setup: Select a DVR window posted below. It is trying to give some kind of instructions but they are cut off by an ellipsis, and there is no landscape mode or any other way to display the hidden words. Also it notes my TiVo Premiere is “Not Complete”, whatever that means. Clicking on my TiVo takes me into the TiVo app, where all the aforementioned errors occur, and doesn’t mention anything about “Completing” what is “Not Complete.”

Effectively these problems make the TiVo app a glorified TV Guide program. You can’t browse recordings, can’t schedule recordings and can’t see what is going to be recorded (the To Do List).

Instructions cut off, and what is "Not Complete"?

Unfortunately for it’s customers TiVo, which has been on deathwatch since at least 2005, has mastered the art of doing the absolute bare minimum to keep themselves alive. I’m not entirely sure why I continue to love TiVo so much, maybe I’m nostalgic for the early days when they were all about the user, before the giant price hikes (2006 version)…and the giant price hikes (2011 version). Sort of like the feeling people had for Netflix until recently with the Qwikster and their own giant price hike debacles. You felt like Netflix was on your side, battling against the movie studios and their astronomical pricing for content, movie tickets and DVDs.

Those days are past us now and Netflix joins TiVo as Just Another Corporation. Today, at least for me, Google may be the last company where I feel they truly care about the user. They’ve had their own gaffs and shortcomings but I’ve never felt like they put the screws to me like TiVo, Netflix or any of a hundred other corporations have.

MiniKeePass Brings KeePass to iPhone

justin — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 18:34:17 +0000

Dropbox Export to MiniKeePass

When I started using KeePass earlier this year the best app on the iPhone to access those passwords was MyKeePass, it cost a buck, was rarely updated and only worked with KeePass databases of v2.14 or prior.

Cruising the AppStore to see if someone released a better program turned up MiniKeePass, released in July. It works with the latest KeePass database revision (v2.16), can import your database from Dropbox and it’s free which pretty much fills my whole wishlist, I’m a simple man.

It does have a few features which severely compromise security in my opinion, and security is the whole point of using KeePass right? My settings are:

Pin Enabled: OFF (Not sure why this option is here, you should be re-entering your database password to access it not using a short pin as an alternative)
Delete All Data on PIN Failure: OFF (Same reason as above, the PIN option is insecure)
Close Database on Timeout: ON (I have mine set to lock after 5 minutes)
Remember Database Passwords: OFF (Lawdy! Don’t do this, keep them in your encrypted KeePass DB!)
Hide Passwords: ON (standard security feature, just shows asterisks)
Clear Clipboard on Timeout: ON (Mine clears after 3 minutes)

MiniKeePass Security Settings

Even though some features add convenience at the cost of security, which I’m not a fan of, it’s still a great app and I’m glad to have it.

Apple TV Slideshow Speed Unchangeable [Update: Sort Of?]

justin — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 23:59:02 +0000

Apple TV Slideshow Settings

Well this one was a little surprising, the latest Apple TV (2nd generation, software v4.3) doesn’t have the option to change the speed of your slideshow. All my other devices let me set the length of time between slides; TiVo, Panasonic TV, Boxee Box, but why not the Apple TV? It apparently switches slides based on hard-coded intervals which appear to depend on the type of transition you have selected, I’ve seen it anywhere between 3 and 10 seconds depending on how many images are displayed concurrently.

The missing feature isn’t much of a problem to Apple TV owners apparently because a Google search turns up almost no complaints. However someone did suggest that if you really want to choose your slide intervals you can set them on a per-album basis in iPhoto and share them in iTunes.

Slideshow Interval Setting

UPDATE: So thanks to a post at Apple Support Communities it appears you can change your slideshow interval on two themes, Ken Burns and Classic. Why they chose to put the delay setting in there where it can’t be used on Origami, Scrapbook or the other modern themes I have no idea. To get there:

Navigate to your photos, choose an album
Choose Settings, scroll to the bottom themes; either Ken Burns or Classic
Set Time Per Slide to your preference (default: 3 seconds)

Free Up Space in Gmail: Scalpels and Chainsaws

justin — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 19:48:23 +0000

Bought a little time

I needed to do some quick-and-dirty deleting in a Gmail account, a user managed to fill all 7613 MB with “humorous” videos and PDF files. Who is still attaching videos in this age of YouTube? Anyway for being a search company Google seems to be missing the most important search function of all in Gmail, filter by size! You cannot search for large attachments in Gmail, a heinous omission. To sort your mail by size your best bet is to install Mozilla Thunderbird and add your Gmail account (as IMAP) temporarily. Once Thunderbird downloads all the headers you can sort by size and remove the worst offenders.

That’s the scalpel way, but sometimes you just want a chainsaw. The chainsaw method involves Google’s search terms, my favorites:

has:attachment

before: (yyyy/mm/dd)

filename: (pdf, xls, wmv, mov, avi, etc…)

label:unread (if you haven’t even read them, you probably don’t need them)

I was able to free up about a gigabyte with

has:attachment before:2010/01/01 filename:pdf

alone, then a bit more by filtering for video extensions. Google does allow you to purchase extra space for your Google Apps account but unfortunately it doesn’t apply to Gmail accounts, for that you have to pay $50/yr for 25GB of storage on the premium plan.