j.mo, letting Google solve my computer problems

Autofilled Email Addresses in iPhone Are Permanent Fixture

2011-12-15T20:30:17Z

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!

2011-12-15T18:08:09Z

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

2011-12-01T20:00:58Z

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!

2011-11-10T04:30:15Z

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

2011-10-12T01:40:59Z

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

2011-11-10T04:33:04Z

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?]

2011-11-01T20:16:21Z

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

2011-11-10T04:32:36Z

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.

Tomato Advanced Firewall Settings

2011-11-10T04:31:40Z

Tomato Advanced Firewall Settings

A user commented on the Tomato Wake-on-LAN post:

I found I couldn’t get wake on lan to work at all until I enabled Advanced->Firewall->Allow multicast.

Well that made me wonder what all those advanced settings did, and turns out the descriptions available suck! Well sometimes there wasn’t even a description to label as “suck” so lets put some descriptions in Google that are at least marginally better. In italics is the setting explanation from the Tomato manual at Wikibooks:

Respond to ICMP ping - If checked the router will respond to ping requests from on the WAN interface. (Default: unchecked)

If you plan on using Wake-on-LAN this must be checked or the router will ignore the Magic Packet that actually tells your computer to turn on. If you don’t need to access your network remotely you can leave it unchecked.

Allow multicast - If checked, the router will allow multicast packets to reach the LAN. (Default: unchecked)

Multicast is a “one-to-many” communication method so a computer can send data to several computers at once via a single packet, improving efficiency. It is frequently used for streaming video and you may notice performance gains/losses by enabling/disabling it, total crapshoot. You can leave this unchecked most likely. Just to be confusing some routers like Linksys call this option “filter multicast” in which case you would leave that setting checked to disable (i.e. filter out) the multicast packets.

NAT loopback - If checked, the router allows LAN devices to reach other LAN devices via the router’s WAN IP address and a properly configured port forward. If unchecked, LAN devices can only contact other LAN devices via their local IP addresses. (Default: Forwarded only)

This one is a little complicated but DynDNS has a good description with a diagram. For example the loopback problem occurs when there is a webserver on the same subnet with you. If you try to visit that webserver by browsing to TheWebserver.com or whatever it’s domain is the router would try to send you out onto the internet to visit the site. Problem is the server isn’t out on the internet from your perspective, it’s on your local area network. Most users will want to leave this at the default setting of Forwarded only. If you want more crazy detail on what is happening this thread should prove helpful.

Enable SYN cookies - Activates SYN cookies. (Default: unchecked)

Probably the best description in the whole book! SYN cookies are a tool for thwarting a SYN flood, an older type of DoS attack. I would enable this unless you find it causing problems with your router. The Tomato developer has commented about sparse and unconfirmed reports of issues with the setting.

Well that’s something at least, hopefully it’s all correct yeah?!

Ninite to Save Me Untold Hours, Ulcers

2011-04-05T17:24:13Z

Ninite software selection

It looks like Ninite has been around about two years now, wish I had known that. Basically it creates a fully automated installer for whatever free software you select on their website. Most of my favorite apps are available such as Dropbox, Chrome, Digsby, KeePass (a less full featured version, I prefer v2.x), VLC, Notepad++ and a dozen or so others I use regularly.

With the number of OS reinstalls I do Ninite is definitely going to be a huge time saver. It also has some Linux options if you want to go that route, although Synaptic is pretty good on Ubuntu.