Paul Roub : blahg

Since it appears Bloglines will never answer my request for sane 'My Start Page' behavior, here's a DIY fix if you're using Firefox.

To recap: Bloglines (beta) has a My Start Page feature, similar to old-school Bloglines "Playlists", which lets you pick a selection of your feeds as an at-a-glance front page. Nice, except it displays both read and unread headlines; for me, this makes it kind of useless. Why do I need to see the same Groklaw post I read three days ago?

Edit or create userContent.css (details on finding that available from Mozilla), and include the following:

div.quickviewTemplate div[ismarkedread="1"] { display: none; }

This just tells Firefox to hide any headlines in the Bloglines Beta Start Page which are already marked as "read".

You'll need to restart Firefox to see the results.

Posted by Paul Roub at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've decided New Year's resolutions don't work for me. I've also decided to blame this fact on the too-long timeframe, not on my own lack of will power.

Consequently, I'm making some short-term resolutions for this month.

• Record a fleshed-out demo of "Disappear". This is doable for a number of reasons:
  1. I'm having fun recording (playing) with my christmas present.
  2. Therefore, the basic rhythm track and a scratch bass line are already down.
• Buy a new bass. There's a reason that the existing bass line is labeled "scratch". A fretless with a bad neck is not the ideal recording tool. Something cheap, serviceable, probably a Squier or Mexi P-bass.
• Get the running back up to 3 days a week. Got way off track since November.
• Put up temporary shelves in the garage, and use them, while deciding what the hell kind of permanent storage and workspace solution is needed.

Voila.

Let's see how that goes.

Update, 2005-01-04: One down. Bought a used Squier P-Bass at Guitar Haven, easily the most Ed's Guitars-like place I've found since, well, Ed's. Which is high, yet difficult to explain, praise.

Update, 2005-01-24: Shelves went up last week. Bass, main guitar and percussion tracks recorded. Running tonight, Thursday and Saturday (so goes the plan).

Posted by Paul Roub at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm trying to psych myself up about the impending preparations for this like a good geek -- you know, "Hey, great, I get to try out the new shutters!" or "I can use that collection of Sterno recipies..."

Not really working.

Posted by Paul Roub at 5:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

OK, maybe not indispensable. But I really don't want to be without these -- I use them constantly, and they spare me untold amounts of grief (and yes, obviously I use IE View all the time, but I'm talking about other people's extensions at the moment). I don't keep too many extensions installed for more than a day or two; but a few seem like part of the browser to me now.

spellbound - Spellchecker for Firefox 1.0 and the Mozilla Suite

Just started using this, but I'm very happy with it. Spell check any text box with a right-click. Great for checking, say, the title of this blog where I'd initially written "Indispensible"

JustBlogIt

Quickly add a blog entry regarding the current page, including any selected text. I use this to blog MP3s, etc. for later download; also great for linkblogs, etc. Very handy.

BugMeNot extension

Man, do I love this one. Land on a mandatory-registration page when trying to read a news article? Right-click, select BugMeNot... Automatically grabs information from the BugMeNot site, fills in the username/password fields, and submits the form. Didn't realize how badly I wanted it until I actually had it installed. The second thing I add to a new Firefox install (right after IE View).

Posted by Paul Roub at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Continuing the theme of unsolicited advice, over at openmikes.org I offer a bit of Free Advice to Clubs, Bars, Coffeehouses, etc.

Posted by Paul Roub at 3:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you're any kind of web geek (of course you are, you're reading a blog - deal with it), you definitely want to check out the batch of interviews over at Meet The Makers. Folks like Jeffrey Zeldman and Steve Champeon talking about the things they do very well.

If you're like me (perish the thought), though, you want to print things like this out and read them at your convenience. Oops - the interviews are in multi-page form only. So even if you do print out all 7 pages, you get a bunch of redundant header pages, etc.

Naturally, being a good, real-work-avoiding developer, I wrote a li'l script. Page headers, footers, background, links etc. are preserved. I did, however take a small liberty with the printed CSS, just making the distinction between questions and answers.

Source is here, if you're interested. Thrown together in a morning, so be kind. Patches and suggestions welcome.

And thanks to Brian for not blocking my IP when he saw all the weirdness in his server logs.

Posted by Paul Roub at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's back! Not My Desk is back!

Except, you know, in that it's not.

Posted by Paul Roub at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Looking for a serious Windows IMAP client that doesn't drive me nuts.

Actually, cross-platform would be even better. My gut feeling is that I'll end up hacking on Mozilla Mail (a.k.a. Thunderbird) to meet my needs, and hopefully someone else's.

Meantime, Eudora misses out on all sorts of things (auto-save to a remote Sent Items folder, for one); Mulberry's interface is... interesting, plus it's folder-list display doesn't work for me at all; Outlook 2K isn't actually half bad, but it's offline support is mediocre at best.

And none of them works well in my world -- where categorization / sorting happens on the server side, not at the client. That is, by the time the client sees a new email, it's no longer in the Inbox. It's in a folder.

I'd like that folder to be opened and highlighted, just as it would be if Outlook (e.g.) had routed it there all on its own. I'd like a standard new-mail notification. That's all, really. OK, I'd also like full-blown disconnected-mode support, but one step at a time.

Anyone know of a client that does this right now?

Update, 2004/10/12: Thunderbird has come a long way. Search is over, I think.

Posted by Paul Roub at 5:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (1)