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Nerd Stuff
Need a Reason to Use Evolution Email? – Attachment Reminders
Mar 30th
Tonight I was cranking away on an email, extremely focused on making it sound as professional as possible. I was re-reading sentences, moving words around. When I was finally happy with what I had on the page, I hit send. What I forgot to do was attach the file I was writing about – oops. What this usually means is that I have to send a very unprofessional follow-up email saying “and here is the attachment” or something of that sort.
But tonight that didn’t happen. Tonight Evolution, the default mail client in Ubuntu 10.04, was looking out for me.
It had a pretty good idea of what I was doing and prevented me from having to send that very silly follow up email. I am a big fan of software that has my back. Congratulations, Evolution – you just moved up in my book.
Quick and Easy Multipage Tiffs in Ubuntu
Feb 6th
I have never really been a fan of the multipage tiff creation within xsane. It works okay when you are scanning a lot of paper that makes up a single document, but it is somewhat cumbersome when you just want to lay a big stack of paper on the scanner consisting of several single and multi-page documents, scan in the entire batch as single page files and then create your own multipage tiff files on the fly.
I have used tiffcp in the past to create multipage tiffs from the command line. However, what I wanted was something built into Nautilus so as I was reviewing large icons of the batch of paper I just scanned, I could simply select the ones that go together, right click, and create a multipage tiff from those files.
Installing nautilus-actions
To make this happen, I was going to need something that allowed me to customize my right click options in Nautilus. Some quick googling lead me to the nautilus-actions package. It provides a slick interface to build out custom actions for the right click menu, exactly what I wanted to do!
Setting up nautilus-actions
After installing, I navigated to System > Preferences > Nautilus Actions Configuration and added a new action called “Create Multipage TIFF”.
The next thing to do was to setup what I wanted this action to do using the Edit Action dialog. It is pretty easy to do as well. We specify the label, the tooltip, the command we want to use, and the additional options. Nautilus-actions provides a legend for passing various parameters that could be determined based on what is selected. For what I wanted to do, I simply needed a list of all the files I selected (%M) and the current working directory (%d). I decided I wanted my output naming convention to look something like, out-<filename of file I right clicked on>.tiff, so out-%f.tiff became my last parameter.
I think this next part is really cool. Nautilus-actions allows me to specify when I want this right click option to be available. This is great because I don’t want to see this option when I am not selecting multiple tiff images. To prevent this from happening, you can just click on the Conditions tab and build it out. For my use case, I wanted this to show up only when I selected multiple tiff images. I didn’t want to fuss with specifying multiple file extensions, so I decided to qualify on the mime type, image/tiff. Finally, I specified that this should work for only files, and checked the “Appears only if selection has multiple files or folders” checkbox.
The Result
After logging out and back in to restart Nautilus, I was ready to test. I found a directory with several tiff files that I wanted to merge, selected 2 of them and saw my beautiful, customized Nautilus action.
Thank you serveraxis.com!
Dec 3rd
So, here is the deal… I like to tinker. A lot.
Today during a discussion with my dear friend Nathan, we decided we needed to install byobu so we could configure and setup our virtual terminals with ease. Our server, however, was running Intrepid and there was no installation candidate. So, rather than take the easy route and add the PPA, we said “eff it, let’s upgrade”.
A sudo do-release-upgrade later, the upgrade from Intrepid to Jaunty kicked off, finished great, rebooted, and we started the upgrade to Karmic goodness. Again, things were running smoothly, new packages were installed, and another reboot.
After the reboot, I got caught up with real work and totally forgot all about byobu, why we were upgrading, etc.
This is where serveraxis.com comes in, and the reason for this post. Before heading out that day, I checked my email one more time and saw an email from support@serveraxis.com about my VPS. They said it was not starting and recommended I take a look at it. I tried to ssh to it, and it was unresponsive, so it appeared very down indeed. I wrote them a quick email back asking if they had any recommendations, they said they would take a look.
During my commute home, I got another email from support about how they had located and corrected the kernel issue and that the VPS was operational again.
Here’s the deal. I looked and looked at several VPS providers, and even tried two others, before landing on serveraxis. I initially landed on them because the specs you got for the price were outstanding. What I didn’t realize I was getting was proactive support (they told me I had a problem before I realized it) and super speedy problem resolution.
For those of you out there nerdy enough to know what a VPS is and might consider getting your own little slice of the cloud, I hands down recommend checking out serveraxis.com.