Monthly Archives: April 2005

Quick File 0.15

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Don’t know what Quick File for Thunderbird is? See my original post on it.

From an email announcment from Paul Tomlin:

Quick File 0.15 has been released.

You can download this spiffy new version from the Quick File homepage at

http://www.paultomlin.com/projects/mozilla/thunderbird/quickfile/

Changes from 0.14 include:

  • Fixed the auto selection of the next message. Previously there was an option in the extension options dialog ‘auto select next message’, which has been removed. This feature is now enabled all the time and works far far better. I’ve not had a single occurance of the previous bug whereby the message preview pane would not have any content, even though the header information was displayed.
  • Fixed handling of folders which have regular expression meta-characters in their names. Previously, if your selected folder name included brackets, braces, hash/pounds and various others the OK button would be greyed out. An earlier attempt, privately mailed to a few people failed to fix the problem but I finally tracked the issue down. I’ve not managed to make this version fail on any folder names. If you find an example then please let me know, since I now know where to look for the problem.

SlickRun

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I have quickly grown quite fond of this program. It is a free Windows program, similar in concept to the commercial app ActiveWords which I demoed for a while, but it never stuck with me for some reason.

It’s basically a little command-line that you can bring up by pressing a key (Windows+Q by default) and then you can type “MagicWords” to launch programs, go to URLs, etc… I’ve setup words to take me to certain web sites I use at work, email myself, lock the computer, go to “Program Files” or “My Documents”, etc… It just seems much easier to me to use the keyboard than to hunt around for the proper shortcut and shortcuts , whether on the Desktop or in the QuickLaunch bar, take up screen real estate and make things seem cluttered. I strive to have my desktop as clutter-free and Zen-like as possible and this helps me have that and still be able to launch things quickly.

* SlickRun
* SlickRun Help

So to recap, my favorite productivity-enhancing programs, in rough order of decreasing usefulness to me:

* StrokeIt  [ my blog post ]
* Thunderbird with Quick File extension   [ my blog post ]
* SlickRun
* AutoHotkey  [ my blog post ]

What are yours?

More oncall fun

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Monday was a doozy of a day and the fun continued yesterday. First, the pager went off about 5 times during a meeting. Then when someone commented on it after the meeting, I jokingly pretended to give an OfficeSpace-style thrashing to it, but did it ever go lightly with my elbow. Well not that lightly apparently, because this seemed to have broke the LCD screen on the pager, which made me want to laugh, cheer, and freak out all at the same time (apparently, these pagers can dish out abuse, but they can’t take it). Luckily (or unluckily?) I was able to go down to the IS department and get another one in 10 minutes flat. Then the pager lie in waiting, mostly quiet, for a few hours (“Crouching beeper, hidden pager”) and then attacked in full-force at around 12:30pm at night, right after it sensed that I was relaxed and ready to go to sleep. When all was said and done, it was 2am and my wife was passed out on the couch, sleeping through the pages and I was an envious, tired mofo.

I’m on call this week

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Yesterday, some misconfigured servers at another ISP hammered Yahoo. We actually thought it was a DOS attack. I got 393 pages in < 30 minutes. I can still hear the sound of the pager, hammered into my head. Bleargh.

Skype

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I tried Skype yesterday. I haven’t had a successful two-sided conversation with it, but that is not the fault of Skype. I bought some adapters from Radio Shack to convert my 2.5″ headset jack to two 1/8″ jacks, but I suspect I got the wrong stuff — I might just buy myself a PC headset with two 1/8″ jacks or a USB connection since Skype seems to be promising. Recommendations? I’m thinking of this one:

Sennheiser PC150 Noise Cancelling PC Headset

I am impressed with the application so far. My friend Andy skyped me and the sound quality of his voice was excellent, better than telephone for sure. He couldn’t hear me so I had to type back to him, which definitely made for a very bizarre conversation dynamic.

I had even purchased $13 (10 English pounds) of SkypeOut credit so that I could try calling my parents on their landline. I wanted to find a free Skype voucher code so I could try before I buy so I searched the Internet but couldn’t find any, so I just plunked down the $13. This was before I realized that I had mic problems so I could hear them but they could not hear me. After 20 seconds of fiddling with the connection, I gave up and called them from a regular phone. I’ll try again when I get a better headset.