31 December, 2011

What New Years Means to Me - Pt. III

My New Year's Resolution is to not assume people who disagree with me are ignorant. Sometimes they DO have a lot of good data, upon which to make their decisions and judgments, but they simply don't have the tool-set to properly analyze the information.

#NoFixingStupid

- From "What The New Years Means to Me", by Dan Reams (shopping a publisher)

What New Years Means to Me - Pt. II

When I was three, I threw a baseball off the Earth, and the next year, I was hoping we would hit it and it would cause a big crater. I was so young and naive, then, in the ways of orbital mechanics.

Silly me. Little did I know that it had never achieved escape velocity, and it ended up killing a donkey in Tijuana about a week after I'd thrown it up. I guess the performer was po'd at the loss of her income.

- From "What The New Years Means to Me", by Dan Reams (shopping a publisher)

What New Years Means to Me

Blah blah Happy New Years blah blah.

What do I like about New Years? Back when I physically wrote checks, I really liked being able to write a different digit, in the one's place. Every decade I was like, "All right! I get to write TWO DIFFERENT DIGITS!". For now though, it's "Welcome, Two, and One, well, eff you."

Of course, now it's TYPING, not writing. So, like, I'll be doing a lot more 2012-MM-DD this year, and I'm looking forward to it.

- From "What The New Years Means to Me", by Dan Reams (shopping a publisher)

10 December, 2011

Nook Tablet Update - My Wife is Returning Hers - Readability Not as Good as an e-ink System

My wife very much enjoyed her Nook Tablet as a tablet.  However, as a book reader it gave her a headache when using it for an hour or more at a stretch.  She much more enjoys our kids e-ink based Nooks.

So off it goes, back to Barnes & Noble.

ref my posting: http://waukeshawestside.blogspot.com/2011/11/more-fodder-for-fire-nook-lightweight.html

08 December, 2011

UWM pantherLINK email - Thunderbird - Extracting AND Deleting Attachments - Review of "Attachment Extractor"

    While I utilized this tool on my UWM email account, one could likely use it on any Thunderbird email account.  Note that some of the deletion options may or may not work, depending on, for example, how your service provider implements IMAP, etc.  The choice to run the tool -- and possibly lose your email messages and/or file attachments -- is yours.

     I ran the Thunderbird add-on, "Attachment Extractor" (http://www.eviljeff.com/?page=moz-extensions) and (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/attachmentextractor/) against 5,174 messages in my IMAP inbox.

My Goals
  • Extract the file attachments from my messages to a local folder.
    • Utilize the option to keep a text (HTML) copy of the message itself, as a file, in addition to the extracted file attachment.
  • Delete the file attachments, after downloading them from the email messages, while retaining the email messages themselves.

Environment

  • Thunderbird 8.0
  • Windows 7
  • Extraction folder set to a local drive
    The entire process took about 20 minutes to extract the files and to create the text file copies of any messages that also had attachments.  Surprisingly, I could continue to use Thunderbird and other applications while the process ran.

    I found the tool to be useful.  I particularly liked the ability to include variable keys to include in the resulting file names.


    The first time I ran the utility I opted to use the 'Save message txt to file' option.  Doing so created a separate HTML file for every message in my inbox.  While an interesting backup, I found no real use for the HTML files, so I aborted the process, disabled that option, and simply downloaded the attachments themselves.
    For my UWM account I chose 'Delete the attachment from the message' and its 'Delete with AE's internal (experimental) routine.  This method allowed me to bypass having to okay the deletion of each message's attachments.  Again, just like using the tool itself, the risk of utilizing that option is your choice.
What Next?
    Once you download your file attachments, make sure to back them up to an external drive, a cloud drive, etc., using the desired encryption technique of your choice.  I suggest TrueCrypt, to encrypt containers, or Crypt4Free to encrypt individual files.  Both are free and easily locatable via your favorite search engine.