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Kindle+Briss for PDFs

Submitted by Jeffrey Rice on Wed, 07/13/2011 - 17:37

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While the Kindle does support PDFs natively, readability has been a problem for me. I generally have to rotate the Kindle 90 degrees to get the text large enough to read.

Briss is a cleverly named PDF cropping program. Briss can crop away the page numbers and headers/footers of your PDF eBooks before you run them through a conversion program to create an ePub or Mobi book. That's great by itself.

Mirror Drupal on Mac for local development

Submitted by Jeffrey Rice on Sat, 09/18/2010 - 10:14

To begin with, this assumes you have a working local server environment. I'm using MAMP, which was by far the easiest solution I have seen under Leopard. The standard edition is free and comes with Apache2, MySQL, PHP5, and phpmyadmin. Previously, I wrote up my notes on configuring MAMP for a local development environment, and you can read my hints here.

Drupal: Limit profile categories visibility to selected user roles

Submitted by Jeffrey Rice on Fri, 09/17/2010 - 06:55

The control over the visibility of Profile fields in Drupal is fairly course. The only options are:

iTunes organization for Classical Music

Submitted by Jeffrey Rice on Mon, 08/16/2010 - 10:15

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I'm not the first to comment on it by any means (1,2,3,4, and too many others to list) but I'm still struggling with iTunes to get my collection of classical music into meaningful genres. I'm using primarily the method outlined by Stan Brown in his article Taming iTunes for Classical Music, with some tweaks I've added based on my listening habits and problems I encountered as I was organizing my collection.

Updated VERP for pflogsumm

Submitted by Jeffrey Rice on Tue, 04/13/2010 - 11:15

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Postfix Log Summary (pflogsumm) is a useful tool for looking at your Postfix logs. However, it lists all the sender addresses and the regex patterns for consolidating single senders is outdated. This is an update - it's fairly aggressive, but works for me.

To activate the new patterns after you've patched, run pflogsumm with the option "—verp_mung=3".

Revisiting Greylisting

Submitted by Jeffrey Rice on Mon, 04/05/2010 - 08:52

Some time ago, in my battle against spam, I started using greylisting. Greylisting, for those not familiar with it, takes advantage of a standard fallback in email delivery systems. If a server is running but temporarily unable to accept incoming messages, it can send an error code saying so. RFC compliant servers are supposed to retry after a timeout period. Why is this useful? Because most spammers don't use compliant servers or don't have the time to retry.

Easy and Elegant (?) Snow Leopard Web Development Platform

Submitted by Jeffrey Rice on Sat, 12/19/2009 - 16:00

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I'm getting started with designing a new Drupal theme using Zen. However, a first step needs to be to set up a development environment on my Mac, so I can use local tools and not keep messing with a production (glorified hobby) server.

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A Proposal for creating pseudo-random, unique, recoverable passwords

Submitted by Jeffrey Rice on Sat, 12/12/2009 - 03:38

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We all know the importance of good passwords, and how dangerous it is to reuse passwords between websites. One breach and your whole weblife is open, right? So the alternative is random passwords for each website. That's great - strong, secure - but what if you need to get log in and you don't have 1Password or Keepass (etc) available?

Eject Time Machine on sleep (or any other disk)

Submitted by Jeffrey Rice on Fri, 10/30/2009 - 13:21

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In the morning, my Macbook is usually asleep - and plugged into the hub that connects it to the Time Machine disk. I usually just grab it and go - leading to the dreaded 'disconnect' message when I wake it up at work.

Now, I have a solution - to eject the disk when my Mac goes to sleep. You'll need SleepWatcher, a cool little program from Bernhard Baehr. It is compatible with Leopard, but appears to run fine on my Snow Leopard system. Install SleepWatcher and the startup item.

JavaPassion Course

Submitted by Jeffrey Rice on Sat, 10/24/2009 - 14:28

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I've started the Java course created by Sang Shin at http://www.javapassion.com/javaintro/. I'm very impressed - the pacing is pretty good, there are exercises and homework, a forum for questions and comments, and it's free! What a great resource to learn from.

Java has come a long way since I took a class back in 1996.

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