Customising Dates in Evolution

Evolution is Gnome's official email, calendar, contact, & task management software.  ie. I use it daily to check my emails.

I've always had a pet peeve with date formats that look like this:

It's fine when I'm thinking about mail relative to today.  However, sometimes I have to check for certain emails with regard to the absolute date.  For example, "What was all the correspondence to a certain customer on the 21st".  I would quickly scan the date column for 21/01/11, and find there isn't any.  However the 21st was last Friday, which is shown as "Fri 02:42 PM".  There are various reasons why this is not a good thing with regard to efficient human-machine interfaces, however there are also good reasons for a fuzzy date.

Since Linux gives you so much choice (in the right places) it's gratifying to see the option to change the date column to any of a number of presets, or your very own format:

As you can see, I've selected a simple day/month/year format:

Note: the version of Evolution used here is 2.32.1

hop counter

I was playing with traceroute and felt like "rolling my own" hop counter, so this is what I put together in a few seconds:

for ((i=1;i<21;i++)); do echo -n .; if ping -c 1 -t $i somehost.com >/dev/null 2>&1; then break; fi; done; echo " $i hops"

You'll reasonably quickly see a few dots (especially if the router in question doesn't respond to pings) and a final count.  You can of course tweak the options to ping to make it more like traceroute (max wait time, max hops, etc).  The output is something like:

.......... 10 hops

Now, for some reason `traceroute` needs superuser access for the ICMP option, and yet you can do the same with ping.

Internet TV... without the internet TV bit.

So I bought a 32" LED backlit (not LED pixel) LCD Samsung a couple of months ago.  It's hard to compare "Internet" TVs because each brand puts their own spin on exactly what "internet" means.

The Samsung series 6 has an Ethernet port, and by default Windows (Vista and higher) detect it and ask if you want to "trust" it or not.  The TV detects DLNA servers you might have easily on your network too.

But what about this "internet" claim?  When I first bought it, there were some simple internet "apps" that you can choose from and install.  Mostly boring stuff from a TV perspective like Google Maps, Picasa, Facebook, Youtube, etc.  This is all good but not exactly what I'd call internet "TV".

SATA disk beeping

I've never heard a hard drive beep!  Until yesterday.

I just yoinked a free second hand Inspiron 9400 laptop for a media centre, sans disk.  I purchased the cheapest SATA 2.5" disk I could find - 320Gb for about $50.  I started installing MythBuntu and then the drive started clicking and beeping, and the installation froze!  It was the usual crunch of a failing drive with an intermittent "beep" (much like the electrical interference noise you sometimes get in laptops / desktops).  The drive worked fine in a USB caddy.

At a complete loss, I turned to the oracle (Google) and found this.  Strangely, some drives are sensitive to the 5V power supply (it was the cheapest drive I could find).

Up until then I had been working on battery, so I plugged in the power, rebooted, and the drive worked flawlessly.  Hopefully it won't do the same when I loose power...

update: The problem seemed to be getting worse, so I returned the drive under warranty.  With the Christmas break I'll have to wait until they get back to me...
update: The drive was returned, and Seagate replaced it under warranty.  For the same price I purchased a 320Gb Western Digital Caviar Black 2.5".  It is infinitely quieter (I can't hear it with my head pressed to the laptop).

Live and Learn!

WakeOnLan from your Pocket PC

There are various programs and tips around for those of us who still use Windows Mobile (yes, I don't have an iPhone nor and Android phone...)

I've gathered some tips to set up "Wake on Lan" so you can wake any computer in your house from your mobile/PPC.