• Open up your “hosts” file in a text editor. This is the location on Windows XP:

  C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
  

• Add two different hostnames with the same IP address.
• Enter control panel -> User accounts and select your user. Then click “Manage your network passwords” (in the upper left corner, assuming you haven’t selected “classic mode”).
• Add the different host names and the corresponding user names and passwords you want to use. You might need to add “MACHINENAME\” before the user name. The MACHINENAME is the network name of your Windows machine.
• Optionally, map the shares as network drives.

Since I usually know exactly what I’m looking for, I wanted to be able to go directly to a certain page when entering a search term, instead of searching for the term.

This is how you modify Firefox to behave that way:

• Add the search engines to Firefox through Mycroft or the official Add-on repository.
• Close Firefox.
• On XP, enter the directory

  C:\Documents and Settings\YOURUSERNAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\YOURPROFILE\searchplugins

• Open the xml files in a text editor.
• For Wikipedia, you need to change the following line

  <os:Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/{searchTerms}&sourceid=mozilla-search">

  into this:

  <os:Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/{searchTerms}">

• I.e., change the URL so that it points straight at the article instead of the search function.

I was quite annoyed but the Google logos displayed every now and then on top of my pictures, and decided to try to remove them. It wasn’t hard, here’s how I did it.

• Install a resource editing program, such as the XN Resource Editor.
• Open up the Picasa installation folder and make a backup of the file Picasa2.scr, just in case you want to switch back to the branded screen saver again.
• Start the XN Resource Editor and open the file Picasa2.scr.
• Locate the two JPEG resources in the resource tree, in my case it was 111 and 114 (this might differ between different versions of the screen saver).
• Right-click on the resources and choose “Delete Resource”.
• Save the file.
• Done! The Google logos have now been removed from the screen saver!

A little tip: The same screen saver (atleast AFAIK) is available in the Google Pack, in case you don’t want to install the full Picasa suite. It’s called “Google Photos Screensaver”, but seems to be the same program that they bundle with Picasa.

• Install the excellent freeware program MyPhoneExplorer.
• Enter the Options (F2), choose Sync and then choose Thunderbird Lightning in the “Calendar” field.
• MyPhoneExplorer will automatically install the required Thunderbird plugin.
• Click on “Advanced” to choose which calendar to sync and what mode (merge calendars or let phone override Lightning or vice versa)
• Hit Ok, enter the Calendar and hit sync - done!

If you want to create a desktop shortcut to automatically start the sync - duplicate the shortcut to MyPhoneExplorer, enter the icon properties and add “action=sync syncitem=organizer” to the destination (after myphoneexplorer.exe). There are more command line options available in the English FAQ.

Hope this howto helps someone, it sure made my life a lot easier! Before I discovered this method, I was auto-exporting the calendar as an ICS file (through a dedicated Thunderbird extension) and then importing in manually into MyPhoneExplorer on a regular basis. Now I only need to connect the USB cable and click the dedicated shortcut - quite an improvement!

• Try using the “Manage my network passwords” window (accessed through the “User accounts” applet in the control panel)
• If that didn’t help:

• Make sure to enter the server name in the username box, example: MACHINE\username
• Try entering the IP address of the server instead of the host name (worked for me when everything else failed).

• First, a black list. I have an array with bad words (viagria, cialis, roulette, casino) which are common in spam posts and quite uncommon in valid guestbook entries. Every post is checked against the black list. The black list also contains a few URL:s that are often used by spammers (blogspot.com and hometown.aol.com) as well as the tag [url= which is probably BBcode.

• Link spamming. A quick check is made on the number of http:// links, if it’s above 5 - well, it’s most probably a spam!

• Cookie test. This is something I picked up on a mailing list a few weeks ago, and it works brilliantly. The idea is that spam bots aren’t valid browsers, they just look for forms and submit them. The trick is to set a cookie when the form is displayed, and then check for the existance of that cookie when the form is received, before it’s saved. If there’s no cookie - the post isn’t saved! This stops people with cookies disabled from entering posts, but it stops a LOT of spam.

BTW, here’s my entire black list as of today:
levitra,viagra,cialis,porn,roulette,casino,hometown.aol.com,blogspot.com,[url=

If you think your web host has enough horse power to resize large images, go ahead and modify line 89 in wp-admin/inline-uploading.php and change the number three to something higher:

if ( $imagedata['width'] * $imagedata['height'] < 3 * 1024 * 1024 ) {

This should be added to the WordPress Codex.

I moved all files from the inbox to a temporary directory and started moving the back a few at a time, to isolate which emails that caused the problem. After about an hour of investigation, I noticed that there were a few duplicates with the same size and almost the same name. The only thing that differed was the Maildir “flags” after the comma.

The reason was probably that the user was viewing his mailbox while the backup was being restored, causing some files to be renamed and thus creating duplicates. The IMAP server (Courier in this case) was apparently confused by multiple files with the same timestamp but with different flags, and dropped the connection to SquirrelMail.

To isolate the duplicates, I used ls -1 and cut:
/bin/ls -1|cut -d "," -f 1|uniq -c|sort -n

Then I removed the duplicates, which were the files with file count > 2 in the list produced by ls.

When I investigated the originating IP:s, I noticed that all spam except ONE came from one of four C-nets. I quickly decided to block in the .htaccess file in the weblog directory.

Here’s what I added.

# DIE, SPAMBOTS, DIE!

I’m willing to take the very small risk that a valid user from one of these IP:s won’t be allowed to enter my weblog.

(Yes, I know that I could install a WordPress plugin, but this was quicker and less cumbersome. )

The other day I got the idea to make a bookmarklet that does the conversion for me, and voilá! All you have to do is mark the timestamp and click the “Convert” bookmarklet. You’ll get an input field if you don’t mark anything.

Here’s the bookmarklet:
Convert timestamp (Bookmark the link, don’t click it!)

Please let me know if you find it useful or think of a way to improve it.