mark.bockenstedt.net » How-To

Add Your Twitter Timeline to FriendFeed with an Imaginary Friend

Mark — Tue, 19 May 2009 03:02:46 +0000

If you want to read your Twitter timeline from FriendFeed, you can do so utilizing what FriendFeed calls an Imaginary Friend. Simply set your “friend” up with a custom RSS feed that you’ll get from Yahoo! Pipes and you’re set. Here’s the setup for your pipe:

Make sure you add your password into the private string box in the upper right. Once you get the URL for this feed, go to the Imaginary Friend settings and create a new friend. Give your friend a name, then set up the RSS feed as a Custom RSS Feed. Browse to your new friend and view your feed. Simple as that.

Please leave questions and comments here.

Disable Bonjour in Cyberduck

Mark — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 16:32:49 +0000

Every time I load up Cyberduck, I get flooded with Bonjour Growl notifications. Since I never use Bonjour with Cyberduck, I figured it’s acceptable to disable it. It’s a simple Terminal command, like so many other things are in the Mac world. To disable Bonjour, fire up Terminal and execute this command:

defaults write ch.sudo.cyberduck rendezvous.enable false

If you want to re-enable Bonjour, do the same command but change false to true.

DIY Craigslist Super Feed

Mark — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:31:44 +0000

A while back I had a neat idea to build a service that would allow me to select a list of Craigslist feeds for a location (or locations) and aggregate it into a single feed. You could add any of the categories from any of the cities just by going to a website and it’d do all the work for you. However, I’ve found a much easier solution using Yahoo! Pipes.

If you’re unfamiliar with Pipes, it’s a way of aggregating data from a ton of different sources and pulling it into one channel. This is a perfect way to build a single RSS feed from multiple feeds. Here’s a diagram of what the finished product looks like:

Build Your Pipe

The basic idea is to create multiple instances of the Fetch Feed entity and join them together with a Union. You’ll want to create a Fetch Feed entity for each of the categories you want to aggregate, such as electronics, games/toys, etc. Simply click the output button from the feed entity and drag it to an input on the union entity to join the two. You can pipe multiple unions together if you need to scale the diagram.

Once you’ve joined your feeds into a union, you should add a Sort entity to sort the results by date in descending order. Drag the Sort entity to the sandbox and connect its input with the output from the union. Then, select “item.pubDate” as the sort field and “Descending” as the order (as shown in the diagram). Once you’ve done that, you can send its output to the input of the Pipe Output entity.

Run Your Pipe

When that’s all finished, save your pipe. At the top of the screen there will be a link labeled “Run Pipe…”, so click on that to get the results. After it’s been run, click More Options and select Get as RSS. Copy the URL and add that to your feed reader. Voila, you’ve now got a single feed for your city on Craigslist.

Backup Your Gmail With… Gmail Backup

Mark — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 19:20:34 +0000

Yesterday’s article was written giving instructions on how to back up all your email accounts using some pretty simple techniques. In the end, Thunderbird was the agent that we used to grab all the email from our gateway account. Today, I’d like to show you how we can accomplish the same thing with a different service called Gmail Backup.

Rather than copy and paste all of yesterday’s article to this one, please read that article and come back to this one. The only difference will be in step 3, which is the step in which we’re actually pulling email to the local machine.

New Step 3

The previous method used POP to download email. This step will use a different protocol called IMAP. Here’s the info you’ll need for enabling IMAP on your gateway account. Once you’ve got IMAP enabled, you need to download the Gmail Backup program, available for Windows or Linux. Once you have your client of choice, jump to the appropriate section below for instructions on setting up the client.

Generic Setup

For the most part, this software can be used uniformly across multiple platforms. If you want to use the GUI version in Linux, you need to install the WxPython packages (python-wxgtk2.8 in Ubuntu). You can also run it from the command line in any platform. With command line access comes the ability to script and schedule updates! The command line version may also work on OS X, but the GUI version doesn’t (yet).

GUI Version

I’ll just walk through this once, since it’s the same for both platforms. After installing (or extracting) Gmail Backup, launch the executable. If you’re on Linux, you want to run the gmail-backup-gui.sh file. You’ll be presented with a window like this one:

Fill in the first three text boxes in the GUI. If you only want to grab email for a date range, you can specify that in the Since Date and Before Date fields. This will allow you to grab email from only a certain timeframe, which makes it easier to archive your email by month.

Once you’ve got your archive, you can put it in your Dropbox or another safe location.

Linux – Command Line

I want to spend more time on this part because, let’s face it, I’m lazy and I like having things done for me. When run from the command line, the Linux variant of Gmail Backup can be be extremely powerful. You can easily set up Cron jobs to run the backup at a defined interval and use command line arguments to drill down to exactly what you want and where you want to place the backup.

1. Install Dropbox (optional)

If you plan on using Dropbox to store your backups, you can find Linux Dropbox packages here. When you’re run Dropbox and have defined a folder to use, you can proceed.

2. Tweak Command

In the folder you extracted from the Gmail Backup archive, you’ll find gmail-backup.sh. There are a number of command line arguments you can pass to this bash script. Whichever method you choose, you should consider appending 2>&1 /dev/null at the end because the command will generate a considerable amount of output. I only recommend doing this AFTER you’ve run it successfully so you know that it’s doing what its supposed to.

a. Cumulative Backup

For a cumulative backup (i.e. everything), simply use the following.

./gmail-backup.sh backup /path/to/backup/dir gateway@gmail.com password

b. Incremental Backup

Here’s a shot of what the file structure should look like on your disk (this is all in my home directory).

Incremental backups are more useful and easier to organize. Here’s the syntax for that.

./gmail-backup.sh backup /path/to/backup/dir/subdir gateway@gmail.com password 20081001 20081031

The last two arguments specify a start and end date for archiving. This example will archive everything from October 1, 2008, to October 31, 2008. But how do you calculate those dates in Bash, you ask?

You can use the –date parameter of the date command to get past and future dates. For instance, if you want to run a backup of your email for the last week (not including today, obviously), you can do something like this:

./gmail-backup.sh backup /path/to/backup/dir/subdir gateway@gmail.com password `date +%Y%m%d --date="7 days ago"` `date +%Y%m%d --date="1 day ago"`

I realize that’s pretty ugly, but it does the trick. If you’re ambitious enough to use a wrapper to get full control over directories, timeframes, etc., you can use something similar to this.

3. Insert Into Cron

This is the easy part – all you have to do is decide on a frequency and then make sure your $sd variable in the bash script matches that. If you run it every week, $sd should go back 7 days; if you run it every month, it should go back 1 month, etc. The command to run the script every Sunday at midnight:

0 0 * * 7 cd /home/mark/email_backup; ./gmail-backup.sh;

Restoring Archives

It’s important that I tell you that you can also restore backups made this way. However, I feel that it’s outside of the scope of this article. For info on that, check out the documentation page of Gmail Backup’s website.

How To Use Gmail as an Email Backup Service

Mark — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:05:47 +0000

With recent horror stories of Google users getting locked out of their accounts floating around the Internet, it makes you reconsider putting so much trust in Google. A lot of people have all their eggs in the Google basket, but they could too be locked out at any given time. Gmail could also go down or lose some of your email when you need it most. Here’s a method for archiving all your email to a local machine using a Gmail account and a POP3 email client.

1. Create a Gateway Email Account

I call this a gateway account because all your archived email will pass through this account. If you’ve already got one, make sure you can dedicate it to this sole purpose. If not, head over to Gmail and sign up for an account. Once you’ve got the account set up, we can start forwarding email to it.

2. Gathering Email

There are two ways to accomplish this and both methods are outlined assuming you’re getting email from another Gmail account (Google Apps for Your Domain works this way too). Method A involves forwarding a copy of your email to your gateway account; Method B involves grabbing email using POP3 from your gateway account.

a. Forwarding Email

This is pretty straight forward. Go into each of the Gmail accounts you wish to forward email from and click on the Settings link in the upper right, then click on the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab. Check the radio button next to “Forward a copy” and then enter the address for your gateway account. You’ll probably want to select keep Gmail’s copy in the inbox, especially if you intend on using the address. When you’re finished, click Save Changes.

b. Popping Email

Gmail has directions on enabling POP for your archive accounts, which is just step one. The beauty of this method is that you can set this up for any account that supports POP, which is just about every email service on the planet. Even if you’re not using Gmail, you can employ similar techniques to get this working.

Once you’ve enabled POP for your account, you can start pulling email from up to five accounts into your gateway account. Again, Google has directions on enabling Mail Fetcher, so check those out.

3. Setting Up the Email Client

There are a ton of applications you can use to do this, but I recommend using Mozilla Thunderbird (it’s free, fast, and just good). The basic idea is to set up Thunderbird to grab copies of email from your gateway account – and subsequently all other accounts funneled into it – and store them locally. Google already has good directions on how to do this, so I won’t reinvent the wheel.

Some tips for setting up your POP3 client are to make sure you enable POP for all mail and keep Gmail’s copy in the inbox (just in case). If you’re funneling high volumes of email into your gateway, you’ll want to keep an eye on your gateway’s disk quota so you don’t go over the limit. You could also tell Gmail to remove the server’s copy once you download it. After you do that, you can proceed with setting up Thunderbird.

FYI – You can also do this with Apple Mail 3.0, Outlook Express, Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, or Windows Mail.

4. Safely Storing the Archive

The final step is to make sure you’re storing the archive somewhere safe. If you trust your computer, you can just leave it as is. But, the whole point of this article is having a backup, so I recommend putting a copy of the email archive somewhere safe, such as Dropbox. Any cloud storage solution will work and most offer around 2GB of storage, which should be plenty. You can also use an old-fashioned CD or thumb drive if you so desire.

To grab the mail archive from Thunderbird, you need to find your profile folder. This folder is generally a hidden folder, so you’ll need to unhide folders temporarily if you’ve got them hidden. The x characters below will be a random string, so don’t actually look for xxxxxxxx.default.

In XP, go to C:\Documents and Settings\[User]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\
In Vista, go to C:\Users\[User]\AppData\Local\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\
In Leopard, go to ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/
In Ubuntu, go to ~/.thunderbird/xxxxxxxx.default/

Your safest bet is to copy the entire profile folder to ensure you get everything. Once you’ve got that, throw it into your Dropbox in a folder named email_backup or something similarly indicative of its contents. Keep in mind the folders you’ll put into Dropbox are cumulative, meaning they’ll contain all the email that Thunderbird knows about.

5. Automate

Well, this isn’t really automation in the true spirit, but you can leave your Thunderbird running in the background grabbing email every 5 or so minutes. Then, you can set up automatic exports in Linux or OS X to copy your backup into your Dropbox. I don’t have advice on how to do that in anything other than Linux, so I’ll skip this step. Just be aware that it’s possible.

All your email are belong to you…

That’s it, 5 simple steps to backing up your email. Look for an article soon on importing email to Thunderbird from this backup. I’ll also be covering a similar solution using Gmail Backup which will use a lot of the same techniques, but will omit the use of Thunderbird.

Google Alerts, RSS Style

Mark — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 13:55:54 +0000

Yesterday Google allowed users to subscribe to their alerts via an RSS feed instead of email. I prefer this option as my RSS reader is open almost all day and I like to know about things as they happen. Sure, that was always available for the email notice too, but RSS is so much easier.

To get an alert through RSS, head over to google.com/alerts and set up (or change) an alert’s “deliver to” menu to feed.

The frequency menu will go away because RSS is delivered as it happens. Here’s what you should see if you se it up correctly.

You’ll be given an RSS link, which you can copy and paste into your reader of choice (or add it straight to Google Reader). After I heard about this yesterday, my alerts went from three to about 10. If you’re a blogger not already using Alerts, you really should set it up. It only takes a few minutes and it’ll let you know whenever your keywords are mentioned elsewhere. Alerts you should set up include your name, your blog’s name, your Twitter handle, etc.

As always, ReadWriteWeb has a fantastic article on using these new feeds with Yahoo! Pipes to filter out duplicates and do other fancy things, so check that out.

VMware Fusion VMs as Apps

Mark — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:54:40 +0000

Mac OS X: Last week I showed how to create VirtualBox VMs as applications. This week, I’m trying out VMware Fusion to see if it’s better or worse than VirtualBox. I’m trying to shoot for the same experience as the VirtualBox machines, so I needed to figure out how to create an App using AppleScript so I could put the VM on the Dock.

Create VM

This step is obvious, but necessary. Get everything in your VM set up how you want it, including opening it in Full Screen mode if you wish. Fusion seems to remember your last view, so killing your VM while it’s in full screen will open it next time in that mode. Plus, it saves on AppleScript that I really don’t like (setting delays before going to fullscreen).

Write Script to Create Application

If you remember the script for VirtualBox, it was very short:

do shell script "vboxmanage startvm Ubuntu"

The script for Fusion is slightly more complex, but still not too bad:

tell application "System Events"
    if UI elements enabled then
        open "~/Documents/Virtual Machines.localized/Ubuntu.vmwarevm"
    else
        display dialog "Can't start VM"
    end if
end tell

In order for this to work, you need to have the “Enable access for assistive devices” box in System Preferences -> Universal access checked. I’m not sure why, but you just do. The else clause here is just so you have some feedback in case your VM doesn’t want to start.

Once you’ve entered the script above (substituting the correct path to your VM), save it as an application. I save all my custom apps to /Users/mark/Applications, but the path is arbitrary.

Change App Icon (Optional)

Check out this post on how to change an application icon.

Put on Dock (Optional)

I don’t think I have to explain how to do this if you’re messing around with virtualization.

Banning IPs in Ubuntu

Mark — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 18:30:59 +0000

Last Friday I was subject to a barrage of spam on this site – somewhere between 100 and 150 comments came in that were spam (prior to that I’d had 300 spams since May). Akismet caught every single one of those comments, but it was still a pain because I still had to trudge through and verify they were all spam. I’m not really that hesitant to drop the ban hammer on the IPs that most of the comments were coming from.

I crowdsourced some solutions to Twitter, not knowing exactly what software to use to ban an IP. @jcollie replied saying I should use iptables to block traffic. So, I took his advice and ran the following command on the server to block the IP:

iptables -A INPUT -s [IP] -j DROP

This worked well, and I saw the torrent of spam slow immediately (there were multiple culprits). However, iptables doesn’t like to reload its rules when the server gets rebooted, so I was searching for another solution. I don’t reboot the server very often, but you know how it goes – when I would, I’d forget to run the rules again.

I also remembered that Ubuntu 8.04 comes with a built-in firewall utility called UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall). I wanted to give this a shot also so I ran this command:

ufw deny from [IP]

Much simpler than the iptables command was, but ufw status told me that the firewall was not loaded. Naturally, the next step was to run ufw enable to load the firewall, right? Wrong. I was immediately locked out of my own website because, by default, UFW seems to want to block all traffic. To remedy that problem, run ufw default allow to set the default behavior to allow traffic. Now, if you run ufw status, you’ll see that your firewall is loaded and it will show any rules you’ve set up. To recap, banning IPs with UFW is as easy as:

ufw default allow
ufw enable
ufw deny from [IP]

If you find yourself unable to hit your web server, try running ufw default allow after you’ve enabled the firewall. I actually did the previous in reverse order, but it makes more sense to do it in the order that’s shown.

Have a better solution? Share it in the comments.

VirtualBox Icons for Ubuntu, Windows

Mark — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 15:21:06 +0000

After creating my VirtualBox applications and slapping them on the Dock, I decided that I didn’t like the default VirtualBox icon for those apps. The problem was exacerbated when I put them next to each other, making them indistinguishable at a quick glance. I figured out how to change the icons for those virtual machines, and here’s how I did it.

I downloaded these two transparent .png files, then converted them to .icns files using img2icns. Once I had the two .icns files, I was able to open the info panel on the virtual machine apps I created using Command-I (I as in Info). The final step is to drag the appropriate .icns icon file over the current icon in the upper left of the information panel. I wasn’t sure how to refresh the Dock’s icons, so i just whacked them from the Dock and put them back on. Voila, I’ve got nice fancy dock icons.

Icon Files:

ubuntu-logo-transparent128.icns

windows-logo-transparent128.icns

Help Get Your Lost Laptop Back

Mark — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:22:47 +0000

Losing your laptop is an ugly event. I’d like to show you a simple way to improve your chances of getting your beloved laptop back. The idea is simple – create a wallpaper image that shows up when your computer is at the login screen.

All I did was grab a pre-packaged image from the wallpaper selections of the OS and printed some text on it that says who it belongs to and what number to call in the event the laptop is recovered. If someone were to find the laptop, they could very easily determine the owner and get in touch with you about getting it returned.

Tips on creating your image:

Make it easy to find and in a location that won’t be covered by the login dialog
It should also stand out and be easy to read
Give contact info on whom to call (or email) in the event the laptop is found
Say a reward will be offered (optional)

Windows Users

I don’t know of any easy way to differentiate between the login wallpaper and the Windows wallpaper, so changing your desktop background should do the trick. There’s a more complex, registry-hack way to do it shown here (I’m not responsible if you FUBAR your computer in the process).

Leopard Users

Simply replace (after backing up) the image located at /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg with your new file. The new file must be named DefaultDesktop.jpg.

Ubuntu Users

You can find the settings under System -> Administration -> Login Window. Under Style choose Plain, then select your image in the next selection menu. You might want to put the image in /usr/share/backgrounds to make sure you don’t accidentally delete it. Also, this modifies the login window so you’ll have to do some more customizations on that.

mark.bockenstedt.net » How-To

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