4 Little Known Thunderbird Extensions
I recently searched through the mozilla thunderbird extensions website and found 4 extensions that I didn't know about that actually prove to be quite useful. I use Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 on Foresight Linux and have tested all of these extensions and verified that they work on that environment. Hopefully, they'll help someone craft a more enjoyable email experience 
If you're like me, you like to group like items together in your inbox. With this extension, you can group emails from the same sender as quickly as a right click. Really, it's just a shortcut that places the sender email up into the search box and searches for you. The nice part is, with this extension, you don't have to type it. Quick, easy, and simple. This has quickly become an extension that I cannot live without.
SyncMab is an extension similar to foxmarks for Firefox. With foxmarks, you keep all your bookmarks on a central server of your choosing so that your bookmarks are the same across all computers you use that have Firefox installed. This is perfect for me since I have a set of work bookmarks and home bookmarks and like to be able to switch back and forth between them. But what about thunderbird? It doesn't have bookmarks right? Exactly, but it does have contacts in your addressbook! So, you'll be able to save your contacts to a server of your choosing and then on another computer with thunderbird you can synchronize your contacts by downloading that file using SyncMab. It's brilliant and allows you to always have the same contacts across operating systems, across computers, and even to maintain multiple addressbooks
This extension will display a small graphic in Thunderbird that tells you how much space you have left in your IMAP mail account and can warn you when you get close to filling up. This might not be too useful for those of you that use IMAP with huge quotas (gmail) but for others, it may be. I have heard that some users do not like the popup that displays for warning on this extension. For those users, Thunderbird has a built in function you can enable:
Open your configuration editor in Thunderbird and find the following keys:
- mail.quota.mainwindow_threshold.show - % when quota should show up
- mail.quota.mainwindow_threshold.warning - % when quota becomes yellow
- mail.quota.mainwindow_threshold.critical - % when quota becomes red
Thanks to goddess-gate.com for information on how to do this.
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Microblogging, Status, and Blogging 2.0
In my previous post, I asked readers how they plugged their blog and/or microblogged, web 2.0 style. Some microblogging readers recommended that I check out Ping.fm. It was exactly the service that I needed; the ability to simultaneously post status updates on twitter, pownce, facebook. I specifically look for services that don't require that I install anything on my desktop (I like IM much more).
The only problem with this is that ping.fm is in beta stage...and a closed beta at that. So, I began to read various different blogs to try and find any other service that might do the same thing as ping.fm.
During my search, I cam across profilactic.com, which is a central aggregate place similar to friendfeed.com. The interesting part about profilactic is that it plugs into ping.fm and every single user can be part of the closed beta for ping.fm!
This means that you can microblog/status message bebo, blogger, brightkite, facebook, hi5, Jaiku, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Mashable, Myspace, Plaxo Pulse, Plurk, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter, and Xanga through one single interface OR through Instant message (there is a ping.fm bot).
Here's the kicker...profilactic.com supports 186 sites as well as the ability to create a custom site. There are too many to list. Check out their supported sites.
So, you can utilize ping.fm to instant message status updates or microblog and instantaneously have it sent out to close to 200 different sites all at once. This is handy for me since I like to use pownce a bit more than twitter but my coworkers use twitter more. My status updates are still broadcast (on 60 second delay) on twitter through my instant message to the ping.fm bot. Ping.fm also supports the iPhone and has the ability to have custom triggers.
To take advantage of these great services, head over to profilactic and signup. When you're setting up your sites, you'll be able to plug into ping.fm (it will require that you signup using the profilactic beta password that profilactic will provide for you during setup). Don't forget to visit my lifestream and add me as a friend Happy micro/status/blogging!
How do YOU Plug Your Blog to Web 2.0?
I've been drastically neglecting a few areas of my blog. The main one is plugging it into social networks. I've been using things like twitter, pownce, and stumbleupon...but I haven't truly plugged my blog into these services.
Now there are so many...I don't even know how to plug them all in
Which services are most important? Which ones are you, the reader, using? Thus far, the easiest way I've found to manage things is to choose one service like Tumblr or Pownce and aggregate all other services into it. THEN to use friendfeed.com to envelop them into a stream.
I'm curious as to how others are managing things...I'd like to make Yet Another Linux Blog reach a larger audience and I think that this is a good starting point. So if you have suggestions, please let me know
rPath Documentation Status Update
There are many changes on the horizon for rPath Documentation.
One of the things that team docs here has known for a while is that the rPath wiki is a fantastic tool to leverage for documentation. It's quick. It's easy. It allows engineers to contribute directly to the wiki. It allows community members to contribute to to the wiki.
We've also known for a while that this tool has a major caveat...and that is that versioned documentation is costly. For example, if we had say version 1.0 documentation of a project at wiki.rpath.com/v1/productname and version 2.0 came out, we'd have to maintain 2 separate documents with the same information in two different URI's and 2 different name spaces. With each addition of namespace and project version, updates would be more costly and time consuming.
It's also a bad thing that a user can search the wiki...and have the possibility of getting results from versions that they are not using...possibly information and behavior of products that no longer applies.
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Why the RIAA and ISP's are Stupid
ISP's are beginning to bow to RIAA demands and spying on their users. This is odd if you consider them a communications company...like the telephone companies are. For example, do you talk on the cell phone each day? How about a LAN line? What if...AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile (I've probably hit about 80% of you) monitored your phone conversations? You're probably saying, "well, they already do" and you'd be right to some degree...but what if they monitored your line not for terrorism or keywords flagged by the US Government...what if they monitored your line for ANY illegal activity at all?
Say you were remarking to your friend about a deal down at Best Buy that was "a steal". Told your mom how you "swiped a $beverage" from your buddies house. What if these keywords flagged you as one who participated in illegal activity if you discussed them on the phone? And what if your carriers had a "3 strikes and you're out" policy? You'd find yourself phoneless based on the topics of your conversation. Sound far fetched?
It may not be. Compare the idea above to what Internet Service Providers (ISP) are doing. ISP's are bowing to the RIAA (and BPI) and spying on their users...monitoring the topic of your communication and cutting you off if your communications do not live up to their standards. Virgin Media in the UK is the first major ISP doing this...
It seems ridiculous that an ISP can tell you what you should or should commicate about...which isn't unlike a phone company telling you what to converse about over the phone. But it's happening.
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