Solution Wanted!

This was perhaps the easiest DIY project in my life, yet what came out of it did take away quite a bit of pain for me.

Like many households out there, we collect recyclables. Every couple of months we take them to the bottle exchange and get a refund for the deposit we paid at the time of purchase, which is between 10¢ and 25¢ depending on the size of the bottle. Collecting and storing large volumes of recyclables requires a system of some kind, each family having one of their own. Most commonly, non-glass items go into plastic garbage bags, and we are no exception here. You keep filling a bag till it’s all packed, tie it down and put aside, then you start a new bag. Pretty simple, eh?

Well, kind of, except dumping recyclables into the bag is somewhat painful if it just lies on the floor. You have to pick it up, open its mouth and unload your temp container into it trying not to spill any items, which you don’t always succeed at. I must admit it, I have uttered swear words more than once when a dumping attempt ended up with some of the pop cans missing the target and scattered all around. Being sick and tired of that, at some point I thought to myself, “There’s gotta be a better way of doing it!”

In the end, the solution turned out to be so simple I feel compelled to share it with everyone because it’s a real pain saver.

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There is no shortage of note taking applications in the mobile world: Evernote, OneNote, Apple Note, Google Keep — you name it. I personally am a big fan of Evernote and have been using it for years for most everything note taking. Yet there is one area where a seemingly unsophisticated app called Simplenote outshines many others, and in this post I am going to introduce you to this gem of simplicity and show how to put it to some interesting uses.

What’s important about Simplenote is that it is a cloud service in the first place, for which a number of clients for different platforms are available including Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux, or you can just run it in your browser. And what is even better, it is totally free and it contains no ads! Oh, and so you know, there is no limit as to the number of notes and the size of a note. Pretty cool, eh?

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I like wall calendars. I know there are electronic day planners out there that have great features like reminders, schedule sharing, customized views and a lot more. Yet I like it that I always have a month outlook right in front of me on the wall in my home office. Of course, people with busy lives may find this format too limiting, but if you have just a few appointments, due dates and special events here and there, a wall calendar is a great way to keep your life organized.

One thing that I really miss in paper calendars though is that there is no visual clue as to where you are on any given day. You really have to mentally put yourself together every time you look at the grid to remind yourself of today’s date. I once even tried to check off days as they went by, but quickly gave up as it looked downright ugly. On a psychological level, it was like crossing out your own life day after day!

Then one day it dawned on me: if there was some kind of a sliding frame that you could move up and down on the calendar to indicate the current week, that would solve the problem! I started googling around for ready made products like that, but to my surprise there were none. Nor could I find any DIY projects for making one myself. Upon some pondering, an idea started to form. It did take me some time to pick up the right materials, but once everything was prepared I just got down to implementing it, and after 30 minutes of work here is what I ended up with.

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Ever since I chose Thunderbird as my desktop email client many years ago, there have been on ongoing struggle with one particular issue. For the life of me, I can’t understand why Thunderbird developers don’t fix it or at least make it a configurable option. I am talking about the [X] button. When you click it, the program is gone. Not a biggie, you might say, but NO, it IS! You rely on your email client, and you expect it to bring up a notification when new messages arrive. If you or someone else closes the program by accident, you could go for hours without realizing that you are not seeing any incoming emails because Thunderbird is not running in the background.

Looking for a solution, I have tried several add-ons like MinimizeToTray (followed by MinimizeToTray Revived, followed by MinimizeToTray Reanimated), with varying degrees of success. To be more precise, they started out fine, but at some point they stopped working when a new Thunderbird upgrade was rolled out. It was really like a never ending arms and shields game. When another incarnation of the plugin was declared incompatible with Thunderbird as of version 68.0, I was about to give up, but because the problem was still there I kept looking. And, believe it or not, an answer was found!

I got my first tablet device a while ago during the season sale. It was a shiny new ASUS Eee Pad known as the Transformer. At $300, the deal was more than compelling, although it did not include the bottom part – the dock that could double up as the back cover, complete with a USB port and an additional battery. Rather than spending another $150 on something I did not really need, I just grabbed the tablet itself, and moments later was playing around with the cool new toy.

Eventually the tablet took up its residence in the kitchen where we would use it to show each other great new videos, keep track of weather forecasts, look up interesting things and try out fancy recipes, and all was good.

With time, however, I started to notice that something was missing: the ability to keep the device upright without using my hands, and one day I figured I needed a stand. Researching the idea I came across several DIY designs, none of which really inspired me, but then in one of the discussions someone mentioned a plate holder, and that did the trick. Continue reading →

Blackberry Curve is a pretty slick smartphone, and my girlfriend Tara definitely likes her 8900, no question about that. As for me, I don’t have anything against it, except it has the nasty habit of making inadvertent phone calls from inside her purse. It doesn’t happen very often, but it has happened more than once over the past four months that she’s had this device.

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In one of my previous posts I wrote about the Junk folder issue in Thunderbird. Fortunately, a simple solution was found soon that made the problem almost negligeable. Today, I am going to rant about Thunderbird once again. This time, it will be the signature functionality that we will review with scrutiny.

As you know, email signatures are those lines that contain your titles and contact information and which are somehow inserted by your mail client at the end of every message you compose. Now here is the tricky part. If you’ve never created a signature in Thunderbird, when you finally get around to doing that, you’ll be in for a big surprise: how theo heck do you do it?

If you are like me, finding the place to enter your signature string is not going to be easy. To save you the time and effort, I came forward with this handy screenshot that shows exactly where the signature setting is located.

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I use Mozilla Thunderbird as my desktop email client. Maybe it is not the finest piece of software in the world, but it kind of works for me. Besides, throughout the years I have seen a good share of different email clients, and not all of them were pretty. In fact, some were so ugly I do not even want to mention them.

So, like I am saying, I am OK with Thunderbird. But there is one recurring problem with it that really pisses me off. Every once in a while after collecting new mail and getting it sorted, Thunderbird ends up being very confused about the contents of its Junk folder. You can delete all spam messages to clear the box, but a few items will still be there. I call them ghost junkies. Here is what it looks like:

People say the problem has to do with some internal index getting corrupt, and luckily enough, there is a way to fix it. Here is how you do it.

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