Search Text in Firefox by Typing

Posted on July 8, 2010 by Dan

By now most of us are used to pressing Ctrl F (Cmd F on Mac) to bring up the find bar to search for text within a web page we’re on. It just works and wasn’t even something I knew was a problem until I found this tip today. Open up Firefox’s options and select the advanced tab then check search for text when I start typing.

Firefox Advanced Settings

Firefox Advanced Settings

From now on whenever your on a web page and start typing a quick find box will come up and the cursor will automatically jump to the word you’re looking for. There is no navigation in the quick find box though so it’s not full featured as regular find. There’s a workaround for this: http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2006/10/firefox-quick-search-as-it-should-and-used-to-be/, it’s just a quick edit to your userchrome.css file in order to setup the navigation buttons in quick find. I’ve tested it out and it works great! :)

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[CP] Coffee Pot Engineering

Posted on April 21, 2010 by Dan

Cross post from my other blog, Big Dan’s Corner > How hard is it to Engineer A Coffee Pot? : I bought a new coffee pot and the reservoir is to narrow to fill without getting water all over the place.

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Moving your Tunes Library From PC To Mac

Posted on March 11, 2010 by Dan

Recently I bought an iPod Touch and originally I set it up to sync with my Mac. In the interim I decided to move everything over to my PC as my Mac was supposed to be moved into another room. The mac never got moved and I decided to again hook up the Mac to my main monitor and use it as my daily internet surfer. Figuring that I would be spending more time in front of the Mac it would only make sense to have my iPod sync with the Mac. With help from Life Hacker I got everything setup. Click the Life Hacker link to read more about the nuts and bolts. This post is more about my experience with the move and some tips to help speed things along.

I should preface this by saying if you haven’t invested any time creating playlists, added metadata (title, track, album, etc)  to your songs and aren’t transferring purchased iTunes music to your Mac you can simply copy all your MP3 files over and import them. That being said I’ve spent many a nights with Fix Tunes (aka Tidy Songs) fixing my tags and wanted to retain that information..Hence the project and headaches start.

There’s several options to transfer your library from one computer to another. One option is home sharing in which you setup iTunes with your Apple account to share files between computers on your home network. This method seems to be the easiest and most straight forward. You setup the sharing, select all your files and copy everything. The only problem here is speed. My Mac connects to the network wireslessly which is to slow for my likes to be transferring large amount of files. Even with my modest 8 GB library, I was running out of patience with the transfer process.

The second option and the one I originally chose was backing up my library to disc (File > Library > Back Up To Disc). I’m a little surprised at Apple here as the only option is to burn discs. Which is odd, it would be much faster and not to mention cost effective to back to up to an external hard drive. Even so my library is only 8GB I figure 2 maybe 3 DVD-R’s and I’ll be set. Tip: if you have DVD-RWs (rewritable DVD discs) at your disposal you can use them instead of wasting DVD-Rs. As luck would have it I wound up trying to do the backup process 3 times because it kept failing and I couldn’t get it to work. Apple’s “suggested method” didn’t work. So, I had to hack a little.

I wound up using the method outlined in the Life Hacker article linked above. This method was a little more hassle but go figure a lot easier than Apple’s way of copying a library. After consolidating my library via iTunes I simply copied the whole iTunes folder to an external drive then copied it on to my Mac’s hard drive. Consolidating your library basically means that iTunes copies all of your music files to folders under iTunes’s folder in your music folder. After everything copied over to my Mac, I open the library.xml file in Smultron (a text editor) then used search and replace to change the file paths to reflect Mac’s paths to the music. This worked and retained all my information.

I probably should mention that you can also use your iPod as an external hard drive and copy all the data over that way. There is no real reason why I didn’t do it that way other than I have serveral exerternal hard drives to use.

Another thing is I didn’t have to worry about any purchased content except for applications which were relatively easy to sync back to iTunes from the iPod once I authorized iTunes, I suspect the same will be true of purchased music, tv shows, and etc once you authoize your Mac with your iTunes account by going to Store > Authorize computer.

In conclusion I was really surprised that Apple hasn’t made this simpler. I should be able to take my iPod and plug it into a new computer choose sync and have it copy everything from the iPod to the new computer. I have no doubt in my mind that the process isn’t easier to prevent music from being freely copied but for a company that markets themselves on easy of use this project certainly wasn’t as easy as it could have and should have been.

Posted in Applications, Mac OS X | 1 Comment

Almost Geek now iPhone / iPod Touch Friendly

Posted on February 27, 2010 by Dan

Since getting an iPod Touch I’ve been looking to make my websites more accessible to mobile devices now that I actually have one to test on. ;) I found this awesome WordPress plugin called WP-Touch which makes it brilliantly simple to make you site mobile friendly, at least to Apple devices. It’s as simple as installing and activating the plugin. You’re good to go with the default options but there are plenty of options available for you to tweak if you feel the need.

WordPress and it’s ecosystem of plugins never ceases to amaze me. A big thank you to the WP-Touch coders. :)

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Straight Talk Samsung R451C

Posted on February 26, 2010 by Dan

The Samsung R451c from Straight Talk is a decent enough phone. I bought this phone last November and have been using it since. I’m a heavy texter and less of a voice user but the voice quality anytime I’ve used it is crystal clear.

For those who don’t know Straight Talk is a relativity new cell phone service offer by Tracfone through Wal-Mart. It’s $45 per month for unlimited everything though with taxes and fees my bill was $49.49 per month. There is also a $30 per month plan for 1000 minutes and 1000 texts per month. Being a Tracfone fan, I jumped right on Straight Talk though I was disappointed to see only 1 qwerty phone in their line up and it being one of the most expensive it’s still a decent deal for a no contract phone.

Overall the phone feels good in your hand. Navigating the menus and options is simple and straight forward, nothing out of the ordinary. The the full keyboard and mobile web access makes you think it could be a smart phone though it is far from a smart phone. Web browsing is ridiculously slow even in areas with full service.

Let’s go through the features:

Speakerphone: Just works at the highest volume setting it crackles a bit but it’s plenty loud at the medium-high setting.

Camera: At 1.3 mega pixels there is nothing remarkable here, standard low end camera phone picture quality. Decent enough for quick snap shots but not much else.

Bluetooth: The Bluetooth on this phone is actually decent. It’s not locked down like some competing prepaid phones. You can send music and pictures from your blue tooth enabled computer to you cell phone with no problems. I didn’t bother with a bluetooth headset which is what bluetooth is primarily used for so I cannot comment on that.

Web Browser: Very basic, we’re talking 2001 basic. You can login to mobile MySpace and Facebook if that’s your thing. Gmail’s mobile interface works decently. I was not able to access any Yahoo services on the phone though. Keep in mind the internet speed is ridiculously slow on this phone even in areas with full service.

Text Messaging: Text messaging is a breeze with the full qwerty keyboard. The only real complaint here is that the phone stops at 160 characters where as most phones will let you keep typing and just send 2 messages instead of 1, I found that a little annoying but perhaps as it’s prepaid its to stop you from going over your limit. I found one small quirk if you happen to be sending a message just as one comes in the phone freezes and you need to remove the battery to reset it. It’s a rarity but it does happen especially when having conversations with multiple people at the same time. It happened to me a grand total of 3 times.

Music Player: This phone includes an expansion slot for a micro-SD card which I didn’t bother with. Even without the SD card you can put some songs on the phone. I didn’t bother much with this as I have a separate MP3 player but the basic functionality is nice. The included headphone jack is not standard size, instead it’s a ‘PDA jack” so you will need to purchase a converter to plug in your regular headphones/ear buds, these are available from Amazon for less than $10. Here’s the link to the adapter: Headphone Adapter Cellphone PDA 2.5mm to 3.5mm Jack

Battery Life: Battery life on the R451C is okay. On standby (not using the phone ) it seems to last for 4-5 days once you start texting and using the web  a lot the battery is gone in about a day which I guess isn’t too bad. My battery only died on me once in 4 months but then again I charge it every night.

The Straight Talk web site is crappy. You cannot do much aside from activating your phone, checking your balance (if on the limited plan) and signing up for auto-renew. It would be nice if you can stop auto-renew on their website. The ‘My Account’ area is under construction and has been since I got the phone. You get the feeling no one is really working on the website. When you select buy ring tones or graphics on the phone it tells you to online from your PC. Not that I do that, I email ring tones and songs for to my phone, it’s a lot cheaper ;) . When you go on the website the selection is limited and prices are high.

All in all I feel the phone is well worth $100 initially and $50 per month. In my area Straight Talk is serviced by Verizon towers and the service has been great. I traveled to Florida with the phone and it worked every where. Unfortunately I’m deactivating the phone next month and going back to the Google Voice and Tracfone combo as I’ve cut back a lot on texting, though I plan on reactivating the phone whenever I travel again.

Do you have a Straight Talk phone or are you considering one? Is there anything else you would like to know about the phone?

Posted in Product Reviews | 39 Comments

Copy Filezilla Settings From One Computer To Another

Posted on November 6, 2009 by Dan

Filezilla is my FTP client of choice. It is a free and open source FTP client that works on Windows, Linux and Mac it can be downloaded from here. Filezilla has many features, one of the nicest features is called “Site Manager” where it saves the server information along with your user name and password so that you can connect to it quickly. If your a webmaster with many websites and random passwords this is a definite time saver. If you are like me and a lot of other webmasters you have a regular computer and a laptop for the road. The tutorial will show you how to setup all your FTP accounts in Filezilla on one computer then copy the settings over to your other computer(s) so that you don’t have to reenter your details again.

Filezilla’s site explorer settings resides in your appdata folder on Windows, a hidden directory within your home directory on Linux, and your user’s library folder on OS X. This posts assumes your copying from settings Windows to another Windows machine as that’s what most people use. I will show you where the folder in on Ubuntu and OS X the file is the same on all platforms and can be copied between systems without issue.

First things first, Open Filezilla and click open the Site Manager. Site manager is the leftmost icon, I’ve highlighted it in the screenshot below.

Filezilla Open

Filezilla Open

This is the Site Manager. Click “New Site”, name it and put in your host, select “Logontype” normal from the drop down and input your user name and password. Repeat for the rest of your sites. Connect to each account to make sure it works then close Filezilla.

Filezilla Open

Filezilla Open

Now Windows navigate to your appdata folder. For instructions on how find your app data folder click here (new window). This is your app data folder, open the Filezilla folder.

AppData Folder open

AppData Folder open

This is your Filezilla’s app data folder. Now you want to copy the sitemanager file to a thumb drive or perhaps email it to yourself.  Keep this file secure! The passwords are stored in plain text anyone can open the file in any text editor and view all your account information.  Alternatively you can copy the whole Filezilla folder to your thumb drive to save all the program’s settings.

Now you have the file and can place it in Filezilla’s app data folder on another Windows machine. Be sure to install and run Filezilla first on the second machine so that it create the Filezilla folder under appdata. Alternatively you can install Filezilla and don’t run it then if you copied the whole folder just drag and drop it to appdata.

Bingo! Your done. :)

Other operating systems:

Ubuntu:

You can install Filezilla by running ‘sudo apt-get install filezilla’ without the quotes from terminal or clicking here on your Ubuntu system.

In Ubuntu Filezilla’s settings are stored in ~/.filezilla. This is a hidden folder (click to learn how to show hidden files in Ubuntu) in your home directory. If you copied the whole folder just drag the folder off your thumb drive  to your home folder and rename it to .filezilla then launch Filezilla and all your sites will be there. If you just copied the sitemanger.xml file. First launch Filezilla by going to Applications > Internet > Filezilla then close it. We launched it just to create the configuration folder. Copy sitemanager.xml to ~/.filezilla and relaunch all your sites will be there.

Filezilla's Setting Folder under Ubuntu

Filezilla's Setting Folder under Ubuntu

Mac OS X:

Show hidden files by following this tutorial then copy sitemanager.xml to .filezilla in your home directory. Alternatively you can copy the Window’s folder from your thumb drive and rename it to .filezilla then drop it into your home folder.

Filezilla's config folder under OS X

Filezilla's config folder under OS X

If you have any questions leave them in the comments please. :)

Posted in Webmaster Stuff | Tagged , | 1 Comment

How To Show Hidden Files in OS X

Posted on November 6, 2009 by Dan

In following the tutorials here at Almost Geek, you will often need to look at your systems hidden files for copy or move things around. OS X makes showing hidden files a chore, in fact I had to search for how to do it. I found this article on how to do it http://osxdaily.com/2009/02/25/show-hidden-files-in-os-x and that’s how I do it on my system.

Copy this command into Terminal* (new window click to find out where Terminal is):

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

Then restart finder by typing this command into terminal:

killall Finder

When your done working with your hidden files and folders simply reverse the command to hide hidden files again.

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE

Once again restart Finder with the following command:

killall Finder

Here is what your home directory normally looks like:

Mac OS X Home Folder

Mac OS X Home Folder

Your home folder with hidden files shown:

OS X's Home Folder with Hidden Files Shown

OS X's Home Folder with Hidden Files Shown

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Where is the Terminal On my Mac?

Posted on November 6, 2009 by Dan

As you follow along with our tutorials here you will sometimes need to use Mac OS X’s terminal which is the command line interface for your Mac it’s just like command prompt on Windows. You can find your terminal by opening your Applications Folder > Utilities > Terminal.

The terminal icon looks like this:

Mac OS X Terminal Icone

Mac OS X Terminal Icon

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How to Show Hidden Files In Ubuntu

Posted on November 6, 2009 by Dan
Ubuntu Logo

Ubuntu Logo

The default install of Ubuntu includes the Gnome desktop environment and the Nautilus file manager, this is the Linux equivalent to Windows Explorer or Mac OS X’s Finder. In Ubuntu and Linux in general most programs hold their settings and configuration data under a folder prefixed with a . (period) in your home folder. By default most file managers hide these folders to make using the system and finding/accessing your files easier. For this reason it’s best just show hidden files briefly and not all the time.

To show hidden folders in Ubuntu simple open a Nautilus window (your home folder) and press Ctrl H. This will show all hidden folders in and files in this window where ever you navigate to. If you would ike to rehide them simply press Ctrl H again.

Here are screen shots of Ubuntu with hidden files both shown and hidden:

Standard Ubuntu Home Folder

Standard Ubuntu Home Folder

Ubuntu Home Folder with Hidden Files

Ubuntu Home Folder with Hidden Files

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First Installs for Ubuntu

Posted on November 5, 2009 by Dan

With the release of Ubuntu 9.10 aka Karmic Koala last week it was time for me to do a fresh install of Ubuntu on my main machine which dual boots Vista and Ubuntu. For the most part I upgrade my Ubuntu install around beta 1 then roll along with the updates until final release, a few days after final release I wipe the partition and install with a fresh copy just in case any bugs are hanging around.

The default Ubuntu install has some great software out of the box but we need some multimedia stuff like the ability to play MP3s (which may or may not be legal in your country, IANAL) and flash player. From there I install a bunch of other programs I enjoy playing with. Here’s the first command I run for installs:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list \
–output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list &&
sudo apt-get -q update &&
sudo apt-get –yes -q –allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring &&
sudo apt-get -q update &&
sudo aptitude install ubuntu-restricted-extras skype googleearth kompozer keepassx pidgin pidgin-plugin-pack inkscape xaralx epiphany midori audacity djplay hydrogen hydrogen-drumkits terminator filezilla gftp abiword cowsay thunderbird banshee virtualbox-ose gnome-do gnome-do-plugins nautilus-image-converter cheese

This adds the Medibuntu repository, which distributes among other things multimedia codecs and Google Earth then updates the software sources and adds it’s keyring (for authentication of packages) then yet again updates the software sources and finally starts installing my programs with confirmation.

Let me run through the packages and what they do:

Ubuntu-restricted-extras: Installs flash, MP3, WMA, and MS Font support among other things.

Skype: The world famous video messaging client works on Linux.

Google-earth: Who doesn’t love Google Earth?

Kompozer: Fork of NVU a WYSIWYG HTML editor, good for simple webpages.

Keepassx: A great cross platform password database app to save all your passwords. I use this on Windows, Linux, and OS X.

Pidgin & pidgin-plugin-pack: Multi-protocol IM client.  In Karmic Empathy is the default IM client however I’m still happy with Pidgin. I use Pidgin on Windows & Linux

Inkscape & Xaralx: Cool graphics programs, which I haven’t dived into as much as I’d like to as they appear to have a steep learning curve.

Ephphany & Midori: Internet browsers as a webmaster you can never have to many browsers.

Audacity, Hydrogen, and DJ Play: These are all programs. Audacity is a track editor, Hydrogen is a beat maker, and DJ play lets you play DJ between two tracks. I haven’t played around with the latter two a whole lot but like to have them installed for when the mood strikes.

Terminator: Embeds multiple terminals in one window. Mainly useful for when I’m ssh’ed into more than 1 server

Filezilla & GFTP: Filezilla is my preferred cross platform FTP client. GFTP is my backup FTP client in addition to Nautilus’s capabilities.

Abiword: Lightweight cross platform word processor I use this on all 3 platforms for hammering out blog posts and replies to longer private messages on forums. I must admit I lauch Abiword before Open Office in most cases.

Cowsay: Neat little app that puts whatever your place after the command in a comic strip bulb over an ASCII cow. It’s not useful for anything just good a for a quick laugh. :D Check out Cowsay:

Cowsay screenshot

Thunderbird: Firefox’s sister a cross platform email client. I mostly use it just to monitor a couple of IMAP accounts

Banshee: A music manager.

Virtualbox-ose: A free virtual machine app, I use this to run Windows XP in a virtual machine both on Ubuntu & Vista

Gnome-do & Gnome-do-plugins: Gnome do is a great launcher app much like Vista’s start menu or spotlight on OS X. It can do a lot more but I don’t use for much more than the basic functionality

Nautilus-image-converter: Resize images by right clicking.

Cheese: Webcam application much like Photo Booth on OS X.

From there I head  on over to GetDeb.net to grab Songbird and Ubuntu Tweak the go off and download Opera & Dropbox from their respective sites. Assuming Firefox is saving your downloads to ~/Downloads, I install them all with two commands.

cd Downloads/

sudo dpkg -i *.deb (this tells the Ubuntu to unpack all .deb files)

then

sudo apt-get install -f (to fix dependency issues with Ubuntu Tweak)

Lets run through the apps again: ;)

Songbird: Is a cross platform music manager based on Mozilla. I use it mostly for streaming Shoutcast but it has some great library features built in and is expandable with extensions just like Firefox

Ubuntu Tweak: Basically helps you install packages and if enabled set up some of Compiz’s features in additon to setting default user paths and desktop icons. It’s a nice little app, sort of the modern day Automatic

Opera: Just another web browser

Dropbox: This an awesome cross platform sync tool. I’ve got a premium account and use it to sync and files across all my computers that aren’t confidential. I really cannot say enough good about Dropbox, give it a try.

There you have it with my internet connection I normally get all this installed and have a system ready to go within less than an hour. What do you install first with Ubuntu? Leave any questions in the comments please.

Posted in Applications, Ubuntu | Tagged , , | 1 Comment