Some Monospace Fonts Available in Blogger

While editing my most recent post, I've been disappointed with the lone monospace font that's available in Blogger by default.  I'm referring to Courier.  The biggest problem with it is that it's very difficult (for me) to discern between l and 1.^*  Here's what they look like in Courier: l and 1.

Fortunately, Google has made it easy for a user to add alternate fonts.  I listed below some of the monospace fonts you can choose.  

Based on the discernment between l/1, I like these the best (ranking in alphabetical order):

Font Name	lower L vs. One
Fragment Mono	l and 1
Google Sans Code	l and 1
JetBrains Mono	l and 1
Oxygen Mono	l and 1
Reddit Mono	l and 1
Source Code Pro	l and 1
Ubuntu Mono	l and 1
Ubuntu Sans Mono	l and 1

The discernment is greatest with Reddit Mono; there's no way I'd mistake the lowercase L for the number 1.  However, I like Ubuntu Mono the best.  Not only is the discernment good, the character height is comparable to the height of the default font for this Blogger theme.  So I'll use this font for code listings from now on.

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^*That's lowercase L and the digit one in case you thought I pressed the same key twice. In fact I thought I pressed the same key twice, so I re-entered the characters very deliberately.

Courier the quick, red fox jumped over the brown, lazy dog. THE QUICK, RED FOX JUMPED OVER THE BROWN, LAZY DOG. 0123456789

Cousine the quick, red fox jumped over the brown, lazy dog. THE QUICK, RED FOX JUMPED OVER THE BROWN, LAZY DOG. 0123456789

Datatype the quick, red fox jumped over the brown, lazy dog. THE QUICK, RED FOX JUMPED OVER THE BROWN, LAZY DOG. 0123456789

Fragment Mono the quick, red fox jumped over the brown, lazy dog. THE QUICK, RED FOX JUMPED OVER THE BROWN, LAZY DOG. 0123456789

Google Sans Code the quick, red fox jumped over the brown, lazy dog. THE QUICK, RED FOX JUMPED OVER THE BROWN, LAZY DOG. 0123456789

IBM Plex Mono the quick, red fox jumped over the brown, lazy dog. THE QUICK, RED FOX JUMPED OVER THE BROWN, LAZY DOG. 0123456789

Inconsolata the quick, red fox jumped over the brown, lazy dog. THE QUICK, RED FOX JUMPED OVER THE BROWN, LAZY DOG. 0123456789

JetBrains Mono the quick, red fox jumped over the brown, lazy dog. THE QUICK, RED FOX JUMPED OVER THE BROWN, LAZY DOG. 0123456789

Overpass Mono the quick, red fox jumped over the brown, lazy dog. THE QUICK, RED FOX JUMPED OVER THE BROWN, LAZY DOG. 0123456789

Oxygen Mono the quick, red fox jumped over the brown, lazy dog. THE QUICK, RED FOX JUMPED OVER THE BROWN, LAZY DOG. 0123456789

Reddit Mono the quick, red fox jumped over the brown, lazy dog. THE QUICK, RED FOX JUMPED OVER THE BROWN, LAZY DOG. 0123456789

Roboto Mono the quick, red fox jumped over the brown, lazy dog. THE QUICK, RED FOX JUMPED OVER THE BROWN, LAZY DOG. 0123456789

Share Tech Mono the quick, red fox jumped over the brown, lazy dog. THE QUICK, RED FOX JUMPED OVER THE BROWN, LAZY DOG. 0123456789

Source Code Pro the quick, red fox jumped over the brown, lazy dog. THE QUICK, RED FOX JUMPED OVER THE BROWN, LAZY DOG. 0123456789

Ubuntu Mono the quick, red fox jumped over the brown, lazy dog. THE QUICK, RED FOX JUMPED OVER THE BROWN, LAZY DOG. 0123456789

Ubuntu Sans Mono the quick, red fox jumped over the brown, lazy dog. THE QUICK, RED FOX JUMPED OVER THE BROWN, LAZY DOG. 0123456789

No File Name Completion With org-insert-link? Try This

If you invoke org-insert-link (typically C-c C-l) in order to link to a local file, you might expect that pressing TAB will complete a partial path or file name.  Instead you’ll get the frustrating message “[No match].”

What you need to do instead is to invoke the command with a prefix argument like this: C-u C-c C-l. Then you’ll get the expected completion behavior with TAB.

But why is a prefix argument necessary?  It turns out that org-insert-link expects a link type at the "Insert link" prompt.  Some link types are file, bbdb, info, etc.  (To see a full list of link types, press TAB right after invoking the command, without entering anything.)

This is a powerful command.  You can, for example, enter bbd and press TAB to complete the bbdb: link type.  Then enter the first few characters of someone’s name or a business in your bbdb list of contacts, such as arth.  Upon pressing TAB, you should see completion fill in arthur.  Press again, you’ll get Arthur Dent and perhaps his email address.  Clicking on either will complete the entry.  Press ENTER to put the link into your buffer.¹

Completion isn’t available for all link types.  A link to an info node, for example, has to be entered manually, although usually it’s created with org-store-link (C-c l) while point is in the info node of interest.

I encourage you to read the help for org-insert-link and org-store-link.  The two hyperlinks immediately below will take you to the online manual on gnus.org.  But if you copy the link text and yank into an org file, Emacs will open the Org manual at the page for handling links.

[[help:org-insert-link][Emacs help for org-insert-link]]

[[help:org-store-link][Emacs help for org-store-link]]

I dislike getting frustrated.  But when I’m frustrated with Emacs, I expect to learn something if I dig deep enough.  It hasn’t let me down yet.

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¹ This depends on whether bbdb has been loaded.  If you use bbdb and you’re not getting completion, invoke M-x bbdb and try again.

Edit Online Forms With Emacs

If you'd rather use your own text editor to enter content into a web form, you could use and configure a browser extension to establish a link between the form field and the editor. One such extension that Google search suggests is Browser's External Editor.¹

But if you use Emacs, you're probably better off with Chrome Emacs.²

Chrome Emacs is added to a Chromium browser, but you still need to add something to Emacs. That something is the mode called atomic-chrome.

atomic-chrome can be found on Melpa; you can use the Emacs package manager to add it. My personal experience is that it's necessary to start its server manually with atomic-chrome-start-server, or add (atomic-chrome-start-server) to your init file.

I find it invaluable when commenting on a LinkedIn post, which can disappear whenever your feed is updated.

I also like it as a replacement for the Blogspot post entry field, which is easily cleared with an accidental press of Ctrl-a followed by any key press. Blogspot performs an automatic backup whenever you pause typing during new post mode. But that's a worthless feature because it will backup every mistake, including one in which you replaced all content with a key press. And it offers no way to access previous backups. I'm less likely to select all text in Emacs³, but it's not impossible. As well, I could still somehow still manage to do the Ctrl-a thing in Blogspot. Nevertheless this is a nice workaround.

But in fact I've been composing new posts outside of Blogspot for years; usually I use LibreOffice Writer because... Well, come to think of it, I don't know why I use Writer when I can use Emacs. Maybe it's because with Writer, I can insert pictures and such. (And I haven't figured out how to do that in Emacs.

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¹ https://chromewebstore.google.com/search/Browser's%20External%20Editor
² https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/chrome-emacs
³ Pressing C-x h will select all characters in an Emacs buffer.

Define Emacs as Editor in Altap Salamander

I’ve been a devotee of the Servant Salamander / Altap Salamander file manager¹ for decades. I migrated from Norton Commander (NC)² soon after I started to work on a multi-tasking OS, Windows NT.

Likewise, I’ve been a fan of the (extensible) text editor Emacs³ for decades, having given up on Brief⁴, eventually. While on WinNT, I stayed with Brief a long time. But I seem to recall that Brief didn’t respond well to having one of its open files changed by another application. (This rarely happened in environments that it was designed for.)

Norton’s F4 key invoked a built-in text editor to open the selected file. The Salamander F4 key is configured to use Notepad.exe to open the selected file. But it can be configured to use other editors based on the selected file’s extension. I configure F4 to use Emacs for all text-like files.

Once I open Emacs, I like to keep that instance open for as long as possible. That’s because I build up a history usage, including:

• Regular expression searches
• Kill ring contents
• On-the-fly macros

Switching to a new Emacs instance is a major interruption to my workflow.

Enter Emacs server. Emacs includes a server that can open a file in a running instance when invoked from an external application, such as Norton, ...er, Salamander. This allows a user to edit new files while maintaining the previous Emacs instance.

To use this active server process feature, you’d invoke Emacs with this command⁵ (all entered on a single line): C:\Path_to_Emacs_bin\emacsclientw.exe -a C:\Path_to_Emacs_bin\bin\runemacs.exe

But I find that configuring Salamander’s F4 to call the Emacs server to be difficult sometimes. In fact I spent an embarrassingly long time yesterday trying to figure it out. But it’s not at all difficult if you really understand two things:

1. Only the Emacs executable should appear in the Custom Editor Target box; any switches go into the Arguments box before the $(Name) parameter.
2. Emacs doesn’t like file names that contain quote marks. So if there’s a space in the path to the executable, you should specify the 8.3 name and not the path seen in Explorer.⁶ Please see the figure below.

I’ve heard Emacs gurus advise against installing Emacs in a location other than the default. The default on Windows currently is C:\Program Files\Emacs\emacs-30.1\. And I followed that advice unfortunately. But it caused me a great deal of grief, because it forced me to surround the paths in quotes and was incompatible with the server process. On my previous computers I had been installing Emacs in C:\Users\Public\Programs, which all users have access to and conforms to the DOS 8.3 file name format. That’s why this error is new to me.

So here’s advice from a wannabe guru:

• Follow the instructions above to configure Salamander’s F4 to invoke Emacs if you already have Emacs and Altap Salamander installed.
• When you install Emacs, change the installation location to ensure that the path is made up of only alpha-numeric characters and that all users will have Read and Execute permisions.

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¹ https://www.altap.cz/
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander
³ https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief_(text_editor)
⁵ https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Emacs-Server.html
⁶ Eli Zaretskii, https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-emacs-windows/2014-04/msg00013.html

Proofread With Read Text

One of the best pieces of letter-writing advice came from the CT DOL¹.  The suggestion?  Get your word processor to read your content out loud.

Spell checking can’t catch misspellings where the word spells a different word correctly, such as “no” used in place of “on,” for example.  But when read aloud, the mistake is obvious.  It’s also great for catching cut and paste errors in which a word or phrase may be repeated or missing.

LibreOffice doesn’t “ship” with this feature.  But the extension “Read Text”² can do the job.  After you install “Read Text” and restart LibreOffice, you can select the content you’d like to have read, and then select Tools | Add-Ons and then Read selection…  “Read Text” can also read from the clipboard, so you can use the feature with content from your email client or web browser.

But be careful -- the technique won’t draw attention to homophones³, witch yule all so have two bee vigilant too avoid.

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¹Connecticut Department of Labor
²https://extensions.libreoffice.org/en/extensions/show/read-text
³https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophone

CLCL Customization for Emacs

Way back in 2017 I wrote an introduction to CLCL¹, the clipboard manager that I prefer.  That post described how to add the supplementary Edit tool.  Today I’ll describe how to make CLCL work with Emacs.

By default, CLCL is set up to “listen” to the keystrokes Ctrl-x and Ctrl-c for pushing a selection to its stack of clipboard items, and Ctrl-v for popping the latest item into the focused application.  But Emacs’ standard keystrokes are Ctrl-w for “cutting,” Alt-w for “copying,” and Ctrl-y for “pasting.”  The terms “cutting,” “copying,” and “pasting” are in quotations because Emacs uses “killing” for “cutting” and “yanking” for “pasting.”²   And the keystrokes are described in Emacs-speak as C-w and C-y respectively.  The Emacs function “kill-ring-save” is like copy; it’s bound to M-w on my system.³

Anyway, to get a CLCL item yanked into the Emacs buffer, I add the Ctrl-y keystroke to CLCL.  You can do this on the Key tab of the Options dialog while Emacs is open.  Here's how.

Click the Add... button and scroll the Present Window List until you find a row whose title matches the text in the title bar of your Emacs application.  For me, that’s “GNU Emacs 25.2.1: *scratch*”, which is shown highlighted below.  Select that line and then click the down arrow button (or just double-click the line) to transfer the settings into the edit portion of the dialog box.

The Emacs title bar may include the name of the buffer.  In my example, that’s “*scratch*.”  But since the buffer name will vary, we need to replace it with the asterisk wildcard.

Click in the textbox below Copy and press Ctrl-w.⁴  Likewise, click in the textbox below Paste and click Ctrl-y.  The dialog should look similar to the one below.  Note that CLCL shows uppercase versions of W and Y in the Copy and Paste boxes; if you had pressed Ctrl-Shift-W it would display Ctrl + Shift + W instead.  OK your way out.

Now when you choose an item from CLCL while visiting a buffer in Emacs, it will be yanked into the buffer as expected.

Do you have a CLCL tip that you’d like to share?  Please let me know.  Add a comment below or email me.

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¹ https://ludditegeek.blogspot.com/2017/11/introduction-to-clcl-tools.html

² And to further confuse the issue, Emacs maintains it own “clipboard” which is called the “kill ring.”  Somehow, Emacs on Windows will yank from the Windows clipboard or yank from its kill ring depending on which was modified last.

³ Please see https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CopyAndPaste for more details.

⁴ Actually, configuring Copy not not be necessary.  Emacs on Windows seems to kill to the Windows clipboard, and CLCL adds each new clipboard item to its stack.

Count Selected Items in Outlook

The modern Outlook status bar no longer shows the number of selected items. So some folks suggest that you select items and simply press Enter in order to trick Outlook into thinking you want to open all of them. And if you have more than four items selected, Outlook supposedly will pop up a warning that opening X number of items could take a long time.

But what happens if you accidentally agree to open them, or if the instance of Outlook doesn’t warn you, as in my case? Then you’ve wasted time opening emails and failed to get your answer.

No, it’s never a good idea to rely on an operation’s side effect; it could be eliminated in the next version!

What I do instead is surprisingly simple.  I just call the Count property of Selection.  This returns the number of selected items. I call the property with a message box that’s wrapped in a subroutine, which I link to a button on the Actions Menu.

This is all you need:

Sub CountItems()

MsgBox ActiveExplorer.Selection.Count & " items are selected", vbOKOnly, "CountItems() Message"

End Sub

It would be nice if there were an easy way to add a link to this on my shortcut menu.

Open Org Mode Links With Default Windows Application

I've been using Org Mode for several years.

One Org Mode quirk is that the links in Org files always open in the Emacs editor, by default.  Click a link to Emacs_reference_card_v25.pdf on your hard drive and you might end up with a buffer that starts with this content...

%PDF-1.5
%    
3 0 obj
<<
/Length 4340      
/Filter /FlateDecode
>>
stream

I finally figured out a way to tell Emacs to open such "external" links with the default Windows application.  The multi-part solution involves first specifying all such links with a Special Prefix.  I chose "file:".  It's lame, I know, but it's also how you'd prefix an address for your web browser to open a local file.

So, for the PDF above, the link would look like this:
file:C:\emacs-25.2_64\doc\Emacs_reference_card_v25.pdf

The second part of the solution is to figure out which application on Windows you'd like to use to open the file "properly."  Rather than specifying multiple programs, such as a PDF reader for PDF files, a spreadsheet program for XLS/ODS, a word processor for DOC/ODT, etc., I decided that the single Windows command START already knows how to open all the programs on my computer.

If you were to enter the following in a command prompt, the program associated with the PDF extension would open the target file (assuming the file exists).

START C:\emacs-25.2_64\doc\Emacs_reference_card_v25.pdf

But there's a slight complication.  If the link contains a space or other delimiting character, you'll need to surround the file path with quotes like this: "C:\Path With Spaces\My PDF.pdf".  Unfortunately, START interprets quoted content as the title specification. Therefore, invoking the following would merely open a command prompt window with the title C:\Path With Spaces\My PDF.pdf

START "C:\Path With Spaces\My PDF.pdf"

So to get START to work as intended, you'd want to invoke it thusly:

START "DUMMY_TITLE" "C:\Path With Spaces\My PDF.pdf"

So having figured out the proper way to open file links, we create a function to implement it:

(defun ludditegeek-open-ext (path-to-media)
 (shell-command (concat "start \"ludditegeek-open-ext\" " path-to-media)))

Note that I chose to use the function name as the text for the title.  No matter, if all goes well, START will close the command prompt after it carries out the command -- most likely you'll never see the window.  For debugging, you could include the /WAIT switch, in which case you'll see the window, and the application will be listed in Task Manager with the title included.

Another thing to note here is that strings are defined in Lisp as characters enclosed in double-quotes.  But the title also requires double-quotes!  So I used a backslash character to escape the double-quote characters that are used to define the title.

The third part of the solution is to employ org-add-link-type to define the "file" link:

(org-add-link-type "file" 'ludditegeek-open-ext)

I call it with eval-after-load.  Here, finally, is what you can put in your .emacs:

(eval-after-load "org"
  '(progn
     ;; Create links in Org thusly:
     ;; [[file:/path/to/ppt.pptx][name of ppt]]
     ;; [[file:"/path with spaces/to/pdf.pdf"][name of pdf]]
     ;; [[file:/path/to/video.mkv][name of video]]
     (defun ludditegeek-open-ext (path-to-media)
       ;; Use Windows start command to open default application.
       ;; Note that first parameter to START is the command prompt window's title,
       ;; necessary for links that are enclosed in "", such as links with spaces.
       (shell-command (concat "start \"ludditegeek-open-ext\" " path-to-media)))
     (org-add-link-type "file" 'ludditegeek-open-ext)
     ))

I hope you find this useful!

Show Column in Outlook With Email Purge Date

If you're running Outlook in an Exchange environment, and the administrator has defined a Retention Policy, you can use the following kludge to configure Outlook to display a column of dates that the emails will be deleted on.  It's a kludge because the configuration doesn't actually retrieve the Retention Policy from Exchange -- it's up to you to find out what it is and then add it to the configuration.

Select your Inbox and then right click on the message list header and select Field Chooser.

Click the down arrow next to Frequently-used fields and scroll down to User-defined fields in folder.

Click New... and then enter PurgeOn in the Name box, and scroll down the Type box and select Formula.

Enter in the Formula box the DateAdd function that will return a date that's X number of days or months after the message Received date.  For example, if the Retention Policy is 18 months, enter this into the box: DateAdd("m",18,[Received]).  (The first parameter "m" specifies "Month" as the interval.  The number in the second parameter defines the number of intervals, or months in this case.  The third parameter represents the each message's received date.) Then click OK.

Drag the new PurgeOn field that you just created to the header in the position that you'd like the column to appear.

Close Field Chooser and resize the columns so that the dates in the new PurgeOn field display properly.

Note that the dates in the PURGEON column are 18 months later than the dates in the received column.

Unfortunately it seems that each folder (Inbox, Sent Items, etc.) requires its own User Defined Field. The [Received] field is appropriate for use in the Inbox. You might use DateAdd("m",18,[Sent]) in the Sent Items folder.

Again, this is a kludge. If an administrator changes the Retention Policy on the Exchange Server, your new field will ignore the change and blithely continue to show dates based on the old policy.  It may be possible to write a VBA procedure that would run on startup, retrieve the Retention Policy from Exchange and define the PurgeOn field programmatically.  Let me know if you get that working!

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A subset of this solution appeared on Microsoft TechNet on 2018-08-09.

Introduction to CLCL Tools

CLCL is the clipboard manager that I prefer.  But it’s lacking in extensive documentation, at least for those who don’t know Japanese.  I figured out how to configure the Tools that it comes with, so I thought I’d share that with you.

This procedure assumes that you already know how to download, install and run the main program.

Download the Tools from http://www.nakka.com/soft/clcl/index_eng.html .  There are two ZIP files (tltxt002_eng.zip and tlutl002_eng.zip, as of this writing) that provide DLLs with the functions that serve as tools.  Copy the DLLs from those ZIP files into the directory in which the CLCL executable resides.  While you’re at the Nakka website, you might as well download the other ZIP files that provide ability to manage as wider range of file formats.  Copy their DLLs, too.  As of this writing, there are two: fmtrtf002_eng.zip; fmtmeta002_eng.zip .

Invoke Tools from the Viewer menu, then choose Tool Setup…

Click the Add… button.

In the DLL textbox, enter the path and filename of one of the tool DLLs, for example, C:\Program Files (x86)\CLCL\tool_text.dll .  If you click the Browse button, you can use a File Dialog box to navigate to and select the DLL.

Now choose one of the Tools to add.  I find &Edit to be useful, so choose that.  OK your way back out.

Now when you press your hot key to call up the clipboard list, you can right-click on a text entry, then click on Edit to open a simple editor to modify the text.  When you’re done, you can click OK to put the edited content onto the clipboard, replacing the original entry.

Use the same procedure to try out the other tools.

Dummies Data Visualization Links

The following links are listed in Data Visualization for Dummies:

https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/
http://visual.ly/
http://chartporn.org/
https://excelcharts.com/posts/
http://flowingdata.com/

Seems to be more for artists than for engineers, though.

A Better Way to Link to a Slide in PowerPoint

I've written about how to force Excel to use absolute paths in its links by specifying the Hyperlink Base  That works in PowerPoint, too.  Unfortunately, it interferes with PowerPoint's ability to follow internal links (links to other slides in the document).

Here's a workaround for that.  It allows you to link to another slide in the same PPT even if you have Hyperlink Base set to some location.  This was tested on PowerPoint 2003.

There are two parts to this.  The first part is to create a "bookmark" at the slide you want to link to.  Do this by creating a “Custom Slide Show”.  It's analogous to adding a bookmark in Word (but, regrettably much more complicated and less intuitive).
1.  In version 2003, choose Slide Show from the menu and then Custom Shows...
2.  Click the New... button.
3.  Enter a name for the Show in the uppermost textbox for the slide that you want to link to.  For example, you might enter "Detailed Analysis".
4.  In the left box, click on the slide that you want to "link to".  Then click the Add >> button.  (You can add multiple slides.)
5.  Click OK and then Close.

The second part creates the link to it.  When you click the link, it will run a mini slide show that consists of the target slide(s).
1.  Select some text that you'd like to make into a hyperlink, for example, "Please see the Detailed Analysis".
2.  Press Ctrl-K (or right-click on the selection and choose Hyperlink).
3.  Click "Place in this Document" on the left.
4.  In the scroll box that opens, scroll down to find "Detailed Analysis" (or whatever) under Custom Shows and click it.  (If you see only Custom Shows, click the plus sign to the left of it).
5.  Click the "Show and return" checkbox.
6. OK your way out.

The really neat thing is that the "link" persists even if slides are added before the target slide.  This is an awesome improvement over the conventional bookmark mechanism in which you're limited to linking to a slide number.  On the other hand, the hyperlink works only during a Slide Show.  There is no option to right click and open hyperlink.  So if you like to present in “edit mode” it won't work.

Also, navigation is a bit wonky.  When you click on the link, PPT will show the target slide, as expected.  But Alt-Left (the universal keystroke for "Back") doesn't return you to the previous slide.  In order to go back, you have to tell PPT to advance to the next slide (press PgDn, for example) to get back to the previous slide.  Pressing PgUp will cause PPT to ring the error bell at you.  Don't worry.  After a few dings, you'll get the hang of it.

Even if you don't need to set Hyperlink Base, you might prefer this method over the simpler method of linking to a slide.  Because if that slide's position changes, the simple link won't work the way you intended.

Let me know if you find this useful.  And if anyone knows this “GadiN” who reported the problem, please thank him or her for me and share this method.

Is AntiVirus as Bad as Malware?

I've been using and recommending AVG AntiVirus Free for over a decade.  Whenever a new computer's trial version of Symantec AntiVirus would expire, I'd uninstall it and install AVG.

But when I accepted the upgrade to version 16, I lost the ability to control its update schedule.  It's no longer possible to disable automatic updates.  Now the only option is to accept automatic updates whenever they become available.  Users even lost the ability to force an update.

That's a big problem.  I once hosed a system when AVG updated during a Windows Update.  That was when I decided to disable automatic updates and run them manually with a simple right click of the taskbar icon.

I still have the install file for AVG 15.  Unfortunately, it downloads the full installer from the Internet and then installs the latest version.

I considered doing away with AntiVirus entirely.  But I'm not the only user of the computers -- the other users will need to have the safety net of an AntiVirus program.

So it's time to shop for a new AntiVirus program!

Adventures in Email Debugging

On Wednesday I was unable to download my personal email on my work computer.  Since downloading personal email at work is something I probably shouldn't be doing anyway, I didn't look into the matter right away.

And besides, my set up is a bit complicated, actually.  The email client is Outlook, which is used in IMAP mode to work with the Exchange email server.  But I also use Outlook to connect to Yahoo's POP and SMTP servers for my personal mail.  But not directly.

Outlook is configured to connect to Firetrust's Benign (0), which is set up to listen on a local IP address.  And Benign is configured to connect to POPFile (1).  So any one of those three programs could be at fault, or the Yahoo POP server could be down, or the IT department might've blocked the necessary ports.

I figured I'd restart my computer eventually.  But I was running a long script, and I didn't want to do a restart at that time.  So I first I stopped and restarted POPFile and then Benign.  And then Outlook.

When that didn't help, I fired up Firetrust's Mailwasher Pro (2), just to see if I could connect to the Yahoo POP server and download message headers.  I could.  So at least the POP port 995 (for SSL) was still open on the router.

Then I set up a new Outlook email account profile that would connect directly with the Yahoo mail server.  That worked, too.  So Outlook was still okay.  That meant Benign or POPFile was at fault.

I decided to check out the POPFile website first.  And there I read in the news listing, “The Windows version of POPFile 1.1.3 is no longer compatible with some SSL servers...”  True it was dated back to September 2015, but if Yahoo just upgraded its server, then it would make sense.

I downloaded and installed the SSL updater that POPFile provided (3) and got it all working again in a jiffy.

So if anyone else out there is using POPFile as an intermediary between Yahoo and his or her email client, be prepared to use this technique to get it working again.

(0) http://www.firetrust.com/products/benign
(1) http://getpopfile.org/
(2) http://www.firetrust.com/products/mailwasher-pro
(3) http://getpopfile.org/downloads/updateSSL-mk2-for-POPFile-1.1.3.zip

Must-Have Extensions For FireFox and Chrome

FireFox is my favorite browser.  It beats Chrome in terms of usability.  But I'm curious to see if I could live with Chrome for a while.  So I'm taking it for a test drive.

First for safe browsing, I like to have...
NoScript (FireFox) // ScriptNo/ScriptSafe (Chrome)
Blocks all scripts from running.  Allows the user to add exceptions for scripts on any given domain, either just for the current session (temporarily) or also for future sessions (permanently).  I think I like ScriptSafe on Chrome better than NoScript on FireFox.  Why?  Because NoScript will reload the page each time a single host is enabled, whereas ScriptSafe will let you enable multiple host before reloading the page.  And ScriptSafe features color-coded buttons while NoScript differentiates between temporary and permanent whitelist with italics.

WOT (FireFox) // WOT (Chrome)
WOT, or Web Of Trust, warns you in advance when a link leads to a dangerous website, before you even click on it.  The database of dangerous links is maintained by the community of WOT users.  But this sometimes can lead to sites getting blocked when a user disagrees with a site's ideology.  Still, you can get more detail on each website's rating and decide for yourself.


For usability, try these extensions...
FBPurity (FireFox, Chrome, Safari, Opera)
Facebook could be useful if only _______ (fill in the blank).  Well, FBPurity fills in the blanks by filtering out the elements that you don't want to see.  I use it to block "food pron" (plus other annoying and recurrent topics), to keep videos from auto-playing, to hide the reactions bar, to always sort posts in Most Recent order, to hide the newsfeed, etc.

LastTab (FireFox) // CLUT (Chrome)
N either FireFox nor Chrome cycle through tabs with Ctrl-Tab the way Windows cycles through active programs with Alt-Tab.  These extensions alter how these browsers behave when you press Ctrl-Tab.  So rather than cycling tabs from left to right, Ctrl-Tab cycles in Most Recently Used order.  There is one caveat, though.  Chrome extensions are not allowed to redefine default keystrokes (such as Ctrl-Tab), so none of the MRU-type tab managers on Chrome can fix Ctrl-Tab.  However, you can bind CLUT to Ctrl-q and Ctrl-Shift-Q, which is just to the right of Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab.

Password Management
Both Chrome and FireFox come out-of-the-box with the ability to remember the username and password needed to log in at each unique website.  However, FireFox can remember multiple usernames and passwords for any given site.  After looking for a Chrome extension to get Chrome to work this way (and failing), I thought I stumbled across an experimental option to enable the behavior.  But perhaps not, since the setting I thought I discovered doesn't affect this at all.  Rather, Chrome (at version 49) just started behaving the way I wanted it to!

View Selection Source
In FireFox, you can select content, right click on it and then choose a command to view the source code for that extension.  Chrome provides an "Inspect" command, but it reveals only the CSS details and not the complete HTML.  The View Selection Source extension for Chrome (or its equivalent) is necessary to see the snippet of HTML that's rendered by the browser for that selected content.  Yes, you can press Ctrl-U to view the source of the entire page in a new tab.  But then you have to search for the content you're interested in.  That's awkward, and it works only if the content can be pasted into the search bar.  The weird thing about the View Selection Source extension is that it doesn't come up if you search for it on Google Play.  I found the link in a post on the Help Center.

Save As... / Print To... PDF
Chrome has a built-in PDF printer that it calls "Save to PDF."  It works great, and there's no need to install a separate printer driver.  But you'll have to choose at least one of these three options to get FireFox to save a page as PDF, too.

1. Install on your computer a PDF Printer Drive, such as PDFCreator or CutePDF.  (Both are free to download and use.)
2. Install in FireFox a PDF printer extension.
3. Use an online Web page to PDF service.

I like the first option, since the extensions I've come across either save the web page as a image or send the HTML over the internet to a server to perform the conversion.  I like the ability to select and copy text from the PDF, which is not possible with an image.  And when I generate PDF, it's usually to record a financial transaction, the details of which I'd rather keep on my local hard drive.

At one point I couldn't get the PDF printer drivers to work with FireFox.  Before giving up and switching to Chrome, I came across this Mozilla support page.  It turned out that resetting the print_printer setting fixed it.  As well, I've had to delete the prefs.js in order to solve a problem with the PDF coming out with all blank pages.

What are your favorite Extensions / Add-ons?

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2016-07-09 LG Added the section "Save As... / Print To... PDF"
2016-06-13 LG Added "View Selection Source" paragraph.

Notes on Setting Up Windows 7

Recently I had to set up fresh installations of Windows 7 on two computers.  Here are some tips to make that process go a bit smoother...

1. Windows Update #1 -- Microsoft has released hundreds of recommended and important updates for Windows 7 since it was introduced.  All that data is a burden for Windows Update, and the update process can bog down on slower computers.  To remedy this, you'll want to download the update associated with KB3102810 first before you even check for updates.  Adjusting your computer's Power Options so it stays awake during the long update process may also help.

2. Windows Update #2 -- I wrote about this before.  Unless you want to upgrade to Windows 10, you'll want to hide the update KB3035583, or uninstall it if it already got onto your system.

3.  Gadgets -- Third party gadgets are no longer supported due to "serious vulnerabilities" in the Windows Sidebar.  You'll still be able to add the default Microsoft ones, such as "Clock," "Calendar," "Slide Show" and "CPU Usage" (my favorites).  But I also liked the third party "Network Meter," which I'd use often to verify download rates.  Since Network Meter is no longer available, I figured out that I can use ResMon to do something similar.  To have ResMon (almost) mimic Network Meter I minimize the various components in the left pane of ResMon and resize the window so that only the network graphs show up.  And I add a shortcut to ResMon.exe in my StartUp folder.

Do you have any tips for setting up Windows 7?  Please share them!

How About Never?

A coworker had just bought a refurbished computer with Windows 7 OS and was dutifully applying updates.  He noticed a new icon in the taskbar tray and clicked it.  The program presented him with the opportunity to upgrade to Windows 10.  It implicitly asked when would you like to download Windows 10?  The dialog box offered two buttons labeled "Upgrade now" and "Upgrade tonight."

How about Never?  That was not an option.

The Gwx.exe and GwxUX.exe programs make it easy for users to reserve their free copy of Windows 10.  They appear after the user applies the update associated with KB3035583.  And they disappear after the user uninstalls that update.

This "How To Geek" article describes it all in detail.

My previous post discusses why you might want to avoid upgrading.

The Windows 10 Giveaway

As of Wednesday Microsoft started giving away Windows 10.  What would you be giving away if you upgrade?  Privacy?  Security?  Performance? #UpgradeYourWorld

According to the Free Software Foundation¹:

• Windows' 10's privacy policy asserts the privilege to sell almost any information it wants about users, even creating a unique advertising ID for each user to sweeten the deal.
• Microsoft announced that, starting with Windows 10, it will begin forcing lower-paying users to test less-secure new updates before giving higher-paying users the option of whether or not to adopt them.
• Microsoft is reported to give the NSA special security tip-offs that it could use to crack into Windows computers.

"What am I supposed to do about it?" I hear you ask.

• Don't upgrade to Windows 10.
• Begin to use Free Software that runs under Windows.  Here's a small excerpt of all that's available.
• Download and try a free Linux Live CD.
• Install one of the many free Linux Distros on a spare computer.
• Spread the word about Free Software using responsible social media.
• Buy a computer that has a free Linux Distro pre-installed on it.

Close Windows, Open Doors

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¹ https://www.fsf.org/windows

Undo the Default App Selection in Android

Here's the scenario....  Your Android device presents you with a choice of apps to complete an action with.  You're supposed to select the app and then select either "Just Once" or "Always."  Either way the app opens to complete the action.

If you selected "Just Once" you'll have to choose again the next time you need to complete that same action.  That might seem annoying.  But what if it's the wrong choice?  If you choose "Always" you won't get to choose again, at least not easily.  And if the app cannot complete the action successfully, what then?

According to many lame blog posts and webzine articles, it's "easy" to change your mind after choosing "Always."  They say to just press the app's "Clear Defaults" button.  Here's one such article on AndroidCentral.

Fortunately AndroidCentral is swarming with brilliant users who are much more sophisticated than the folks who write the articles.  I say "fortunately" because when I needed to change the option of using Photos for downloading an image file attachment, the article's advice was useless because Photos' "Clear Defaults" button was greyed out.

A user called Siddhartha Gupta suggested that to remove Photos as the default app, it's necessary to change the setting for Google+.  That didn't work, either.

A user called ChromeJob pointed out that there's "a 'reset app preferences' in the action overflow button. This appears to reset ALL default app choices at once."  If only it were that easy for me.  It didn't work.

The thing that finally worked for me was to revert to the factory version of Photos by pressing the "Uninstall Updates" button.  After doing that, I was presented with a choice of two other apps to use.  The idea to alter Photos' version came to me after reading a comment byGrillMouster who stated that "when any of those apps receive an update the ["Just Once" / "Always"] dialog will pop up again, even if you had previously set an app as the default."

If you want the very gory details of why Photos didn't work, please read on to find out what I was trying to do.

I had used Firefox to log in to an Exchange Server using an Outlook Web Access (OWA) client hosted on a web page.  I then opened an e-mail that had a JPG file attached to it.  When I attempted to download the attachment, OWA again wanted me to provide my username and password.  Photos was unable to handle that request (and neither was Firefox).  It was only by completing the action with ES File Explorer File Manager that I found out about the need to provide username and password.  I've included this detail in case there are others who are having trouble downloading attachments with OWA.

Trials with an Old Computer

About six years ago, I mused about what to do with an old computer, a 500MHz Pentium III.  My idea was to reformat the hard drive (20GB) and install one of these operating systems: Windows 2000 (already obsolete); Windows XP (facing obsolescence); and Linux (Ubuntu, although I don't recall why I decided on that flavor).

I tried all three plus Dyne:bolic, a Linux variant specialized for music and video production on under-powered computers.  Here's how I fared....

Dyne:bolic was easy to try out, and I didn't have to reformat the Window NT drive to do it.  So I tried it first.  After downloading version 2, I burned the ISO image to a CD.  It booted up just fine and I ran it from the CD.  It performed well, but it was set up for a single root-level user, and it wouldn't "play" Flash content.

Next was XP.  The first problem I had was that I couldn't activate the OS, even though I had a valid key.  But I played around with it anyway during the evaluation period.  Just twenty minutes was enough to know it would be way too slow.

Then I installed Windows 2000.  This involved a lot of tedious business with multiple CDs for the OS itself, then Service Pack 6 and then more CDs with security software and utilities.  Everything went well until I installed the antivirus program and updated it.  After that, the OS would not start.

Finally I decided to give Linux a try.  Rather than download images files, I decided to search the local public library system for Linux books that had accompanying CDs.  And I limited my search to old books, too, since I really needed the installer to be on CD-ROMs and not a DVD.  There were some Red Hat Linux books, so I got one and tried it.  It installed and ran really well except for the web browser, Mozilla, which had me pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del and longing for Task Manager to come up so I could kill it.

Of these four options, Dyne:bolic was clearly the best.  Unfortunately, by the time I got around to realizing it, Jaromil released version 3.0.0, whose 1.6GB image now must be burned onto DVD, not CD.  (I can't find the CD that had version 2 on it. And booting from USB is not an option in this computer's BIOS.)  This latest Dyne:bolic is totally awesome -- I tried the Live CD on my main home desktop (a P4), and I created a small virtual machine on my work computer, which boots the image file.

In order to run D:B3 on my PIII, I need a DVD drive.  Since I had two on my main desktop, I removed one and installed it on the PIII.  But, alas, it didn't work.  The computer detected the drive, but it won't boot from it, and Linux won't mount it.  So I think the laser is shot.  I've encountered a few non-functioning DVD drives in this manufacturer's computers, so I really do think the drive is defective.  In fact I wasn't able to boot from the drive recently when it was in the P4 that I took it out of.

So this is where I am now.  I need a working IDE DVD drive, which are expensive and/or refurbished.  There are adapters that can convert a SATA drive to IDE, but that's an extra expense I didn't want to pay.  Plus, I'm not sure this small form factor case will have any room for it, although I can put the new SATA drive with IDE adapter into the main desktop and move the working IDE DVD drive from the main desktop to the PIII if I really had to.

If / when I clear this hurdle I'll check in again.  Hopefully D:B3 will still be available!