I don’t actually have anything to hide, however the recent privacy screw up by Google when they released Buzz really rammed home to me that all my data is with Google and I am trusting them to keep it safe!  I do not believe the Buzz fiasco was an error by Google.  Most Google products go through several years of beta testing (remember GMail just recently came out of beta) and all of a sudden a new product called Buzz was thrust upon us.  I think this was all very intentional, and Google were just testing the water to see what they could get away with.

So with this in mind I set out to see how I could live life without GMail and Google Reader, and I found it extremely easy especially as I have a couple of VPSs which I have full root access to.

Email

Moving all my email to a Dovecot email server was a breeze.  I used isync to connect to GMail via IMAP and create the equivalent MailDir format.  Job done.

I predominantly use Thunderbird 3 as my email client, though occasionally when I am on the road it is handy to access the mail via a webmail client, and this where RoundCube comes to the rescue.   Don’t be fooled by it’s low version number, it is feature rich and a more than suitable replacement.

News Reader

This was bit harder to find, but I found a fantastic project called Tiny Tiny RSS Reader, it’s a breeze to install and use and even has a mobile interface for accessing from you phone.   It was easy as pie to export my subscriptions from Google Reader and import them to Tiny Tiny RSS Reader, and after using it for a week or so in many ways  I prefer the interface to that of Google Reader, lets face it Google are not renowned for their UI design.

So my online life is no longer tied to Google, and best of all I have achieved the same functionality using free, libre and open source software.  I would like to thank the developers and community of both RoundCube and Tiny Tiny RSS for making this all possible.  From the 1st March 2010, I will terminate my GMail account and presumably all the data associated with it will be sent to the big bit bucket in the sky….or will it?  I guess I will never know.

The second gPodder release in this month brings updated translations, lots of bug fixes and some UI clean-ups to your open source podcast aggregator. Here are some highlights of this release:

• “All episodes” in “View” menu and enabled by default
• Episodes are passed to the media player in chronological order
• Try to use mimetype-based file icons (using GIO) for episodes
• Make sure the podcast list is correctly updated all the time
• Disable feed_update_skipping by default (+expose in UI on Maemo)
• Default cover art for podcasts with no cover art
• Re-designed preferences dialog for Maemo 5 (Fremantle)
• gPodder rotates to landscape on Maemo 5 when the keyboard is open
• Better button captions in shownotes window (“Cancel download”)
• Remove podcast.de search option (this was broken for some weeks)
• Hide “Download folder” preferences option (see User Manual)
• Flush gPodder database after MP3 player sync has finished
• Updated translations (Galician, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Ukrainian, Finnish, Polish and German)
• New translations: Romanian (by Gherhardt Mathisz)

The source package is now available from the downloads page and packages for Ubuntu, Maemo and Windows should be available soon.

I recently created a new server at home and install Ubuntu 9.10 Server on it.   As a consequence all the SSH keys I used to access my old server were lost and I needed to add them back again….one at a time from each machine I use to access it.

Although this does not seem a big deal, the method I was using previously was as follows:-

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh <user>@<host>
'dd of=.ssh/authorized_keys oflag=append conv=notrunc'

Although this worked fine, I was catching up on my Linux reading and in Linux Journal #184 (August 2009) another reader Mark K. Zanfardino wrote in withe following more simplified command which works great on Ubuntu:-

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub <user>@<host>

This is not only easier to remember, it also checks that the key being added doesn’t already exist on the server! Brilliant!

Taken from gPodder.org:-

After a productive weekend in Copenhagen with improvements in the UI for portable devices we are ready to surprise you with another fine release of the most enjoyable podcast client so far. Some highlights:

• Download pausing, resuming and better error reporting
• “Paste from clipboard” button in add subscription dialog
• Auto-detect run path (makes –local obsolete)
• Better screen space usage for the Maemo UI (no more tabs)
• Newly supported target: Maemo 5 (Fremantle)
• Newly supported target: Mer (Maemo Reconstructed)
• Newly supported target: Windows (Tested with XP/Vista)
• A HUGE set of bug fixes and performance improvements
• Transition to GtkBuilder means removal of Glade dependency

See the detailed changelog for more information.

This script is very easy to get installed and running on a Linux box with a LAMP setup. I then started to use it. However when posting some Launchpad URLs that contained ‘+’ characters, I discovered that Phurl did not store the URL correctly therefore causing the shortened URL not to wok.

I emailed Hidayet with this question, and overnight I got a response that included the fix:-

in create.php

change:

$url = trim(urldecode(@$_REQUEST['url']));


to:

$url = trim(@$_REQUEST['url']);


This will ensure that URLs are correctly stored in the database, including those containing the ‘+’ character.

I am sure this fix will be included in the next release of Phurl, but to make sure your installation is free from this issue then make the changes above.

Searching the web I could find other people with the same problem, but sadly no solution.  Until today!

I stumbled across this blog entry on Synergy Problems and Workarounds and I now have the ‘@’ symbol back on my laptop when using Synergy!

The solution is very simple, in a terminal window type the following:-

echo keycode 24 = q Q at at at at | xmodmap -

Brilliant, thanks to Delta Nova!

root@ycits01:/# quotacheck -u -g -f -m /
quotacheck: Cannot create new quotafile //aquota.user.new: File exists
quotacheck: Cannot initialise IO on new quotafile: File exists
quotacheck: Cannot create new quotafile //aquota.group.new: File exists
quotacheck: Cannot initialise IO on new quotafile: File exists

The solution was to run the following:-

mv /aquota.user.new /aquota.user.broken
mv /aquota.group.new /aquota.group.broken
quotacheck -u -g -f -m /

So I hope this is of use to somebody, now all I need to do is find out where I should report the bug!

After the release of gPodder 0.15.0 exposed some problems with installations of Python 2.6 (for example, Ubuntu Jaunty, who did the transition recently), and some other bugs that cropped up and were quickly fixed, we present you here a fresh release, containing (as usual) only bugfixes:

• Make default encoding utf8 on Maemo (nikosapi)
• Fix “You must not use 8-bit bytestrings” (bug 375)
• Fix a regression in the MTP synchronization code (Jérôme Chabod)
• Added missing dependency on python-dbus for the Debian package

Thanks to all bug reporters for helping us getting this release fixed quickly. You can grab the updated source tarball and Debian/Ubuntu packages from the downloads page. If you find additional bugs in this release, please don’t hesistate to report them on our bug tracker.

We are proud to announce yet another fine release of gPodder: 0.15.0! This release comes with two long-awaited features/fixes:

• Download resuming (bug 19)
• Proper file and folder naming (bug 57)

When you first start this version, it tries to rename your current download folders and files so they have nice, readable names. There might be some occassions where the renaming does not work – please report such problems at our bug tracker.

This release is also the first to include a new command-line utility, gpodder-backup, which is able to create a nice tarball of all your configuration settings and your downloaded files. This is also useful for reporting bugs that only happen with specific user configurations. See the gpodder-backup manpage for details.

Contributions by commits (since gPodder 0.14.0)

• Alex Ghitza (2)
• Anders Kvist (2)
• Bernd Schlapsi (3)
• Casey Watson (1)
• Iwan van der Kleijn (1)
• Justin Forest (4)
• Jérôme Chabod (2)
• Leonid Ponomarev (2)
• Morten Juhl-Johansen Zölde-Fejér (1)
• Nick Sonneveld (1)
• Romain Janvier (1)
• Silvio Sisto (4)
• Thomas Perl (49)
• Ville-Pekka Vainio (2)
• nikosapi (4)

Thanks also to all bug reporters and people on the IRC channel, who helped making this release as bug-free as possible in the allotted time frame. Now, get yourself a cup of coffee or a glass of orange juice and enjoy this new release of your favourite podcatcher. The source tarball and some packages can be found on the downloads page.

Hello there!

I’m glad to announce that the 0.12.0 release cycle was just 9 days, and we didn’t even include all the new changes from trunk in the 0.12.1 release, because we wanted it to be stable and went for a bugfix release instead (there are the German and French translations updated, but that’s about it).

So, here it is: gPodder 0.12.1 “The Little People” for your bug-fix-loving podcast needs. The release announcement follows below.

What’s next?
We’ll be migrating to Git as soon as we find some time to do a clean migration, we’ll be drafting a new road map, because 1.0 isn’t going to happen so soon, especially as we now have many developers actively working on new features, and the codebase is very dynamic and vital at the moment, so stopping features from coming into gPodder and preventing the motivated developers from putting their creative work into gPodder’s code just for the sake of stability would pull out all the fun from this project. Who would have thought that, huh?

So, until further notice, the 1.0 release is delayed for a few more months, probably when (if) development slows down a bit. I have no problem with delaying 1.0 infinitely if that means that we keep working as motivated as now on gPodder

Thanks to all who were involved in the 0.12.1 release!

Enjoy!
Thomas

======================================================

2008-07-24: gPodder 0.12.1 “The Little People” released
After several people have discovered bugs in the 0.12.0 release of gPodder released last week, we decided to push out a bugfix release, so you get the best out of gPodder without having to wait for a few weeks to get back a working gPodder:

* Fix Device traceback when syncing (reported by FriedBunny, fixed by Nick)
* Fix problems with command-line mode not working correctly (reported by Mykola Nikishov)
* Updated French translation (by Jerome Chabod)

It is recommended that you upgrade to the latest version for the best gPodder experience.