I lost yet another Maxtor hard drive last week, second one this year. A four month old 150GB DiamondMax died in February, but that one started making noises reminiscent of a baby in a blender, which I, of course, mostly ignored. Needless to say Maxtor is eating my RMA right now. To their credit it’s replacement (a 200GB DiamondMax Plus 9) lasted 175% longer finally crapping out right around 7 months. No idea why this last one broke. It just stopped working. When I pulled it out and analyzed it, the reason was obvious.
This is to say, I won’t be buying another Maxtor.
A buddy of mine has been looking to switch to mutt from graphical mail client for it’s configurability, speed and stability. I didn’t get into setting up console mail apps in my last post because I didn’t think there was going to be much interest considering I only know four people who use mutt (and a few suckers who use emacs) for mail. I don’t use or like emacs so if you use it you’re on your own. However, if you use mutt this is how you set it up to be used as the mail app with Firefox.
First off reopen the about:config dialog and find the network.protocol-handler.app.mailto setting as described in the last post. Instead of setting it’s value to the name of a client we set it to mutt_mailto.sh. Now, somewhere in your path (/usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, etc.) make the mutt_mailto.sh file. It’s contents are easy and should look like this:
#!/bin/sh
EXEC Eterm -e mutt "$@"
The syntax is near identical for xterm. Just change the second line to EXEC xterm e mutt "$@". This should work with any app that accepts command line arguments and understand the standard “mailto:bofh@domain.com?subject=foobar” syntax.
Not everyone running linux uses a desktop environment or window manager that supports a global “default email application” setting which Firefox and various other browsers are programmed to automatically detect. Sadly there doesn’t seem to be a preferences setting for this and it can get to be a real pain in the ass. For pre-1.5 versions of Firefox there was a patch against defaults/pref/firefox.js that set Thunderbird as the default mail client. I’m fairly certain with minor tweaking the patch could still work, but what if you don’t want to use Thunderbird?
To pick your own email client you need to tweak the internal Firefox config settings. First open a browser window and in the address bar type about:config. This will bring up the entire list of internal settings, but we only need the ones related to the mail application. In the filter bar type mail and press enter to filter out everything but mail related settings. First off we need to ensure that Firefox is exposing mailto links to external applications by checking these settings:
network.protocol-handler.expose.mailto default boolean true
network.protocol-handler.external.mailto default boolean true
If either of these settings don’t match the above on your system simply double-click it to toggle it between true and false. Once these two are set we need to add the handler for the default mail app. Right click anywhere in the window body, select new -> string. A window will pop up asking for the preference name. Enter network.protocol-handler.app.mailto for the name and /usr/bin/thunderbird for the value.
The value of this string is all the will determine the mail app that Firefox will use. It can be anything from Thunderbird to Kmail, even mutt if you’re like me.
Saw this article over on CNN that reports The Senate rejected attempts to reauthorize several provisions of the USA Patriot Act. They cited it as infringing too much on Americans’ privacy and liberty. This deals a huge defeat to the Bush administration and Republican leaders. I’m certain a special weekend session will be called, but if a compromise isn’t reached, the 16 Patriot Act provisions will expire on December 31.
The funniest part about this is the fact that the event that might have tipped the scales against the renewal of the Patriot Act was Dubbya authorizing the unlawful surveillance of American citizens. But can we honestly be shocked by any of this? Especially from a president who has been quoted as saying the Constitution is “just a god damned piece of paper“. Fortunately, it looks like most of the Senate (including a few noteworthy Republicans who crossed the aisle on this one) have a slightly higher regard for the Constitution of the United States.
Granted, Rense may not be a completely reliable source, but given that this President has stated that it would be easier if the US were a dictatorship (as long as he were the dictator), would a lack of respect for the Constitution really surprise you?
Frankly, I’d believe it if the Weekly World News said that Bush eats babies.
After a freak cold spell, nature has done a one-eighty and kicked off spring early. It’s the middle of December and it was over 40F out today. That’s insane for this time of year. As a matter of fact Tuesday of last week was warmer in Anchorage, Alaska than it was in Las Vegas. I’ve been saying for a while this country was going to hell in a handbasket, I just didn’t know the fire would be this warm…
A lot of people from various backgrounds claim this to be the best time of year. Whether you’re into the holidays for religious reasons or the family togetherness I can tell you it’s a huge pain in the ass every year. Well, if you’re a comic fan that is. Every year in December, and usually the first week of January, comics are late. In Alaska everything has to come up by plane and with the postal system so congested with X-Mas priority packages, comics are always at least a day late. So next year try mailing your Grandma a nice, festive gift card of some kind. It’ll get there cheaper, faster and allow more crap on the plane…
It’s a sick, intellectually backwards world we live in. Here’s proof.
