Tech and life

Leaving Eudora

I’ve been using Eudora as a desktop email client since around 2002. It was a computer mag recommendation that got me started with it. I didn’t like Microsoft Outlook Express and this seemed like a great free alternative. But now it looks a little dated, development on it stopped for quite a while but now an open source version has been released built on the Thunderbird codebase. I’m running the old Eudora version 7 .1 and I’ve been finding it won’t send out some emails recently – it’s giving SMTP server errors about the From addresses I use so I thought now would be a good time to change to a new desktop email client.

Why choose Thunderbird?

Judging from what I read on tech blogs and hear on tech podcasts, Mozilla Thunderbird seems to be a well recommended desktop email client with lots of add-ons but what really interests me is that it is multiplatform. I have an Acer Aspire One netbook currently running Ubuntu and I want to be able to use Thunderbird on that too with all my emails synced on Windows and Linux platforms. So I’ll give Thunderbird a go, but I may go back to the new open source Eudora if I don’t like it.

I do use Gmail too in addition to having several old POP3 email accounts. Everything including my Gmail comes down to my desktop client. Yes I know I could probably deal with it all in Gmail but I like having my emails on my desktop and backed up to an external drive in case anything goes wrong.

Moving from Eudora to Thunderbird

I’ve shied away from this move in the past as I thought it would be a nightmare importing 10 years worth of emails to a new client. So I tried to minimise any problems by taking it in stages.  I decided it would be a good idea to make the move over a weekend when no business emails were coming in and I had a chance to test that everything was set up okay. Here’s what I did.

On Friday morning, I installed Thunderbird. During installation, I chose not to have it as my default email client. I also didn’t import anything when it asked. I just wanted to have a look around the interface and get familiar with it initially. When it had installed, I manually set up one of my email accounts and tried sending a test mail out from Thunderbird to another of my email accounts in Eudora. Everything went fine so on Friday evening, I imported all my emails and account profiles from Eudora. Surprisingly this only took around 10 minutes. Everything went fine and I was soon sending out test emails from all my email accounts to my other accounts. I just had to manually tweak some of the SMTP settings with correct usernames and passwords in Thunderbird.

I’m slowly getting to know my way around the Thunderbird interface – it’s a lot different from Eudora 7.1. I still have lots to learn, add-ons to install, etc so I’ll blog again about Thunderbird later when I have some tips and trick to pass on. But perhaps you have some Thunderbird tips to share? Drop a comment below on Thunderbird. I’d love to hear your experiences.

Getting up to Speed with Mozilla Thunderbird is a post from Techandlife. If you’re reading it elsewhere, it’s been copied without permission. Please visit the original site. Thankyou.

There are a host of commercial utilities for managing windows on dual monitors but here are three free programs which may cover most of what you need. I use all three and they work fine for me and are easy to set up.

Dual Monitor Taskbar

This was the first utility I installed after setting up my dual monitor system. Dual Monitor Taskbar gives you a taskbar on the second monitor showing just the windows open on that monitor.

WizMouse

I’m indebted to Rich Menga of PC Mech for blogging about this great mouse utility. If you’ve worked with dual monitors you’ll know that, if you have a document open on each monitor, to scroll the document on the second monitor you have to move your mouse over that window, click to select that window, then you can scroll the document. WizMouse allows you just to mouse over the window on the second monitor and it will scroll immediately without any clicking. Works on multiple windows open on one monitor as well. A very useful little utility.

DualSwap

If you drag a full screen window to your second monitor, you’ll probably find it is resized and you then have to maximize it again if required. DualSwap adds a button to the top right of the active window (to the left of the minimise button) which, when clicked, will move the window to the other monitor and retain it full screen or the same size as on the first monitor (so long as both monitors are set at the same resolution). One thing to watch is, if you are running Windows 7, install the file called DualSwap-Win7theme.exe not DualSwap.exe, otherwise the ‘move window’ button will sit right over the maximize button so you have to be careful where you click.  A hotkey combination to move the window to the second monitor would be a nice addition to the program.

The other problem is that this program adds itself to your startup programs without asking. If you’d rather not have that, remove it from your startup programs – click Start, then Run and type ‘shell:startup’ in the Run box. This will open the start up folder. Drag the DualSwap program out of there to where you want to start it from, for example the desktop. Then click Start, then Run and type ‘msconfig’ in the Run box. Go to the Startup tab and uncheck DualSwap.

Well, there are three free utilities which will make managing windows on dual monitors easier. Do you have any favourite utilities for working with dual screens? Drop a comment below.

I listened to a podcast recently which got me thinking about free versus paid software and online services. I’ve blogged about free software and alternatives to commercial programs before but Tracy Holt made a great point on The Techie Geek Podcast 90. Tracy and Russ were discussing freeing up space in web email accounts rather than paying for unlimited storage. Tracy ran through his lengthy routine for archiving emails then admitted he would have been better off paying $50/year for unlimited email storage which he does now:

‘My time is probably worth more than all the time I spent trying to free up space’

He’s right and that applies to software as well as online services, particularly if you run a small office/home office (SOHO). If buying software or online services or upgrading from free to premium versions is going to save you time in the long run, that precious time saved is also going to make you more productive and you should earn more in the same time available. So far this has definitely applied to me in my day job as a freelance copy editor. For example, I’ve invested a small amount in two commercial macros for MS Word which both save me a lot of time in the long run.

MegaReplacer is a batch search and replace macro for Word. You add a bunch of words you want to search for in a file and their replacements, for example, commonly misspelled words and when you run the macro it  goes through the file prompting at each occurrence whether you want to replace it. It’s essential for an editor. Without the macro, you just can’t do that quickly and you’ll most certainly miss some words anyway.

ReferenceChecker is a macro for Word to spot inconsistencies between reference citations in text and the reference list. It’s not important to understand exactly what the macro is doing unless you’re a copy editor, but believe me, it’s a lot quicker than going through the text manually and checking each citation against the reference list, and vice versa.

So particularly if you run a small office/home office, consider investing in commercial software or add-ons and weigh up the differences between premium and free versions of software and services and see if the increased productivity they’ll bring will save you money in the long run.

Have you invested in commercial software or add-ons, or paid for online services to increase productivity? Let us know below.

If you use Chrome, you’ve probably come across this problem before from time to time. You click the button for an extension and nothing happens. Click again, still nothing. It worked last time you opened the browser but now nothing. And some extensions are more prone to this problem than others. For me it’s Diigo.

So how to get the button working again. Well I guess you could try restarting the browser but that takes time. I’ve found that disabling and re-enabling the extension is quite quick and usually works for me. To do this, just right click on the offending button and chose Disable (not Uninstall). Then open the Spanner menu and navigate to Tools, Extensions, go to the extension you’ve just disabled and click Enable. That should do the trick. If not, try restarting the browser.

I always try to post about sorting out anything unusual happening on my PC in the hope that it may help someone else with the same problem.

I had a strange thing happen with Google Chrome browser this morning. I have Chrome set to open five tabs when it launches but none would open and I just got one tab of a blank page. When I opened Options (under the spanner icon), in the Basics menu, under On Startup , everything seemed fine. Open the following pages was checked and the correct 5 URLs were listed there to open on start up. So I closed Chrome, reopened it and the same thing happened. Chrome seemed to be ignoring the instruction to open 5 tabs and for some reason was just opening a blank home page.

So I played around with a few things and got nowhere until I opened task manager (Ctrl-Shift-Esc) and saw that even when Chrome was closed, a bunch of Chrome processes were still running under the Processes tab! It seemed that, although I’d closed Chrome, it was still running.

So I opened Chrome again and went to the Options menu as before to see if a preference setting was causing this. Sure enough, when I looked at the Under the Hood menu, the option at the bottom of that page called Background Apps was checked allowing background apps to keep running when Google Chrome was closed. Once I unchecked this and restarted Chrome, everything was back to normal and my usual 5 tabs opened without a hitch.

So how did that box get checked? Well, it wasn’t me. However I had run CCEnhancer/CCleaner just before opening Chrome and this may have somehow reset the preferences. Anyway I know what to do if it happens again. Hope this helps in troubleshooting this Chrome problem.

I read a post on gHacks blog recently in which the author discussed being aligned to a tech company and its products. There was one passage there which made me stop and think:

Let’s take Office for example, it’s still the world’s most popular integrated suite by a wide margin, even on the Mac…So why is Microsoft Office the world’s best office suite? It simply can’t be just because it sells more than its competitors. For this to happen people first have to believe it’s great…

The implication being that if a product is ‘popular’, it’s also ‘the best’. I discussed this in the comments on that post but thought it was worth repeating and expanding those thoughts here.

Most Popular

I would argue that ‘most popular’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘the world’s best’. In the field I work in, publishing, there’s no doubt that MS Word is ‘popular’ as it’s now the industry standard, although WordPerfect was very much the standard back in the early 1990s. In the days before Windows, I well remember using WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS – as an editor, its interactive batch search and replace feature is still better than anything Word has offered. But with the advent of Windows, WordPerfect fell behind and, before real open source alternatives had appeared, most publishers had moved to Word adopting it as the standard. Nowadays, most publishers insist that authors submit manuscripts in doc format, indeed most authors do that anyway. The newer docx format still really hasn’t caught on in publishing. For example, Springer, a major publisher, still doesn’t accept authors’ manuscripts submitted in docx format.  Authors around the world, copy editors, etc have to follow suit and use Word because that’s what publishers insist on and that’s one reason why it’s popular. I haven’t even seen the widespread adoption of cloud alternatives like Google Docs and cloud collaboration in publishing yet. As mentioned in the comments on the gHacks posts, because Word is the publishing industry standard, this has led to the use of illegal copies of Word in poorer countries where writers just can’t afford a commercial product. At any rate, Microsoft’s clampdown on illegal copies of Word should help to increase the uptake of open source and cloud products.

The Best?

To me, the best software means it’s better than its competitors, doesn’t use a proprietary format, can do all you want it to intuitively, and comes at a good price (preferably free). But can we say Word is better than its competitors when as I suspect most publishers haven’t even considered or tried alternatives like for example LibreOffice – I haven’t. It’s just popular because most of us in business have to use it and haven’t looked around at the alternatives. And what about Word’s proprietary format? As another gHacks commenter mentioned, adoption of say rich text format might be a better standard. I often wonder what will happen say 10 to 15 years down the line and we try to access our old archived documents in doc format. Will we be able to open them then? Microsoft have moved away from the doc format to docx, an ISO accredited standard format (Office Open XML or OOXML) but not globally adopted in the face of other standards, and one wonders if saving documents in rich text format might actually have better longevity.

Word certainly can do all that I want but the other problem with being forced along the Word route is that most of us have a product which does much, much more than most of us will ever need. For most of us at home, I’m sure that an open source free alternative like LibreOffice, or even a cloud alternative, would be perfect. In the commercial word, a free product, lighter on features would also suit many but until the Word stranglehold is broken and companies stop insisting on us using doc format then unfortunately great free alternatives won’t be adopted widely commercially and Word will remain ‘popular’, but not necessarily ‘the best’.

What do you think? I’d love to hear what you think are the best software products but which aren’t necessarily the most popular… and the most popular which aren’t the best.

Ever had this little problem? You set up a range of pages to be printed in MS Word and somehow the printer prints a different range… or even prints nothing at all. Well it’s happened to me on more than one occasion. Here’s the answer, or at least one that explains the problem and seems to help most times.

This printing problem seems to occur if your document has sections. You may have used sections for breaking a document, for example, between chapters or between say introductory material and the main text. You’ll know if you have sections in your document (or one that’s been sent to you) if you see thin double dashed lines and the message Section Break (Next Page) over the lines . The printing problem seems to occur if different page numbering has been used in each section and this numbering may be visible in the page footer. Very often an author may skip numbering (or use use a different style like Roman numerals) in the introductory section and start the main numbering with the main text.

In the case shown above (using Word 2010), looking at the overall page numbering in the bottom left corner tells us we’re on the 71st page of 75, but because there’s an introductory section with 3 unnumbered pages, we’re actually at the 68th page of the main text.

Problem is that if you didn’t know about the different sections and wanted to print the page range from here to the end of the document, printing the page range 71-75 would definitely not give the correct result. You actually want to print the page range as indicated in the page footer, i.e. pages 68-72. Just a little counterintuitive isn’t it?

So if you want to print the 3-page unnumbered page range at the beginning, well instead of indicating the range as 1-3, which wouldn’t work, what you have to do is tell Word that the range is in the first section, i.e. p1s1-p3s1, that is from page 1 to page 3 in section 1. But I’ve found that this type of section printing just doesn’t work out sometimes and I haven’t figured out why yet.

Final tip, if you’re just not sure if you’ve set up Word correctly to print the correct page range, just print the first couple of pages in the range initially rather than setting your printer going on a huge range of pages. See how that goes and then adjust the range accordingly. Hope this helps.

Of course, if you have any helpful tips on printing page ranges in MS Word, drop a comment below.

I’m off on holiday to the west of Ireland once again in a couple of weeks time, hoping to keep in touch with the tech world using my trusty old Acer Aspire One netbook running Ubuntu Netbook Edition. Yes I know it’s old school – I don’t have a 3G smartphone yet so I have to go this route. I use Google Reader as my RSS reader but this only works when you have an internet connection as it’s an online reader. As I’ll be away from public WiFi most of the time, I need to be able to update the feeds when and where I can and then browse them at my leisure offline. When travelled there 2 years ago, Google Gears was still supported so I could use this to read my feeds in Google Reader offline.  But since then, Google has withdrawn Gears so I looked at the alternative they suggested in that post – Liferea (Linux Feed Reader), a desktop RSS aggregator for Linux.

No problems installing Liferea using

sudo apt-get install liferea

at the command line. To update Liferea with your Reader feeds, just click Subscriptions, New Source and select Google Reader from the dialog. Then enter your Google username and password. I have about 180 subscriptions in Reader and Liferea took about 20-30 minutes to read in all the feeds. And then I deleted the example feeds which weren’t of any use to me.

I’ve installed version 1.6.3 but I get the impression Liferea is very much work in progress or else it doesn’t play nicely with Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10. It doesn’t update feeds in alphabetical order although I note this had been added in later releases. Also there’s no indication when it has stopped updating, other than the hard drive LED stops flashing. But apart from that, it seems to present my latest unread posts clearly in offline mode so it’ll do the job I want on holiday. Doubtless I’ll learn much more on how it works ‘at the coal face’.

If you use WiFi, how do you browse your RSS feeds offline? Or is it time for me to get a smartphone? Or should I just switch off on holiday? Drop a comment below.

At some point, you may be required to annotate a PDF with comments, notes or suggested changes and share it, or return it to someone – certainly as a proofreader working with digital media, you’ll have to do this. If you and your colleagues all use Adobe Acrobat Reader you’ll have no problem. But not everyone likes Acrobat Reader as it’s slow, blotted and is known to suffer from malware vulnerabilities. So what happens if you or you colleagues want to share an annotated PDF and you use one of the other popular free PDF viewers like Foxit Reader, Nitro PDF Reader or PDF-XChange Viewer. Can you view annotations or notes created in another PDF reader and importantly can you move those notes if necessary to read the underlying text which can often become obscured by the annotation boxes? Can you assume that your annotations will be viewable, movable and indeed editable in another reader? I had a look at these four PDF readers: I created annotations in each of the four PDF viewers, then tried opening the PDF and viewing, moving and editing that annotation in the others.

What I found was that Acrobat Reader (Sticky Note tool), Foxit (Note Tool) and Nitro (Sticky Note tool) are all compatible. Any note created in one reader could be dragged, minimised, viewed on mouse-over or edited in the others. Interestingly, Foxit Reader also had a selection of other annotation tools (underline, replace, insert, strikeout, etc) all of which were compatible in the other readers and these annotation boxes could be moved easily and edited in them all.

PDF-XChange Viewer is a little different with other annotation options. It’s my PDF viewer of choice and I’ve blogged about it before. With it, you can annotate with the Callout Tool and Text Box Tool as well as the Sticky Note Tool. Examples are shown below.

Sticky notes were no problem and could be dragged, minimised, viewed on mouse-over or edited in the other PDF viewers but the Callout boxes and Text Boxes (shown above in red) could only be moved or edited by someone else using PDF-XChange Viewer and so will obscure underlying text when opened in another viewer. I was using the latest version of PDF-XChange Viewer (version 2.5.194). When I used Acrobat Reader to open a PDF annotated by PDF-XChange Viewer, clicking on the Callout boxes or Text boxes would highlight the box handles but I could not move the boxes and so they obscured the underlying text. I did find that Foxit Reader would move the Text box created in PDF-XChange Viewer but if I resized it or moved the Callout box, the text fill would blank out.

So to summarise, if you have to share, send or return an annotated PDF, it looks like the Sticky Note/Note Tool is compatible in all four viewers including Acrobat Reader. Any note can be dragged, minimised, viewed on mouse-over or edited in the other readers. And Foxit Reader has a nice selection of compatible annotation tools. But if you’re using PDF-XChange Viewer, unless you know the other party has PDF-XChange Viewer, it’s best not to use the Callout boxes or Text box tools as the underlying text will be obscured and may be unreadable by the other party if they’re using another viewer.

Incidentally, the PDF used here for illustration is How to Use Jump-Leads. Follow the link for more information.

How do you annotate PDFs? Have you run into problems sharing them? Drop a comment below.

File management in the default setup of Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition is not intuitive, at least not to me. I recently had to copy files from a USB stick to my netbook hard disk and found this quite difficult as it seems impossible to pull up a two pane file manager directly and drag the files across – or at least I couldn’t find an obvious way to do it.

Here’s what’s involved:

1. Plug in USB stick. It appears on the Unity side bar and Nautilus opens a window on the desktop. I can see the folders and files on the stick but I can’t get to the home folder on the hard drive and drag the files across – at least not intuitively.

2. Open Files & Folders in the Unity sidebar. But this opens full screen and doesn’t show the pen drive so I still can’t drag the files from the USB stick.

3. Find the Documents folder, then click on the folder symbol at the top right of the screen, as shown above. Finally I have a Nautilus window of the Document folder alongside the Nautilus window of the USB drive.

4. Navigate to the file I want on the USB stick and drag it to the Documents folder on the hard disk.

Out with the old

Perhaps someone can tell me a quicker or easier way to manage files in Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition but this is the only way I could see to do it. And I’m not alone as Expert Reviews also found the whole process a little strange. If there is an easier way, it’s certainly not obvious or intuitive for a Ubuntu beginner.

I’m used to working with file managers. I’ve been using them since the late 1980s when I had PC Tools as my file manager in MS-DOS (before Windows). I’ve blogged about xplorer², my current file manager of choice in Windows 7. For me, the file manager is a fundamental utility that I often use during the day and I just couldn’t put up with offering in Ubuntu Netbook Edition. I need a two column manager so I looked around for a decent replacement – one that showed a tree view of folders and drives in the left side and files on the right side and with the dual pane folder option. In the past, I had brief looks at a few including Thunar and Midnight Commander but I think I’ve now found the manager I want in Dolphin.

In with the new

Dolphin is a file manager for KDE (K desktop environment). I found that installation in Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition was a breeze and even the necessary KDE libraries installed without a problem. Initially Dolphin will open showing Places (Home, Network, Root, Trash) in the left panel. To get a tree view of folders, go to View, Panels and click Folders. If it opens on the right side of the screen, you can drag the folder window across to the left side if that’s where you want it. You may now see tabs at the bottom where you can select Places or Folders. You can remove Places altogether by going to View, Panels and deselecting Places – or use F9 to toggle Places.

To fine tune your set-up, go to Settings, Configure Dolphin and try out different things. For example, in Startup, set your start up folder. I would have liked the option for Dolphin to close and reopen in the folder I was last working in (as in xplorer²) but couldn’t find that option. Also, if you’ve come from Windows you’ll need to go to Navigation and make sure Double click to open files and folders is selected.

So now plugging in my USB stick, I can access it on the Places panel or more helpfully, on the Folders panel through the folder media. I can now open the folder I want and drag the files across to the hard drive much more easily. There’s also a button at the top to split the files panel if you find that easier.

I did have a problem opening a terminal window (Shift-F4). This should open at the bottom of the screen in the current folder. Just got an error Could not launch the terminal client. KDEInit could not launch konsole. Tried googling for a solution but got nowhere. I’ll just have to use Ctrl-Alt-t if I need the command line. Finally, I decided that I wanted to add Dolphin to the Unity launcher on the left side so I right clicked the icon and clicked on Keep in launcher. However, I found that it would only appear in the Launcher after a reboot.

So that’s my first taste of running a KDE app in Ubuntu and I’m impressed. I might just try Kubuntu on my netbook now.