Moving back to Google Reader

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I was having a bad time with Google Reader and moved to Good Noows as I mentioned previously. Good Noows is really good except for it being exceptionally slow. I tried to bear it like a husband with a mentally ill wife, but I have my limits.

So from now on I’m moving to Google Reader. Too bad Good Noows was not quite happy with the idea of a divorce. It doesn’t allow exporting feeds, so had to manually add many feeds to Reader.

But being the self-centred boy I am, I didn’t like to go to Google Reader’s feet and apologize. Instead I made Google Reader a different person by applying the Helvetica Reader theme, renamed all folders as I had them in Good Noows and hid the Unread Posts counts which were giving me headache.

So that’s it. I’m now trying to come to good terms with my previous wife.

ezLinkPreview makes browsing in Google Chrome damn easy

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This wonderful Chrome extension has made my life quite easy, especially because I browse a lot of news sites. Hover on a link while pressing Alt and the link’s target page opens up in a popup. No more messing with the tabs. The popups are easily expandable and movable.

This comes especially handy when you’re in  a news site and have to open new tabs for each news item you want to read.

Download link

Here’s a screenshot to give you an idea:

Solving the music library not refreshing problem in Nokia E63

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I recently bought this new Micro SD card for my Nokia E63 and added some dozens of songs into it. Unfortunately the in-built music library won’t recognize the new music. A message appears saying it’s refreshing the library but it doesn’t refresh even after hours.

Later found that this had to do with some compatibility problem in the IDs of the MP3s. After a lot of searching I stumbled upon this post, however the command in there did not work so came up with the following after a bit of modification.

Get the terminal and enter the following command: (Yes, you need a linux system like Ubuntu. Which sane person uses Windows these days?)

find /path/to/music/collection/ -name '*.mp3' -exec mid3v2 
--delete-frames=POPM '{}' ;

(The above command should be a single line)

Copy the  music files to the phone. Also delete the following two files which holds the details of the music library:

  • Private/101FFC31/mpxv1.mpd
  • Private/101ffca9/harvesterdb.dat

That’s it. When you start the music player it should automatically add the new music to the library without any problem. Currently I have more than 700 songs with no issue.

Swapping the memory card

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Bought a new 4GB microSD card to replace the 1GB card that originally came with my phone (Nokia E63). I was scared at the thought of reinstalling everything in the new card from the beginning. However I copied everything in my old card to the new one (via my PC) just to check. And you know what! It worked! Each and every app and setting remains as they were in the old card!

Syncing files with Unison in Ubuntu

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I have this music collection in my local hard drive which I wanted to sync with a folder in my portable HDD. What I wanted was to sync any changes done in any of them to the other with just one click. And came across Unison.

It’s available in the repositories and once installed all you have to do is to give the two folders for it to start syncing. However it seemed that most of my folders won’t sync. An error appears saying “Failed to set permissions blah blah”

Then came up with a simple solution in the Ubuntu forums. All you have to do is to add an entry called ‘perms=0’ in the Unison’s profile preferences file. It’ll bypass the frustrating permissions. This file can be found under ~/.unison directory. For my case it was ~/.unison/default. prf

Simply open up that file, enter a new line saying “perms=0” (w/o quotes) and save the file.  Works like magic 🙂

Cool improvement for Nautilus thumbnails

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Saw this trick in OMG! Ubuntu today. You can check out the original article here.

All you have to do is enter the following three commands in a terminal.

  • wget http://a.imageshack.us/img135/8666/thumbnailframe.png
  • sudo mv thumbnailframe.png /usr/share/pixmaps/nautilus/thumbnail_frame.png
  • killall nautilus

And check out the improved look in nautilus thumbnails. What this actually does is changing the default border in the thumbnails to a more 3D looking one.