Backup your Firefox and Thunderbird Profiles

For those of you who haven't yet heard, Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird are two first-rate programs designed to surf the world wide web, and receive and send emails from POP and IMAP email accounts. Because of their popularity a programmer has made a program called Mozbackup. Its a great little program and allows you to backup all your settings, bookmarks, emails etc. from Mozilla Suite, Firefoz and Thunderbird.

In V1.4 BETA a new feature was added which could allow automatic backup. Finding this I made a batch file (a mini program) which could then automatically backup Firefox and Thunderbird in one go which is quite time saving.

If you would like a copy of my Auto-Backup Variant of MozBackup 1.4 BETA you can download below, or just paste the following code in a text file, and then change the file type to Batch (*.bat). I hope you find it helpful.

Source:

@echo This executable is about to Backup your Firefox and Thunderbird Profiles.
@Echo _
@Echo Please ensure all programs which might alter the profiles of Firefox or Thunderbird are closed before continuing.
@Echo _
@Echo Close to cancel,

@echo off

pause

@echo _
@echo Beginning backup of Mozilla Firefox

Backup.exe -f default

@echo Firefox backup completed.

@echo _
@echo Beginning backup of Mozilla Thunderbird

Backup.exe -t default

@echo Thunderbird backup completed.

@echo _
@echo Auto-Backup Complete.
@echo _
@echo Auto-Backup will now exit,
pause

A whole zip file with everything set up is available for download as well.

• MozBackup 1.4 BETA - AutoBackup Variant

If you have any suggestions, comments etc. Please email me at smith[eightyEight]at[bluebottle].com


Please Note: I am in no way endorsed or linked to the developer of MozBackup and this is an entirely unofficial package.

Help Fight Spam!

Have you ever wondered how spammers get your email address? Well probably the most effective method they use is WWW Spidering. This involves them setting up a "robot" program which wanders around the web looking for email addresses. When it finds yours its trained to add it to the spammers list and then spam you.

As we all know this is extremely annoying so many companies and organisations are developing measures to counter this.

Probably my favourite one is the email service bluebottle.com. It uses a method which automatically asks for human authentication of any email which arrive, and any which aren't authenticated never reach your inbox. This means friends who send an email will quickly get a reply email asking them just to reply with a message so bluebottle knows they are a human sending the email. Were a spammer to receive this, they wouldn't know how to reply because the email sending is done by computer. This simple technique stops junk email from even REACHING your inbox.

Another initiative is SpamPoison.com which asks you to put "Booby Traps" into your pages. This tries to render to Web Spiders (also known as Crawlers) useless. All the booby trap requires is that you link to this address ... http://english-20608182735.spampoison.com/

So if you have a web page, a blog...whatever. Help in the attempt to shut down email spammers!

VAIO pocket: Streaks Ahead of iPods

Ever since the iPod was released I've always heard people brag about the user-friendliness and unique design of the circular-scrolling touchpad that is the primary navigation for the iPod. It's attractive, great for scrolling down countless songs, and hard wearing. Well now Sony has released the portable music device which is more than capable of outperforming the iPod in every way except price.

"But how can you improve on an iPod?"
Simple. Easier, quicker, more colourful interface, throw in a rich high-res colour screen, let it open photos then give it a "unique" style to attract attention.

And that's exactly what Sony did. With their new touchpad style navigation you are able to hover over pop-up menu's, jump from one side of the screen to the other in a flash and keep navigation simple. The key difference between Apple iPod's navigation and Sony VAIO pocket's is that in the former you use the touchpad to scroll up and down a menu. In the latter you use the touchpad to select an area of the screen. This makes it FASTER to use!

Other advances are the colour screen with the ability to view photos (much similar to the iPod photo, except the device is smaller) and a large hard drive at 20 or 40 gigs(still a way of the capacity of an iPod).

So if you're looking for a portable music player which is easy and quick to use, looks great and pumps out some awesome music take a look the Sony VAIO Pocket, its a breath of fresh air from iPods.

From Zero to Linux in 5 Minutes

Wow! I tried out Knoppix (a LiveCD version of Linux). Its amazing.

For those out there who haven't yet tried Linux I think this has got to be the best demo of it! I'm not sure on all the technical stuff about it, because I'm very new to linux, but Knoppix been around for a few years and is now at version 3.7

Knoppix is very simple to use. Just insert the CD and start your computer. Just hit [ENTER] if it asks you anything and wait about 5 minutes and it will be completely loaded!

This LiveCD is awesome. It contains nearly 2gb of software (supposedly more than 1000 programs) and is completely free. Its fast (compared to windows), stable and looks great! Its a fresh way to look at computing and has definitely given me the inspiration needed to setup Linux on my computer for good!

No-ip.com

No-ip.com is a must see for any computer enthusiast or a business person. It's hard to explain without actually seeing it yourself, but basically it allows you to host your own ftp, http, pop or imap server on your own computer, even when you are given a dynamic ip by your isp.

For people who don't understand those abbreviations above (ie. non-geeks) here are the translations:

• FTP: File Transfer Protocol. A method of tranferring files, in a very reliable manner, over the internet. Usually requires one of those big fat computers called a server.
• HTTP: Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol: This is the way a typical web page is sent. If you have one of these servers you can host your own web page (with a few other things).
• POP and IMAP: Can't remember what these stand for but POP allows you to download your email to an email program (eg. Outlook, Eudora or Thunderbird) and IMAP gives you remote access to your mail, instead of downloading it. Having a server for this means you can have people send email directly to your computer, instead of say to the hotmail web server.
  

This all works by finding your current IP (Internet Protocol: your address on the internet) and saying "Everytime someone looks for blah blah blah (a url, like DigitalMission.no-ip.com) it will go to your computer. It's really useful and has a number of practical applications.

If you need help from me setting up an FTP server just post a comment. I'm happy to give advice. I'm not too confident with the Email or Web Page set-up so maybe you should search their help pages in those cases.

Blogger Multi-language Issue

Today I just found an issue with Blogger's attempts to localise the language for its blogger users.

I live in Hong Kong, where they speak Cantonese(just in case you didn't know). Now here's the problem, I can't read or speak Chinese, and because of my geographic location it defaults many of the pages into Chinese.

For most sites this isn't an issue, you just click the English link, and the English version of the site pops up (eg. Google.com.hk) but here there is no choice. It all seems a bit pointless to me. Quite frankly most the cantonese people here who are likely to use blogger can read, write and speak fine English. In fact the computer I'm using isn't even a chinese version of windows, its ALL English.

On the other hand I completely understand why they are localising the languages, I mean who would want to read something in your non-preferred language when you could do it in your preffered language. But they should DEFINITELY have a choice. I know many of my friends prefer to speak English (yes I am talking about the chinese ones) even though they grew up speaking Cantonese (a dialect of Chinese). Also, there is such a large English-speaking only population here, that it only seems to make sense to have the option.

Ah...now I've got that off my head I can concentrate on trying to find my way around blogger by hovering over the links, and seeing where they point to in the status bar!!!

Thunderbird 1.0 Released

Today Thunderbird, Mozilla's standalone e-mail application, reached version 1.0. I haven't yet found any major new features, although you can be sure they have fixed any problems with the previous versions and redefined previous features.

Screenshot of Mozilla Thunderbird's Website

I haven't yet downloaded the latest version (I'm running 0.9) but you can download 1.0 from GetThunderbird.com.

You can also read my review of Thunderbird 0.9.