Another “wee” tip. I had a hard time doing this right…

Put emacs in the EDITOR shell variable:

$ EDITOR=emacs
$ export EDITOR

and add the following to your ~/.emacs:

(set 'temporary-file-directory "/tmp")

Now, edit the crontab file via:

$ crontab -e

Edit and save the file, and you should get a response from crontab:

crontab: installing new crontab

If you get an error message, something is wrong. You can check that your edits really changed your crontab using:

$ crontab -l


Some of the changes I love is tagging and message preview with the new mail notification. Note that it’s a beta, and it has some flaws… But that shouldn’t stop you, go get it now! :-)
[tags]Mozilla Thunderbird[/tags]

If you want to know what your public IP address is, it’s here:
38.107.179.228
There are several reasons why you would like to know this, but one reason might be that you are using a ISP that has DHCP enabled, and your IP-address changes once in a while. Another might be if you are on a private network behind a firewall and/or proxy.
The IP address above is fetched via the REMOTE_ADDR value in the $_SERVER variable with the Exec-PHP 2.0 WordPress plugin.

After I upgraded to 1.5.0.1, I could not access certain sites. One of them said that my browser was too old, and I had to upgrade to at least Firefox 1.0 or Internet Explorer 6.0.
If I only had Opera installed, I could fool the site by switching the User-Agent that is sent with every request. This switch is built-in into Opera, and was quite a cool feature! Firefox doesn’t have this feature out of the box, but halleluja, there is a plugin that solves this!

Check out “User Agent Switcher” by Chris Pederick.
[tags]Mozilla, Firefox, Plugin[/tags]

It’s now released, and not only pre-released :-D The release notes and the detailed list contains a bunch of bug and security fixes. So go and grab it! Note that the about dialog is the same as in the pre release.

[tags]Mozilla, Firefox[/tags]

I have used the free edition of RealVNC until I did some research about how to get the connection encrypted. I have tried RealVNC Personal Edition with encryption, but it doesn’t have built in file transfer capability. Meet UltraVNC! It is GPL‘ed, has encryption and built in file transfer!

[tags]VNC[/tags]

I got it via the automatic update system, but it doesn’t mention it on the official website. I found a release candidate of 1.5.0.1 on the FTP site though. Strange…

Not so strange after all, it’s all explained in the “What the heck is with this 1.5.0.1 update?” article at developer.mozilla.org.

I am trying to get my home PC more quiet, and have switched my old CPU fan to a Zalman CNPS7700-CU. I soon will change the GPU and chassis fan to Zalmans too. I want to monitor the CPU temperature, and found SpeedFan, which can show a graph of the temperatures, read RPMs and voltages. It can also read S.M.A.R.T information from hard drives, if you want to know the health of your drives. HDD Health is another tool that can be helpful when monitoring drives, and can be set to trigger alarms on events.

FLST is an extension, to be used in Mozilla Firefox. This one makes sure that the tab you selected last is selected when you close a tab. It can also be used to cycle through all tabs as a slideshow.

Duplicate Tab adds a context menu item when right clicking on a tab, that lets you duplicate a tab with its history etc.

Via Ned Batchelder, I found TaskSwitchXP, which is very useful! I often have a zillion windows open, and the normal task switcher is not good enough to distinguish different instances of applications and windows. I’ve tried other similar addons, but this is both fast and very customizable.