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Firefox shortcut – the best thing since bookmark

Published on 10 August, 2006 in Tips & Tutorials. 15 Comments Tags: , .

One thing about opensource software is that many features are added but never mentioned. In commercial software, every feature gets hyped as the best thing since [fill in the blank ].

Here’s one nice little feature that I use alot on Firefox.

  1. Go to Bookmarks and right on any bookmark.
  2. Select Properties.
  3. Under Keyword: enter a short keyword.
    For example for freebizware.com, I entered fbw.
  4. Click OK to save it.
    saving Firefox shortcut
  5. Enter the keyword on the address bar (or URL bar – the thingy that you key in the web address).
  6. Hit Enter.
    Enter the keyword

Cool! Most of my favourite sites are now keyworded.

Importing from Password Safe to KeePass database

Published on 8 August, 2006 in Security & Spyware and Tips & Tutorials. 0 Comments Tags: .

So I moved from Password Safe to KeePass. After some false start (remember to backup) the data was imported from Password Safe database into KeePass.

If you want to migrate the Password Safe database to KeePass, here’s how you do it.

  1. Use the Password Safe function to export to CSV file
    File > Export To > Plain Text
  2. Import the text file into KeePass
    File > Import From> PWSafe v2 TXT file

The mistake I made was to import the encrypted datafile which produces garbage. You need to export to plain text and import the text file.

Remember all your passwords with KeePass

Published on 7 August, 2006 in Security & Spyware. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

KeePassI consider myself a security paranoid. When I sign up with a site, I use a different password, sometimes even different username. Over the years I must have hundreds of account accumulated on the internet.

To help with remembering, I started with standard menonics, then use associations. Then I became more lazy started using standard passwords for sites that I don’t really care about.

Still, the problem is how to manage passwords overload ?

Let me introduce KeePass .

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Integrated instant messaging with Gaim

Published on 5 August, 2006 in Chat & E-mail. 4 Comments Tags: , , .

GaimICQ, Yahoo, MSN, QQ, GoogleTalk.

If you, like me, have an account in each of these instant messaging (IM) services then you probably have all these client programs installed.

These client not only take up valuable space in the notification area (especially on a notebook), they are also notorious memory hog. Each comes with heaps of “features” that I never use and are piling on more with each new version. Worst, some like QQ forcefully install programs you don’t need and changes your system settings.

Wouldn’t it be great if a single program can replace all of them?

Enter Gaim.

Gaim account showing multiple protocols

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Open Source Anti-Virus for Windows – ClamWin

Published on 2 August, 2006 in Security & Spyware. 1 Comment Tags: , .

Anti-Virus is a class of software that remains a firmly held by commercial companies.

ClamWin

ClamWin Antivirus is one of the better open source anti-virus program that is invading that stronghold in the MS Windows domain. (Is there others?)

ClamWin is based on the ClamAV antivirus engine. Harnessing the power of the community, the concept of an opensource virus directory look set to take on the commercial counterpart.

I decided to check it out a year ago when reinstalling my Win XP. The last anti-virus from Trend Micro never make a return.

My first impression after seeing the main screen of the program is that it still have some way to go in catching up with commercial equivalents.

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Filezilla FTP client

Published on 30 July, 2006 in Utilities & Drivers. 0 Comments Tags: , .

FileZilla Filezilla has nothing to do with Mozilla or the numerous “-zilla” out there. It is an FTP (and SFTP) client (there is also a Filezilla FTP server).

Beside web browser and email client, FTP client is probably one of the most used net-applications.

But unlike web browser and email, there are far more choices for FTP programs around. Commercial, sharewares, freewares/open source, some with really long history. Do you remember WS_FTP? A quick search shows that it is still around. It was very popular once but not many people seems to be using it now. And there were CuteFTP, SmartFTP, just to name a few.-

Personally I had not try alot of FTP clients. There might be another good Open Source FTP client around that I am not aware. However Filezilla had served me well for a few years now and I will gladly recommend it.

If you are using an unregistered or cracked copy of shareware FTP client, give your conscience a break. consider switching to Filezilla, an opensource alternative.

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Still zipping? 7-zip it

Published on 28 July, 2006 in File Compression and Utilities & Drivers. 5 Comments Tags: , .

7ziplogoStill using WinZip, WinRAR or some commercial archive? Try 7-Zip. It is opensource and free.

Do not be deceived by the name which may make it sounds like it is yet another Zip clone and only read zip file. 7-Zip introduces a new format called 7z and also supports ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, Z, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB format.

The 7z format produces very good compression ratio. Compression ratio is the ratio of the difference between the compressed file size and the uncompressed file size to the uncompressed file size. I had been using 7-zip for a good few years now and the format consistently beat other format like zip (worst), rar or even tar.bz2.

The one drawback of 7z is that not many people know or use the format. So I cannot, for example, email a .7z file to a friend. My friend probably get an “Unknown file type” error. But this should change soon. Expect to see more programs supporting the 7z format. WinRAR already support it and so does a number of compression utilities.

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Create PDF file for free with PDFCreator

Published on 20 July, 2006 in Business & Productivity. 3 Comments Tags: .

PDF is a standard format that is used different platforms and languages.

However many businesses are still under the impression that they require expensive software to generate PDF documents.

Each time I send a friend a document in PDF format, they will ask if I have a copy of Adobe Acrobat and they can use it to convert a few documents to PDF.

What they do not know is I actually use an open source program called PDFCreator to create it (print to be exact, read on to see how).

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From Pegasus Mail to Thunderbird to GMail

Published on 18 July, 2006 in Chat & E-mail. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Email must be one of the most used application on any business computer today. And what better way to start introducing free software than with email program.

For years I resisted Outlook, choosing to stand by Pegasus Mail. Pegasus is showing sign of age. The development is slow and for a long time it was not able to handle Chinese.

ThunderbirdI moved to Thunderbird when 0.8 came out. It was able to handle Chinese in UTF8 which was what I needed badly.

It wasn’t easy for me as well. Pegasus had been my email companion for almost 9 years before the switch. There are so many automated filters, identities, and preference that just works. If it’s not broken why fix it?

Thunderbird is useful if you download email to you local PC or notebook and read the email offline.

GMailThunderbird did not last long. Mail started to appear in my GMail folder in October 2005. After trying out briefly, all my incoming email are now handled by GMail.

GMail is great if you are constantly online. It takes care of spams at the server end which mean you do not need to download all the spam before you can filter it.
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Exporting Pegasus Mail to Thunderbird

Published on 17 July, 2006 in Chat & E-mail and Tips & Tutorials. 3 Comments Tags: , .

An article written a while back. I no longer use Thunderbird as my primary client. I spent quite a bit of time figuring out so thought it will be useful for anyone migrating from Pegasus Mail.

Since moving from Pegasus Mail to Thunderbird, the old mail had been tucked away. Today I needed a very old email in the old Pegasus archive to recover an old account password. A good excuse to take the time and export all the old mail to Thunderbird.

There are 2 ways to do it

  1. copy mail folders
  2. use IMAP

The first way is fine if there is not may folders to export. Unfortunately that was not my case. It took a great deal of frustration before I decided to go with the second way.

Here’s how.

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