HOWTO: Reading cartoons with Thunderbird

If you have Thunderbird 0.8 installed, here’s how to read your favourite strips in an easy way:

1. Create an RSS account.
Tools -> Account settings -> Add Account -> RSS News & Blogs -> Finish the wizard.

2. Find an RSS feed for the strip.
Dilbert for example is at http://dwlt.net/tapestry/dilbert.rdf

3. Add the RSS feed.
Select your new account, and from the options on the right-hand side, choose “View settings for this account”, then click “Manage Subscriptions”. Select Add, and enter http://dwlt.net/tapestry/dilbert.rdf as the Feed URL. Make sure to check the “Show the article summary…” box.

You now have a folder that receives new Dilbert comics daily. Repeat with other cartoons you like. For some ideas, check out these sites:

http://dwlt.net/tapestry/ (Feed Url in the “RSS Feed” column)

http://atheos.de/funnies/ (Feed URL behind the little RSS icons)

Making progress

I can make a small fist again. My knuckles don’t bend enough yet, I can’t get a full 90 degrees bend and so what you see on the picture is the best fist I was able to do wednesday night. But it’s progress, and my physiotherapy specialist is happy. So am I. Today she said it would be okay to try a little climbing since I have no pain in the hand.

I am so happy.

This means that as soon as I can free myself from this desk, I’ll be out in Hellerud or Hauktjern. Since Morten is busy with all his excercising, and Jorunn simply hates climbing outdoors, I need a new partner. Mona, our new sysadmin, has agreed to come along. I’m sure she’ll outclimb me easily.

I’ve gotten an account on Flickr, an extremely easy-to-use photo site that I can warmly recommend. I especially like the upload tools they have and the clean layout of the site.

Apache 2

This server moved to apache 2.0 recently. Apache 2 has been out for so long, it’s a miracle I didn’t switch earlier. The machine here is a dual PPro/200 with 64 MB (as I have repeatedly whine about), and apache 2 is more resource-efficient and runs much better on SMP machines. The apache processes used to eat 12-15 MB, now they just use 6-8 MB, which is pretty decent.

Of course the whole thing wasn’t without problems. Migrating all my site-specific settings took me a couple of days — mod_python enabled directories, the php things, etc – and the SSIs still don’t work everywhere, I’m sure. But all in all, it’s much cleaner and I’m happy with the move.

Recommended.

Backups

Always make backups of anything.

At Paderborn, the software installation has always been somewhat deficient. Since I was a student in first semester, I’ve always compiled all my software, and today I still do this for Eressea. I make my own gcc, gdb, luabind, subversion, valgrind, libxml2, libiconv, spamassassin, screen, rsync and jam packages.

This isn’t good for my quota, obviously. Today I needed to clean up some stuff and accidentally deleted the entire software install. Bummer. I realized then that while all this was freely available software, it takes freaking forever to rebuild the whole shebang. That alone is worth taking a backup. I’m still rebuilding gcc now, for the second time, since 3.4 didn’t wok with luabind, and so I need 3.3 instead.

Free software that you can compile yourself is cool. But being root on a debian box and using apt-get is better.