I’ve been using Gmail since 2004. What this means is I have 6 years worth of e-mail stored in it, never deleting anything including videos, powerpoint presentations, sound clips, etc.. And what this means is I had 4.5GB of data stored. I have at the moment 7437MB I can use to store stuff on Gmail, so 4.5 gigs doesn’t look like a problem..but it is, and here’s why.

Recently I’ve been trying a couple of alternatives to OS X’s Mail.app, tried Postbox and really liked it so I might consider getting it in the  future. Like with any mail client you install one must first configure it to access your e-mail account and nowadays the most flexible way to do it is through IMAP, which Gmail supports.

Now, imagine the client you’re currently testing having to download 4.5GB worth of e-mails or even just the headers. Not good, huh? I know there must be an option somewhere to disable this but that’s not the point, I like having all my e-mails stored locally so I can access them whenever I want and like a friend said someday we might end up not having a good relationship with Google and it wouldn’t do being them having all our e-mail from the past 6 years stored. The point is I want all that e-mail stored locally and even possibly backed up somewhere physical near me.

Then it hit me. I had like a gazillion and one e-mails of worthless powerpoints with flowers and inspirational catch phrases, videos of people doing dumb stuff, sound clips some friends send me some times of their music, etc. Just how much disc space was all this worth? 3.4GB apparently. Since I deleted all that useless junk in a couple of minutes.

How can you delete it all in just a few minutes you ask? Pretty simple. Just add the following code to your Gmail search bar and have the files with those extensions neatly displayed for your delete hammer pleasure.

has:attachment (*.wmv || *.mov || *.mpg || *.mpeg || *.mp3 || *.ppt || *.pps)

Feel free to add whatever extensions you want, I have most likely forgot a couple of them that are extremely delete hammer worthy but even so I ended up 1.1GB of downloadable e-mails that aren’t packed with useless stuff, not as much as it was in any case. In time I will remember a few more items I don’t really want to have stored in Gmail and delete them as well. After this is done, just head on to your trash folder and empty it and voila! Look at all the stuff you don’t have to download next time you change mail client or reinstall it. Awesome, right?

I do recommend, of course, that you at least take a quick peek at the e-mails’ you’re deleting subjects just in case you end up deleting something you don’t want.

Sometimes we all wish we could access our home computer with our phone wherever we are just to check on something or do some menial task. If you have a Symbian phone and your computer runs Mac OS X, that’s possible! You can do it with any Unix box, in fact. You won’t have a visual interface and it will only be useful to those of you who are used to Unix console commands, but if you are indeed used to them you already know you can do pretty much everything you feel like on your machine with them.

This guide will not cover what SSH is nor teach you unix console commands. What this guide will teach you is how to get a SSH client in your Symbian phone and get it to work with Mac OS X.

Mac OS X, like any unix box, lets you access your machine remotely through SSH. In Mac OS X it even comes pre-installed, all you have to do is activate it. To do this, open your System Preferences pane and click on Sharing. On the Sharing screen, add a checkmark on the Remote Login service like on the following picture.

It is advisable to change the default port SSH uses to something not easily guessed. I won’t get into details about that. You can test your connection by opening a Terminal window and typing “ssh 127.0.0.1″ or whatever IP you currently have. If a login window preceded by a question if you are willing to accept the crypto key shows up, your SSH server is up and running.

Next up, you’ll need to install PuTTy in your Symbian phone. You can get it here. Launch it and start a new profile. Insert the name you want to use for this profile, the target computer’s IP and login name. This is your short username, not your long one on OS X.

Move back into the main program’s window and select the target host you just created. You will be prompted for a password.

Once you fill in the password field, you will be logged into you Mac OS X box and can start exploring the wonderful world of  the unix console.

As an example you can type “python -m SimpleHTTPServer” to start a http server with your current directory tree at http://$HOSTNAME:8000/. Pretty useful to quickly retrieve files through http to another computer or even your phone.

Hope you find this info useful. Feel free to add a comment with any question you might have.

No próximo fim de semana de 27/28 Março de 2010 vai ser inaugurado o Estúdio Mahtab Danças Étnicas.

Mesmo a calhar, assim dá para brincar com a nova objectiva para a máquina. Se o sítio não tiver muita luz espero é que não se importem com o flash, não me tou bem a ver levar o tripé. Provavelmente a maioria das oportunidades de disparo serão de coisas em movimento, acaba por ser meio irrelevante ter ou não tripé.

É porreiro ver malta amiga e conhecida conseguir pouco a pouco o que quer :) Fico contente que este pessoal tenha conseguido o espaço e leve adiante a ideia de tornar a dança ainda mais parte da sua vida.

Flyer e mais informação aqui.

Really enjoying WordPress this far. Next up is to install Gallery2 and grab the WPG2 plugin for WP so I can both have an online gallery to dump all the pics I take and link/embed them in WP.

Got the theme’s css and bits of code working the way I want to. Didn’t find the heart in me to design a website banner from scratch so I removed the banner space code entirely from the page. Maybe later on I’ll work on it, in the mean time if you want to give it a go and see if you can come up with something to jam in there give me a call.

Gallery2 – http://gallery.menalto.com/

WPG2 – http://codex.gallery2.org/Integration:WPG2

PS: Done :)

PS2: Also fine tuned it to look better integrated within wordpress.

Came across this video today. Made me remember how much I loved Sonic Youth when I was a teenager. Sister and Daydream nation are still among my favorite albums of all time.

Ok, everything’s up and running. Still need some minor tweaks in the template and code/css as well as spend more than 2 minutes on a banner.

It’s starting to look decent(ish).

Hi.

This BLAG was born out of a need I’ve had for a while to have a place where I can dump useful or funny bits of information flowing around me. In other words, a place to drop random stuff.

It’s not intended to be taken seriously taking into account my dark humored and sometimes politically incorrect nature. If you ever see anything here you don’t like, please feel free to close your browser and never come back.

Some posts are in English, some in Portuguese. Sometimes I feel like typing in either one of those languages and that’s just the way it is.

That being said, hope you enjoy your stay and have fun.