Sometimes Thunderbird makes me scratch my head. Case in point: Thunderbird defaults to checking only your Inbox for new email, and none of the subfolders under the Inbox. To check subfolders, you have to right-click on EACH ONE, go to properties, and turn checking on. That’s silly – this Mozilla article seems to agree with me.

Maybe it’s me. I make heavy use of server-side whitelist filtering on my IMAP server to categorize incoming emails. If I get an email from a friend from Fort Myers, it goes in the Fort Myers folder. I hope I’m not the only one doing this… if so, people, you’ve got to try it. Once you set it up, you’ll be happily in control. Get an important email, and you can read it right away. Another joke email from Aunt Gertrude – well, you’ll get to it when you have time. And with Chatter Email on my Treo, I can assign different ringtones to each folder, instantly telling me if I have an important (RING!) or unimportant (bzz) incoming email.

The other email tool I have to have is spamassassin. It uses Bayesian filtering, and it’s now smart enough to keep spam out of my life. Sigh… what a relief.

Anyway, to make Thunderbird check all your IMAP folders for mail (duh), do this:

Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> General -> Config Editor
Start to type [mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new] into the filter box.
Double-click the [mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new] line to change it from false to true.
Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> General -> Connection Timeout -> Bump up to 120 seconds (if needed)
Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Show expanded columns in the folder pane (double click to set to true)
Then you can click on "Unread" and/or "Total" in the small column control at the upper right corner of the folder pane.

Up up and away.

It’s time to move another step into the digital age.

I’ve worked for years on my HangTheDJ mp3 player, and it’s provided me with countless hours of pure bliss, playing a constant stream of mp3’s just right for the mood I happen to be in. But it’s time for a reassessment.

The problem: information organization. In the digital age, get organized or drown. The only practical solution to getting organized is to store all digital media in a central location. Then stream what you need from the central store to where you are. (continued…)

A guy that compiles the XChat GPL’ed code for Windows, at what looks like the official XChat site, XChat.org, tries to get you to pay for it – is that even legal? XChat2 is another guy’s build for Windows, and almost as up-to-date – use it instead.

The only configuration that drove me nuts out-of-the-box was the flood of “join/part” messages in large channels like #gentoo. From the XChat FAQ (at xchat.org, go figure), number 11:

11. How do I turn on Conference mode where I will not see join or part messages?

Right-click on the tab you want to change. In the submenu of the channel name, there's a toggle-item "Show join/part messages", simply turn this off.  If you want to turn this option on globally, type:

    /set irc_conf_mode 1

Then all channels you join after setting this will start with "Show join/part messages" turned off.

I have set a goal of importing all our home video (yes all the raw footage, hours of us staring at the camera :>) and incorporating it into the mythtv experience.

First step: get a clue. Looks like cinelerra is the FOSS advanced video editing software of choice, even though everyone seems to agree it’s been opened with a bad can opener and you’ll probably slice yourself on it now and then. The first hurdle: getting it installed. As always, gentoo makes things dead-easy, but there were a couple steps to get it to compile under AMD64, here they are so you don’t bang your head:

emacs /etc/portage/package.keywords
  media-video/cinelerra-cvs ~amd64
emacs /etc/portage/package.use
  media-video/cinelerra-cvs -mmx
emerge -DavuN cinelerra-cvs

Note that this is a package pulled from cvs, a first sign to proceed with caution. The date on the most recent package is 20070122 – apparently the developer of cinelerra doesn’t work too closely with the community, and the community developers have to occasionally take a snapshot and clean the hell up out of it – so you don’t want it to happen too often. The gentoo package compiles fine on AMD64, but only if you specifically disable mmx support (weird, eh?). Anyway, as always, upwards and onwards…

I continue my love affair with Gentoo by moving to the latest profile, 2007.0. Profiles are sort of watermarks that are released every 6 months or so. They prevent major upgrades to your system, until you’re ready to make the leap to a new profile. Once again, very well done, Gentoo dudes. I’ve got three Gentoo machines at this point, and I’ve migrated two with zero problems. The only real change for me was that I learned to use dispatch-conf with rcs (which gives you version-controlled automated configuration updates, whoop!) instead of the more clumsy etc-update. Oh, and it looks like the gnome terminal configuration file format changed, as my settings are no longer valid. But mythtv is rocking along, no problems. I even managed to upgrade the TV recordings drive from a 250GB to a 400GB sata drive along the way. Party on.

UPDATE: I had the gnome-terminal problem on two different machines. A re-emerge fixed it up:

emerge -av gnome-terminal