UPDATE: In the Layers tab, you can directly change the percent transparency of any layer with a slider. Doh!

No need for any of this any more…

Here’s a cheap fast way to increase transparency of an image in the Gimp. Script-fu to the rescue!

NOTE: I always use the png format when I want transparency. Firefox and IE7 handle png nicely.

  • Select the region to be made “more transparent” (or just Select->All).
  • Select Script-fu->Selection->Fade Outline.
  • Set the Border size large enough to cover the selection.
  • Set BOTH the fade from % and fade to % to the desired increase in transparency.

Sure, it’s hacky, but it works BEAUTIFULLY.

I’m really enjoying Thunderbird these days. My add-ons, for my own reference…

Adblock Plus
Display Mail User Agent
Sieve
Environment Proxy
Contacts Sidebar
Attachment Extractor
Auto Zip Attachments
LookOut
Nostalgy
Tag Toolbar
View Headers toggle button

I run AMD64 gentoo so I had to find the x86_64 build of lightning, here – it’s an entire sweet calendar/todo app!

AMD64 Lightning

Also considering these but they don’t seem quite ready/useful yet…

Mnenhy (tweaks)
Country Lookup
TB Properties
MagicSLR
Sync Kolab (IMAP contacts)
Quote Colors
QuoteCollapse

After checking my webmaster and root emails (and my dad’s email account, that he shares with EVERYONE :> ) and finding 65 THOUSAND spam messages in the Junk folders, I decided it was time to throw down the gauntlet. I’m proud to say that now I’m absolutely crushing spam.

I am using rules from razor2, dcc, pyzor, SARE and the sa-blacklist, updated daily, along with Bayesian filtering.

SpamAssassin rates incoming email using the rules, and adds the spamscore to the header. If the spamscore is high enough (4 or more in my case), it puts SPAM in the title and safely wraps the content. I then use a sieve rule to dump SPAM-titled mails into each user’s Junk folder at the end of the processing.

I took it a step further because I was PISSED at the volume I’m getting. I have NEVER gotten a false positive in all my checking, so I updated postfix to DISCARD emails with a spamscore of 10 or higher. With the high quality rules I’m using, I now have the good fortune to never even see the obvious spam anymore.

To configure postfix to drop high-scoring spam, add a line to main.cf to do header checking:

header_checks = regexp:/etc/postfix/throw_away_high_score_spam

Then create throw_away_high_score_spam and add this:

/^X-Spam-Level: \*{10}/ DISCARD

PISS OFF SPAMMERS! 😛

UPDATE: A few spams were slipping through at scores around 3.5, I’m dropping my SPAM score trigger to 2.0. I still have yet to get a false positive.

UPDATE UPDATE: My first and only false positive, on Bruce Schneier’s August 2008 Cryptogram newsletter. He’s always causing trouble. :> Steady on.

phpMyAdmin Designer

Flashback to 1997. phpMyAdmin with the Designer view gives us an Access-ish design space with InnoDB-supported foreign keys, whee! For some stupid reason it’s a little tricky to set this up – you have to set up a special phpmyadmin database to track the extra layout information, and then configure phpMyAdmin to use it.

(continued…)

I updated my Google framed results script that I use every day on my portal. Try it out and let me know what you think! Free attaboy to the first user. See the wiki for details.

UPDATE: v0.03, mo betta. Use the same link above.