Monthly Archives: December 2010

Thunderbird and the Time Format

Another personal note….

Thunderbird does not adhere to any of the time or date format settings defined via KDE system settings. So, if you want to go for a 24 hour clock as used in Europe, a German keyboard and yet stick to the general English language you need to change the global locale settings of your machine, as e.g. described here.

Still easier, log into GNOME -> System -> Administration -> Language Support and set the format to English (United Kingdom) or English (Denmark) in the Text tab. Finally, use the Apply System-Wide button.

ReminderFox – A pretty nifty tool for Thunderbird

Today, email is quite an essential means of communication. Asynchronous communication. So, quite often, if I send an email where I expect to get a reply sooner or later. Depending on the issue at hand, later might be tomorrow. Or it might be in four weeks time.

If you consider such timescales, tracking all your requests for feedback can be cumbersome. Personally, I either try to remember everything, doctor around with manually created notes in some calendar for the very important stuff or work with plain text files. All in all, not very user-friendly and not very safe.

Enter ReminderFox.

ReminderFox is a nifty extension to Thunderbird which just adds the capability to add a reminder or to-do note to any mail in any of your accounts. So, instead of all these crutches mentioned above, you assign a date and some explanatory text to a mail. And – voila – you get reminded.

That’s something I like.

Scanning and sending faxes under linux

A quick follow-up on my first impression with Scanning under Linux …. If you are fed up with the insanely ugly and incomprehensible GUI of xsane, try skanlite. It is quite a bit better. At least for me:

skanlite -d hpaio:/net/Photosmart_C5100_series?ip=192.168.10.10

For sending faxes I recently discovered SipGate. With the drivers provided here you even get native Linux integration via cups. Nice.

And with the awesome PDF editor PDF X-Change Viewer you don’t even need to print out your forms any more. Stamp your signature on it, save and off you go.

And yes, these are personal notes as well.