McFang – Exercising Futility

Posting drivel that is not of interest to anyone.

Posts Tagged Hack

Deleting in Gmail IMAP

Oct 27

Posted by mcfang in Internet, Online Services | No Comments

Getting “Delete” to work as expected in Gmail IMAP was surprisingly complicated.

The default action when a client deletes a message is to archive it (ie: move it to “All Mail”). I didn’t like this because then if I accessed the account from POP the deleted mail would still be downloaded.

Recommended IMAP settings tells you all the things NOT to do, but doesn’t give any useful advice on how to setup clients.

Eventually after trying many different settings I realised the simplest method was to tell the client to MOVE the message to the Gmail Trash folder when it is deleted. To do this in Thunderbird2 required manually editing the prefs.js file to specify a custom IMAP trash folder:

user_pref("mail.server.server#.trash_folder_name", "[Gmail]/Trash");

Note that the case of the trash folder name IS important.

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How to jump start a PSU

Jun 14

Posted by mcfang in Computers | No Comments

Recently one of my PCs has developed a resistance to powering up. I have not been able to single out whether it is the motherboard or the PSU that is the problem – at worst case it could be both. However because the PC is running mostly 24/7 it has not been a big enough annoyance to replace any parts. It only fails to powerup if it has been disconnected from the mains.

With a paperclip (or piece of wire) it is very simple to jump-start the PSU, and this solves the rare occasions that I do have to shutdown the PC:

On the PSU’s cable to the motherboard there should be a single green wire – this is the poweron switch. To jump-start the PSU simply short the green wire to a black wire (any of the black wires). If you leave the short in place the PSU can never shutdown, so for safety sake you should remove the wire after starting the PSU.

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SP2 cripples Windows XP

Feb 18

Posted by mcfang in Operating Systems | No Comments

SP2 brought with it a rather annoying tweak to the TCP/IP stack: a 10-connection-per-second limit.

I can’t remember exactly what alerted me to this problem, it may have been when a link-checker application stalled, or could have been the multi-threaded ftp client I was using.

Either way, the effect of “hitting the wall” was damned annoying and I need to find a way around it. Thankfully I found an article that offered a few solutions.

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