I’m testing linking photos from Flickr by draging-and-dropping using the Flock Flickr toolbar. If it works, you should see a lovely picture of a bird.

There’s only one thing that bothers me about Thunderbird, which is this bug. I’m sure it’s not a Thunderbird-only problem, but it’s annoying none-the-less and should be fixed.

A summary of the bug goes as follows: when you open an attachment from an email, Thunderbird saves a temporary copy of the file and then opens that. All fine so far. If you modify and save that copy, however, Thunderbird will happily delete the temporary file on exit (or Windows does it for you, I’m not sure as to how temporary files work). The result is that you loose your changes. This situation will only bite you once in a blue moon — as editing an email attachment directly in this manner is uncommon —, but when it does it’s rather annoying.

The most popular post for commenting on, at least in recent memory, was the post about toothpaste. When I mention this to others, they say “You wrote, on your website, in front of the whole world about why toothpaste is minty?!” So I wondered why that post was the most interesting. My guess is that it is because, either:

• It actually is something people are interested in.
  
• It’s easier to comment on than other posts, as it’s much more “commentable”; in that, there is a question to the post. As opposed to, say, the music posts which are more “closed”.
  
• Minty toothpaste strikes a chord with people.
  
• People felt compelled to tell me not all toothpaste is minty (all the flavours sound really odd — cinnamon in particular seems popular — but I may try some one day).
  

Any other ideas as to why that post got more comments?

This is an unashamedly geeky post about why I find Linux very useful. It’s essentially because of the little commands. A couple of examples are:

shutdown -h +45

That means “shutdown in forty-five minutes”. Nothing massively useful in itself, but there are occasions where it’s very useful.

The first is when I want to listen to an album I only have in mp3 format when I’m going to sleep. I don’t want the computer staying on and waking me up, but how to get it to switch off without getting up? A quick “shutdown -h +50”, that’s what.

Interestingly, the SiteAdvisor service and browser plugin that I mentioned a few months ago has been bought by McAfee. I still have their plugin installed, because I believe it is a necessary plugin even if you never need to use it. (I keep the Google Phishing Filter installed for this reason too — it doesn’t intrude, so why run the risk of not having it?) I wonder what the purchase of SiteAdvisor will mean for the service.