Inside the Mind of Sators

Boy I was starting to get frustrated – in the iPhone settings, under Mail, Contacts, and Calendar, I have my iPhone setup to show 200 recent messages. Well, for some reason it was only showing me the past few days worth of email that was still in my inbox, not older messages.

Thanks to this blog post, I discovered that if you click on the settings for your Exchange account, there’s a “Mail Days to Sync” option that you can set to unlimited. Success.

netstat -an |grep :80 |wc -l

Show how many active connections there are to apache (httpd running on port 80)

The Web 2.0 is making life easier for document management, tasks, notes, etc.  I’m finding a lower and lower need to depend on Microsoft Office products or actual installed software as I move to free online applications.  Here’s a few online software products I use that would highly recommend:

• Google Docs – (http://docs.google.com/) This is by far number one on my list.  This answers the call for documents, powerpoint, and spreadsheets.  The best part about Google Docs is that all of your files are stored online and can be accessed from anywhere, edited anywhere, and shared to other users to collaborate on a single document – thus eliminating the potential for multiple offline files being emailed around and nobody knowing if they have the latest version.  The latest online version of your Google doc is always online.  All files are searchable, publishable to a website, etc.
• Evernote – (http://www.evernote.com/) I’ve gone through several phases for random notes – post-it notes, notes in Outlook, Microsoft OneNote, etc.  Evernote is an online program that allows you to file random notes into “Notebooks” that are stored, searchable, etc. all online.  You can make as many notebooks as you want, i.e. Personal, Work, etc.  Their pricing is based on usage, and their free version is typically enough for a basic user.  Notes can be created from their website, their installable software, iPhone, etc.  They also feature that if you include a photo or audio file in your note, their servers can examine those and make the text or speech in your photo/audio file searchable.
• Remember The Milk – (http://www.rememberthemilk.com/) I love task lists.  I feel I work really well and stay focused when I have some sort of list.  Sometimes it’s just a list in my mind, but Remember The Milk takes tasks lists to the next level.  You can categorize, tag, even GeoTag your tasks based on what location they pertain to.  They can send reminders via SMS, iPhone, Skype, etc.  I dig it.
• Mint – (http://www.mint.com/) Some people are on the fence with having their financial data online, however Mint brags about their privacy standards.  Mint is useful for keeping simple track of your budget, balances, and financial status.  I have yet to part ways with using Quicken though because Mint is read-only, you cannot put any future transactions into it.  It simply reads all of your transactions from your online accounts and breaks them down for reporting sake.

Just started playing around with LinuxMCE 710 and my first headache was trying to get my Cisco 7960 phone connected up to be happy. To achieve success took a combination of several blog/wiki pages, so I decided to condense it to one for my sake to look up for next time, and for your sake to hopefully save you the headache I just endured.

Add MAC Address Range to Cisco 7960 Device Template

In the Web Admin, go to Advanced > Configuration > Device Templates. Then, choose Cisco as the manufacturer and click the “Apply Filter” button. As the page refreshes, you’ll now see the Device Template list the 7960. Choose that and click “Pick device template”. As you scroll to the bottom of the page to the “Plug & Play” section, you’ll see that it already has a rand of MAC addresses listed in the From/To fields. I’m guessing if that range would have worked, you wouldn’t be looking at this post right now. Underneath that section is an “Add” button. Click that to add a new range.

Now the fun part. You will need to figure out what the range is here based on the MAC address of your phone. (This can be found on the device by going to Settings > Network Configuration). Because we’re creating a range, if your MAC address is 00:16:47:57:c8:74, our low range will be 00:16:47:00:00:00 and high is 00:16:47:FF:FF:FF. Run the following commands:

/usr/pluto/bin/convert_mac 00:16:47:00:00:00
/usr/pluto/bin/convert_mac 00:16:47:FF:FF:FF

Each command will return a number which is your converted MAC address as the low and high range to put into this device template page. Hit save.

Edit /tftpboot/SIPDefault.cfg

The SIPDefault.cfg file is a configuration file that Cisco phones look for when they boot up to load up all the necessary configuration settings. Without this manual step, LinuxMCE will find your phone and configure it with its extension and everything, but when you reboot the phone, it won’t connect to Asterisk. Run this command:

sudo nano /tftpboot/SIPDefault.cfg

At the very bottom of the page, add:

nat_enable: 1

Note while also here you could customize the phone_label field which is the banner across the top of your phone. “Pluto” just didn’t do it for me. Save the file and exit by pressing Ctl – X. Now, reboot your Cisco phone by pressing the * + 6 + all at the same time.

Fingers crossed – it works! After booting up the first time, it may take LinuxMCE 2 minutes or so to “discover” the device, but once it has, reboot the router and your phone and you should be connected. You can make a test call by dialing 200 which is your initial media center location.

Twitter is all the latest craze these days.  There’s some key applications that I have found to make the whole Twitter social media micro-blogging process very streamlined.

1. TweetDeck (www.tweetdeck.com) - Definitely my number 1, in fact I have a whole screen dedicated to TweetDeck.  You can update your Twitter and Facebook status from one form, have multiple columns of data – ie my columns are: All Friends, Facebook Friends, Replies, TwitScoop, then several search columns for topics I’m interested in.  Easy to Retweet, shorten URLs, etc.
2. DestroyTwitter (www.destroytwitter.com) – Ok my biggest complain about TweetDeck is that it doesn’t really do multiple Twitter accounts…DestroyTwitter is very similar to TweetDeck…I prefer TweetDeck, but I use DestroyTwitter to follow a second twitter account on the same machine as TweetDeck
3. HootSuite (www.hootsuite.com) – Web interface that allows you to tweet to multiple Twitter accounts in one post.  Also supports posting to Ping.fm and displaying Google Adsense advertisements in your shortened URLs, however at the time of this writing, that feature was broken.
4. Tweepler (www.tweepler.com) – ok not everything is about displaying Tweets.  Tweepler is a very slick interface that shows you who has recently followed you, and gives you information about each user allowing you to easily choose to follow them as well, or ignore them.
5. TwitterCounter (www.twittercounter.com) – Some  people just want statistics…how many people are following you compared to yesterday, and how many people can you expect to get tomorrow based on following trends?!  TwitterCounter to the rescue.
6. Ping.fm (www.ping.fm) – Ok by far the best multiplatform status update broadcasting tool I’ve ever seen.  You can post one update to everything from Twitter and Facebook to GTalk and AOL.  Many many many ways to send updates as well such as SMS, Email, Web, Mobile Web, IM, etc.
7. MePing (www.bryanbartow.com/apps/meping/) – Yes, hootsuite can post to Ping.fm, and Twitter can automatically update your Facebook status…I got too many wires crossed and shut off the connection for services updating each other and am letting Ping.fm be the only multi-platform announcer.  BUT, I don’t like having to go to the website, so MePing is a lightweight little app that allows you to quickly shout a message to the Ping.fm network

There’s my seven favoriate apps.  What are you using?  Oh ya – hit up the follow @sators.