Monthly Archives: May 2007

Shortcut Key to Flag Mail in Outlook

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Another shortcut key discovered by accident. I was moving around my inbox with the keyboard, deleting messages, when I mis-keyed and hit Insert instead of Delete. Much to my pleasant surprise I found that Insert flagged the highlighted message with the default red flag. If you hit Insert on a message that is already flagged, it marks it as complete. This works with one, or many, messages highlighted.

To clear the flag completely, or to set a flag with a color other than the default color, you still need to go through the standard process. I’ve never risen to the level of using the various colors for flags, so I’m not hampered by the default action of this shortcut.

I’ve only tested this on Outlook 2003. Can anyone verify this with other versions of Outlook? How about Entourage?

Shimo for Your Cisco VPN on Mac

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If you are a Mac user, and also use the Cisco VPN client to connect to your corporate (or any other) network, have I got a treat for you. The product name is Shimo, and your VPN experience just became truly Mac-like.

The initial reason for the development of Shimo was the lousy software implementation of the Cisco VPNClient for MacOS. Shimo wants to do it the MacOS way: That means to reduce the interface to the important features and integrate it right into the user interface of the OS. Thus the interaction with this piece of software is absolutely intuitive and self explanatory. Try it out and you will see what we are speaking of…

I told Bren about it before I had a chance to install it, and he’s thanked me for it multiple times. I finally installed it tonight, and this what Cisco should have done with their Mac client. I pretty much guarantee that you’ll never go back to the Cisco client again.

[HT MacUpdate]

Full Webpage Screen Capture

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I’ve seen some chatter about the Mac utility, Paparazzi, that captures the entire length of a webpage into an image. Great product, but limited to those of us who have chosen to “walk in the light” of Mac OS X. :-D I was looking for something similar, but for Windows.

Enter Screengrab!. Screengrab! is a Firefox extension that “will save what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame… basically it saves webpages as images.” You can save the image as a PNG, JPEG, or save it to the clipboard. IMHO Screengrab! trumps Paparazzi in two ways:

  1. It is crossplatform
  2. You operate it from right in your browser, without launching an external application

Check it out.  You’ll wonder how you lived life without it.

USPS Says Forever…For First Ounce Only

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This is indirectly tech related, but generally not. :-) The USPS has gone and upped the postal rates from $0.39 to $0.41 for the first ounce on a first class letter. They’ve also introduced something known as the Forever Stamp. I received a word of warning/advise about the use of this new stamp.

In the past, if you knew that your letter was going to be over one ounce you could load up on stamps to cover the additional weight. An example is if you mail in your tax forms, that stack of pages weighs more than one ounce, so you’d stick two (or three) $0.39 stamps on it.

The Forever Stamp will only cover the first ounce. If you place two Forever Stamps on a letter you just wasted one of those stamps. To complete the example above, you would use one Forever Stamp, then add valued stamps ($0.41, $0.26, etc.) on to it to make the required postal rate.

Just to clarify even more, if you place 10 Forever Stamps on an envelope you just used 10 stamps to cover the first ounce, and have done nothing to cover the additional weight.

The indirect tech impact of all the changes to the USPS regulations is that, with all of the policy changes, rate hikes, new classification rules (what is a letter v. flat v. parcel), etc. people are going to greatly reduce their use of tradition mailing (read: USPS) and turn more towards technological delivery methods.

Limiting Categories in WordPress

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Bren and I are working to setup a news/announcement blog at work. This blog will have multiple authors, and most of the authors will only post to one or two categories each. There might be some overlap of categories.

Following the logic of the Principle of Least Privilege — plus having a healthy dose of trust that user error will happen no matter what — I set out to make PLP a reality in limiting what categories authors can post to. By default with WordPress, every author can post to every category. Redalt has two plugins that get you on your way.

The first is Role Manager. Role Manager allows you to define 37 different settings, from the ability to upload files, edit others posts, manage categories, switch themes, and on. And you can create however many roles you need. The Redalt version works for WP2.0, but this modified version works with WP2.0 and 2.1.

The second plugin is aptly named Limit Categories. Limit Categories picks up where Role Manager leaves off. Based on the user’s role — those roles created by Role Manager and the five default roles — you can specify what categories they can post to, as well as what their default category is. And like Role Manager, the Redalt version works for WP2.0, but a modified version for WP2.0 and WP2.1 is available here.

If you are inclined to do a “Free For All Friday” this is exactly the setup you’d want to use. Who knows, I might just do that around here sometime.