https://feeds.feedburner.com/SandroTosi

If you go on reddit.com via browser, on the left column you can see a section called "RECENT" with the list of the last 5 communities recently visited.

If you want to remove them, say for privacy reasons (shared device, etc.), there's no simple way to do so: there's not "X" button next to it, your profile page doesn't offer a way to clear that out. you could clear all the data from the website, but that seems too extreme, no?

Enter Chrome's "Developer Tools"

While on reddit.com open Menu > More Tools > Developers tool, go on the Application tab, Storage > Local storage and select reddit.com; on the center panel you see a list of key-value pairs, look for the key "recent-subreddits-store"; you can see the list of the 5 communities in the JSON below.

If you wanna get rid of the recently viewed communities list, simply delete that key, refresh reddit.com and voila, empty list.

Note: I'm fairly sure i read about this method somewhere, i simply cant remember where, but it's definitely not me who came up with it. I just needed to use it recently and had to back track memories to figure it out again, so it's time to write it down.

 TL;DR

• if you are writing an article and plan to add a TL;DR section, then put it at the very top, right after the title.
• that's it, no excuses, end of discussion.

If you use dput-ng, you may be familiar with the Twitter hook that tweets a message when uploading a package.

A similar hook is now available for Mastodon too; if interested, give it a try and comment on the MR

Most (if not all) QNAP models come with an LCD display, in my model i got a 2 lines by 16 characters each. The tool to control the panel is:

/sbin/lcd_tool

but sometimes it's a bit stubborn in executing the commands, so as mentioned here you may want to killall -9 lcdmond and then issue the command you want; this is the snippet i'm using:

# print a msg on the panel
killall -9 lcdmond
/sbin/lcd_tool -1 "$LINE1" -2 "$LINE2"
sleep 5
# turn off screen light
killall -9 lcdmond
/sbin/lcd_tool -f

it ain't pretty, but it gets the job done.

If you look for how to make your system beep, you may find these commands:

/sbin/pic_raw 80    Beep short
/sbin/pic_raw 81    Beep long

but they no longer work. So keep looking, i stumbled upon this post, mentioning hal_app, and that indeed works, but with a different syntax than the one presented at that link.

In order to use hal_app to make a beep sound, the syntax that worked for me is:

/sbin/hal_app --se_buzzer enc_id=0,mode=XXX

(you can prepend as many 0 to the mode strings as you wish, so 000 is equivalent to 0, 000018 is equivalent to 18, and so on).

PS: this article is based on my system, TVS-473 running firmware 4.5.3.1652

PPS: friendly reminder that this is how you edit the crontab on a QNAP machine.

I'm very lucky to be able to see the Empire State Building from my apartment windows, and at night the lights are fantastic! But i'm also curious to know what's going to be today's lights, and tomorrow, etc.

I thought I'd easily find a calendar to add to gCal to show that, but i wasn't able to find any, so I made it myself: https://sandrotosi.github.io/esb-lights-calendar/

If you enjoyed watching Devils, like me, and if you tend to obsess over tiny details that have absolutely nothing to do with the story being told, like me, and you lived in that general area, like me, then you may be curious of the location of Massimo's apartment.

In several shots we can see views of both The Gherkin and the north side of Canary Wharf, so that means the building is in and around E1/E2/E3 zip codes. But London is huge, and while yes i tried to just browse Google Maps for clues, that didn't produce any result.

The final clue is revealed in the 9th episode, at minute 20:10, and precisely with this shot:

at the bottom left we can see the entrance sign for Tobacco Dock, located at:

So right there, just off to the right from the entrance, it's the apartment building: Park Vista Tower.

The exact apartment number, i don't know, it's probably somewhere on the door or on the door frame, which can probably be seen one of the times when Sofia or others come to visit Massimo, but since that happened mid 9th episode, i'm not gonna go back to find that clue 😀

Recently the Python Team started the migration from Alioth mailing list to a tracker.debian.org team.

Alioth mailing list, being a real ml, included a List-Id header, which is handled by Gmail natively and which you can use to create a filter based on it.

Tracker.d.o instead uses a custom header, X-Distro-Tracker-Team, and Gmail doesn't allow to create filters on custom headers. But there's a solution: Google Apps Scripts.

To create a new apps script, click "New project" from the scripts dashboard: this will open a code editor, so now cut and paste this code (change the label name to match the one you want to use, and the header too if you're going to use this for another team):

function tagPythonTeamEmails() {
  
  // search for all recent threads (hours is the smallest interval searchable)
  var threads = GmailApp.search("newer_than:1h");
  // this is the label i want to apply to the messages
  var label = GmailApp.getUserLabelByName("Debian_Python_Pkgs");  // <-- EDIT THIS

  for (var i = 0; i < threads.length; i++) {
     
    // get all messages in a given thread
    var messages = threads[i].getMessages();

    // for each message in the thread
    for (var j = 0; j < messages.length; j++) {
      var message = messages[j];
      // needed to have access to the full email: headers + body
      var email = message.getRawContent();
      // this is the header i want to check for: if present, add label and archive
      if (email.indexOf("X-Distro-Tracker-Team: python") > -1) {  // <-- EDIT THIS
        threads[i].addLabel(label);
        threads[i].moveToArchive();
      }
    }
  }
}

(This code is largely inspired by this StackOverflow answer.)

Given we're going to perform changes to the emails, we need to add extra permissions to the script; first we need to toggle the option "View > Show manifest file" which will show the appsscript.json file. Once done, edit it and update the scope of the script to include:

  "oauthScopes": [
    ...
    "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.readonly",
    "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.modify"
  ],

These new permission will be granted when we deploy the script, which we can actually do right now: from the editor window click on "Publish > Deploy from manifest..." and then "Install add-on"; it will make the app script available to operate on Gmail by opening the usual Google grants authorization popup.

Unlike filters defined on the web UI, apps scripts are not triggered every time a mail is received (there's a pub-sub mechanism, but it doesn't look like it would work for this), so if we want to execute periodically the new script, we need to create a time-driven trigger.

The simplest way is probably from the script editor (but you can also follow this doc): "View > Current project's triggers" and then "Add trigger" from there. For my specific use-case i set:

• event source = time-driven
• type of time based trigger = minutes timer
• minute interval = 5 minutes
• Failure notification settings = notify me immediately

Be aware of quotas and limitations for Apps scripts; in particular the "Triggers total runtime" set to "90 min / day" is what led me to set the trigger every 510 mins.

Use the scripts dashboard (doc) to monitor the script execution logs, in the "My Executions" section, and specifically the "Duration" column: the script execution time depends exclusively on the number of emails to process at every execution, so fine-tune the trigger time to stay within your quota.

The newer_than search operator doesn't allow a granularity smaller than hours (although that's not even documented), so that means we're going to scan multiple times the same emails.

UPDATE (2020-12-26): I've already had to bump from every 5 to every 10 minutes, as otherwise i'd get Exception: Service invoked too many times for one day: gmail. (remember the quota!)

to send emails with images you need to use MIMEMultipart, but the basic approach:

import smtplib

from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.mime.image import MIMEImage

msg = MIMEMultipart('alternative')
msg['Subject'] = "subject"
msg['From'] = from_addr
msg['To'] = to_addr

part = MIMEImage(open('/path/to/image', 'rb').read())

s = smtplib.SMTP('localhost')
s.sendmail(from_addr, to_addr, msg.as_string())
s.quit()

will produce an email with empty body and the image as an attachment.

The better way, ie to have the image as part of the body of the email, requires to write an HTML body that refers to that image:

import smtplib

from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.mime.text import MIMEText
from email.mime.image import MIMEImage

msg = MIMEMultipart('alternative')
msg['Subject'] = "subject
msg['From'] = from_addr
msg['To'] = to_addr

text = MIMEText('<img src="cid:image1">', 'html')
msg.attach(text)

image = MIMEImage(open('/path/to/image', 'rb').read())

# Define the image's ID as referenced in the HTML body above
image.add_header('Content-ID', '<image1>')
msg.attach(image)

s = smtplib.SMTP('localhost')
s.sendmail(from_addr, to_addr, msg.as_string())
s.quit()

as a good boy i just upgraded my QNAP NAS to the latest available firmware, 4.5.1.1465, but after the reboot there's an ugly surprise awaiting for me

once i ssh'd into the box to do my stuff, instead of a familiar bash prompt i'm greeted by a management menu that allows me to perform some basic management tasks or quit it and go back to the shell. i dont really need this menu (in particular because i have automations that regularly ssh into the box and they are not meant to be interactive).

to disable it: edit /etc/profile and comment the line "[[ "admin" = "$USER" ]] && /sbin/qts-console-mgmt -f" (you can judge me later for sshing as root)

UPDATE (2020-12-26): as pointed out in the comments, and discovered now after an upgrade, the menu comes back up after because /etc/profile is a system file for QNAP so gets replaced/updated by them often

For my work on Debian, i want to use my debian.org email address, while for my personal projects i want to use my gmail.com address.

One way to change the user.email git config value is to git config --local in every repo, but that's tedious, error-prone and doesn't scale very well with many repositories (and the chances to forget to set the right one on a new repo are ~100%).

The solution is to use the git-config ability to include extra configuration files, based on the repo path, by using includeIf:

Content of ~/.gitconfig:

[user]
    name = Sandro Tosi
    email = <personal.address>@gmail.com

[includeIf "gitdir:~/deb/"]
    path = ~/.gitconfig-deb

Every time the git path is in ~/deb/ (which is where i have all Debian repos) the file ~/.gitconfig-deb will be included; its content:

[user]
    email = morph@debian.org

1. in Payment Methods, change the billing address of all your payment methods;
2. in Address Book, change the default shipping address;
3. in Settings, change your home address.

# where the numbers list ends
n = 100

# handy function to square a number
pow2 = lambda x: pow(x, 2)

# first compute the sum of the squares
sumsq = sum(map(pow2, range(1, n+1)))
# then the square of the sum
sqsum = pow2(sum(range(1, n+1)))

print sqsum - sumsq

# handy function to check if a number is palindrome
def is_palindrome(i):
    return str(i) == str(i)[::-1]

# what's the max?
max_p = 0

# multiply all numbers `i` between 100 and 998, with all between i+1 and 999
for i in xrange(100, 999):
    for j in xrange(i+1, 1000):
        p = i * j
        if is_palindrome(p) and p > max_p:
            max_p = p

print max_p

1. Login into GMail for AccountSRC
2. Gear icon > Settings > Labs
3. Enable the "Filter import/export" plugin
4. Reload GMail to enable the plugin (if not done automatically)
5. Gear icon > Settings > Filters
6. At the bottom of the page, Select all
7. Export: this will download an XML file with the filters in it
8. Login into GMail for AccountDST
9. Enable "Filter import/export" plugin
10. Load the file containing the saved filters
11. Import all (or select which one) filters; this will also create automatically the labels defined in the filters.

1. Login into GMail for AccountDST
2. Gear icon > Forwarding and POP/IMAP > Disable forwarding: this will stop redirecting mails from AccountDST to AccountSRC
3. Login into GMail for AccountSRC
4. Gear icon > Forwarding and POP/IMAP > add a forwarding address
5. Enter AccountDST as the address to forward mails to
6. A verification code is sent to AccountDST and you'll need to enter that code in AccountSRC to verify you have access to both mailboxes
7. Once verified, select "Forward a copy of incoming mail to" to AccountDST and to delete the GMail copy on AccountSRC

1. Enable IMAP access on both AccountSRC and AccountDST
2. Open Thunderbird (or Icedove if you're on Debian like me) and register both accounts
3. You can now start moving folders/emails from AccountSRC to AccountDST
1. Copying a (missing) folder, will automatically create a label with the same name
2. Moving a mail from the same folders on the two accounts will add the label called with the name of the folder to that email
4. Be ready, it's a LOOOOONG process, but it's safe and it guarantees a perfect result

1. Login into GMail for AccountSRC
2. On the combobox on top-left, select Contacts
3. More > Export
4. Export all the contacts in Google CSV, since it's specific to be re-imported
5. Login into GMail for AccountDST
6. Contacts > More > Import
7. Select the previously saved file and import it

1. Login into Reader for AccountSRC
2. Reader Settings -> Import/export
3. Export your subscriptions in OPML format
4. Now login into Reader for AccountDST
5. Reader Settings -> Import/export
6. And import the saved OPML file

1. Select the blog
2. Go into Settings > Permissions
3. Add AccountDST as a new author: this will send an email to AccountDST GMail account
4. Accept the invitation (this will ask you to create a new Blogger account for AccountDST if you don't already have one)
5. Go back to to Blogger with AccountSRC
6. Blog > Settings > Permissions
7. Grand admin rights to AccountDST

1. Login into Calendars for AccountSRC
2. Go into Settings > Calendars tab
3. Select export calendars: this will download an archive of your calendars in a zip file; you will need to extract all the ics files from that zip archive so you'll have the main calendar readily available
4. Login into Calendars for AccountDST
5. Settings > Calendars tab
6. Import the main calendar

1. Login into Calendars for AccountSRC
2. Settings > Calendars tab
3. Share the calendar with AccountDST and give it "Make changes AND manage sharing" right - the new account will have full control over that calendar

1. Login into Docs for AccountSRC
2. Select all the documents
3. Share them with AccountDST
4. In the same window select AccountDST as "is owner"

1. Login into Groups for AccountSRC
2. Enter in the "manage" area for the groups you've created
3. Manage members > Invite members
4. Invite AccountDST
5. Accept the invitation, clicking on the email sent to AccountDST account
6. Go back into AccountSRC manage area
7. Select the AccountDST account
8. Edit the subscription and set "Membership type" to "owner": now AccountDST is the owner of the list

1. Login into Analytics for AccountSRC
2. Select Admin on top-right, then for each account you have
3. Select the account, select "Users" tab, click on "+ New User"
4. Enter AccountDST into the "Email Address" field and give that account the "Administrator" role
5. Save
6. Now AccountDST is able to access the same data on Analytics as AccountSRC

1. Login into Picasa for AccountSRC
2. Click on the gear on top-right > Photo Settings > Privacy and permissions
3. On the "Migrate account" line click on "Migrate my photos"
4. Insert AccountDST into the box for destination address
5. In case you're using picasa to store blogger photos, also select the tick below
6. At this point, AccountSRC will receive an email: copy the link in a session where you've logged in as AccountDST and then visit the page: that will start the process
7. Wait until the transfer is completed: you'll receive an email to AccountDST when it's done

1. Login into Zoho Notebook for AccountSRC
2. My Account > Profile > Email address
3. "Add new email" and add AccountDST, it will send a confirmation email
4. Then "Make Primary" on AccountDST, so now the new account can login into Zoho notebook with the Google info and have all the notes there.

1. Login into Bookmarks for AccountSRC
2. Click on Export bookmarks and it will save an HTML file with the bookmarks in it
3. Import the file in a browser
4. Use the Google toolbar to import in into AccountDST

1. Login into History for AccountDST
2. Click on "Turn Web History on" to enable Web History on the new account

1. Select one book from AccountSRC, copying its link
2. Go to AccountDST and navigate to the copied link
3. Add the book to the right category, as it was before.