Category Archives: Tools

Organize Photos Into Monthly Folders

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I had a few months worth of photos on my phone that needed to be imported and sorted.

All I wanted to do was move the photos into monthly folders. So I found exiftool that had some options that did what I wanted.

If you have Homebrew on mac you can install it like this.

brew install exiftool

Here is the command I used to move my photos.

exiftool -d %m "-directory

If you wanted to move them into year/month folders, it would go something like this

exiftool -d %Y/%m "-directory

Have a look at the docs and organize away.

Get MySQL Workbench working on Ubuntu 11.10

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MySQL Workbench doesn’t work out of the box in the latest Ubuntu. These steps will get it working until Oracle gets around to updating the official package ;)


sudo add-apt-repository ppa:olivier-berten/misc
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mysql-workbench-gpl

Source: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=62347

Update: Don’t know if Oracle has fixed this yet. This works in the latest Linux Mint as well.

Back to Ubuntu

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I’m moving to Ubuntu (9.10 Karmic Koala) on my home pc. Its a big honking DELL Studio 1555 compared to my work MacBook 13. But hey it sits at home most of the time and grinds away at anything you give it.

It came with Vista. Hmm ya that wasn’t going to last. Within a few weeks of purchase DELL announced they would give a free upgrade to Windows 7. Ya I missed that. Within about a 1 1/2 months after buying it Vista got stuck and didn’t boot. I booted with a Ubuntu 9.04 cd got my files out and tested if it was worth moving to Ubuntu then. At the time the web cam didn’t work and I really couldn’t spend a lot of time hacking it back into existence. I did a DELL factory restore back to Vista and just waited.

Windows 7 came out. The upgrade was too expensive for a Vista user. If it was 50AUD or so I wouldn’t have minded. But 160-180AUD just for a upgrade was out. In the early stages there were not enough info about doing a clean install from an upgrade cd as well.

I didn’t want to do a in-place Vista upgrade and bring all that crap along, so that was out at the time, so I waited.

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala came out. Got it, put it on a flash drive, booted and loved it. The web cam works now. Only thing I noticed was that it didn’t power down when it was shut down.

So I waited a few more weeks, backed up everything and installed Ubuntu 9.10 dual-boot. I applied the latest updates and that fixed the previous shut-down issue.

So far so good, moved my Firefox profile over and installed a bunch of apps I needed.

KeePass – password manager

sudo aptitude install keepassx

FileZilla – FTP client

sudo aptitude install filezilla

F-Spot is okay but I had some meta data on my photos with Picasa so I’m going to use that.

Skype sees my web cam it should work fine.

Secure Email

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I just setup a secure email account for myself. I needed one to exchange some passwords etc with a friend. Here are a few links that will help you setup one.

First you need an email client. My choice was Thunderbird. The rest of the setup depends on this so if you pick another client the next steps will vary a bit.

You can get Thunderbird at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/

Now you need a Thunderbird extension called Enigmail https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/71

Enigmail helps you with the PGP tools within Thunderbird.

Now you need to download GnuPG http://www.gnupg.org/download/index.en.html which is an open source PGP tool.

I got version 1.4.9 Windows command line installer gnupg-w32cli-1.4.9.exe.

How to do this in detail is on the Enigmail quick start guide.

Secure email is a good thing to have even for personal use. Most emails travel as plain text and get stored on servers for a long time. By using this setup you can exchange public keys and encrypt mails before sending. Only your private keys can open them.

I sometimes get spam or phishing mails from my friend’s computers. Those are from bad bots that got into their computers.

Also anyone can set the from field to any other email address and impersonate another person.

Using PGP you can sign your emails as well so the receiver can be pretty sure its you sending the mail.

Read more about PGP on Wikipedia.

Internet on the Road with WIFI, 3G and JoikuSpot

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I tried out JoikuSpot with my Nokia N80 and notebook. Its simple to setup and worked pretty well. This is definitely useful on the road.

This method can’t beat 3G modems since they can go up to 7.5Mbps. The Nokia N80 only supports 384 kbps. But its better than buying a dedicated 3G modem for me because I don’t need to use it often between ADSL points.

If you don’t already have a 3G phone it might be cheaper and faster to get a 3G modem.

I checked Mobitel and Dialog for 3G modems a few months ago. Back then I was on Linux only and they didn’t have drivers etc. This should work on Linux as well since its on WIFI.

JoikuSpot has a few limitations at this time. It only supports HTTP/HTTPS and the WIFI hotspot is not secure. They say other protocols and security is on the way.

Here is the introduction from the developers:

JoikuSpot is a free mobile software solution that turns a Nokia Smartphone to a WLAN HotSpot. You will carry internet in your pocket. Connect your laptop to web everywhere! FREE — INSTANT — EASY