How to find and organize gmail lost archived items.

creativity, personal, , , , , , , ,

Since we started the 21st century, I use the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day to clean house digitally. A synchronization of clocks, time servers, updates, firmware, and yearly maintenance with all things containing zeros and ones. The deleting of old emails, spam, and the archival of a picture folder entitled “2011.”

This year I stumbled on an interesting thing that gmail doesn’t do. It won’t show you mail that doesn’t have a label. Any mail that you “archived” to get off your in-box, without any categorization, dropped into this pit mixed with thousands of other labeled emails. Looking for these orphaned emails would involve looking through hundreds of pages of “All Mail.” I archived them for a reason (to go through them one day) otherwise I would have deleted them. Little did I know that finding these orphans would prove to be a challenge.

“Why do I need to see those old archived emails? If I ever need anything I’ll search for it and find it. “ – you might say.
The answer is the same as why you need a photo album and still like pawing through SkyMall. We are nostalgic creatures and sometimes (at least once a year) like to reflect on the past. Plus, a full catalog of information can result in more discovery. I’ll give two examples: 1. After rescuing my archived items I found a webcam picture of my dad with a cast on his arm. I barely remembered he broke it and seeing this picture gave me the memories back. 2. Listing out every sub-domain for UCI one day resulted in passport.uci.edu – weird way to find out that the University had its own passport office 1/4 mile from your house and you didn’t need to trek all over Orange County for mini-pictures and wait in a Post Office queue. I never thought either of these things existed and certainly wouldn’t have searched for them.

Gmail ninjas know about the Gmail advanced search options, but even here it specifically states: “There isn’t a search operator for unlabeled messages” Further searches looking for a fix resulted in a cobbled-together list of all your labels with a minus sign in front to indicate “anything not labeled this or that or etc….” Example: -(label:Subscriptions OR label:Ebay OR label:Rally OR label:Receipts) For some of you that never adopted labels, or only use 3 of them, this is great and might just work! For the rest of us, I noticed that after typing 6 or so of them into the search box and tried lables that had “Two Words” or “funky-ch@ract3rs/” search started to break. I think that nested labels makes this worse, but I stopped the experiment as I currently use 20+ labels.

In order to find your (labeled items archived in-box stuff orphaned never) you’re going to have to make the LIAISON pledge:

I {insert name here} promise to never blindly press the gmail archive button. I promise to make sure that 1 or 2 labels have been attached by filter or by my own key-press AND furthermore I promise to guard the secrets and ways of the Gmail ninja, never using my powers for evil.

Alright ninjas…
Add the ZZZ label

  • Start by making a new label. Something that you can search for in the future like “ZZZ”.
  • You will repeat the next steps many times as you go through all your labeled email.
  • START: View all of the mail in one label and click on the check-box in the upper left to select all mail.
  • At the top of the mail items a message will appear:
  • All 100 conversations on this page are selected. Select all ### conversations in “{your label}”
  • Click the link and now all the mail in that label is selected (be careful here)
  • Choose to add the ZZZ label to you messages:

  • Google with respond with a message. Feel free to click OK.
  • Find the rest of your  labels and tag them with ZZZ. It took me 5 minutes and you’ll never have to do it again.
  • If you still have labeled email to tag with ZZZ goto START
  • See that wasn’t so bad. 😀 Unless you have like 500 labels. 😐
  • If you do have more than 100 labels, I suggest 43 Folders.
  • Done!

Now you can use this magical search string:

-label:zzz -from:me -is:chat -in:inbox

Go ahead and paste that into your email search box. This means: Show me everything that IS NOT labeled ZZZ, that IS NOT from me, IS NOT a chat, and IS NOT already in the inbox. Since you tagged all the email you know about with ZZZ, items orphaned with no labels were not tagged. Your long lost archived items will appear! I had about 150 items that I selected and placed back into the inbox for me to go through in the next couple days.

What’s next?

  • Delete the ZZZ label now that you have no further use for it.
  • Never blindly hit the archive button again. You promised! 🙂
  • Get Google to make a search parameter for “label = null”
  • Enjoy your discovered conversations from the last few years!

Have a happy and prosperous New Year!

mcafeesecure password security fail

rant, ,

I’ve been using KeePass at the office and have really started letting it manage the hundreds of passwords I need to keep track of as a systems admin. Out of all of the sites I use, this one surprised me. The default 20 character KeePass password has failed mcafeesucure.com. Really? Too long? For a website security company 16 characters is all you need apparently. Even their giant text box html can handle 40 characters! 🙁

Gap-less play in Winamp – really?!

rant, , , , , ,

File this under: “Things I should have figured out in 1997.” Today I was listening to The Police – Zenyatta Mondatta very loudly. Between track 2 and 3 there was a dramatic gap that I could fit a truck into. Out of nowhere this made me think: It’s 2010 and I can’t listen to an album in mp3 without half second gaps? I know I tried to solve this problem once in Winamp and probably just gave up on it. Probably because it’s not THAT big of a deal, I missed the right buttons to get it working, or I should have stopped using Winamp 5 years ago. 😐

Well, I still use good’ole Winamp 5.0.5. Why? Because it plays MP3’s. It’s not a: download manager, media database, video player, encoder, weather bug, malware, virus, and it uses 1 process on my PC – not 5 and 3 applications plus 2 services that stay resident in memory should I decide to plug in my portable music player. /rant When it installs by default the gap-less play is not enabled. No time like 13 years later to fix something.

Fix this by going to Preferences (Ctrl + P) / Output / DirectSound / Configure
Set buffer ahead on track change to something more then ZERO. Five hundred worked for me.
Check ‘remove silence at the beginning – end of track’.

Games for Windows LIVE gets me over a barrel.

rant, , , ,

Last night my friends and I wanted to play some Dawn of War II. I bought the game sometime last year and it’s been installed and running perfectly on my PC. I start the game on Steam and it tells me that a Windows LIVE update needs to be downloaded. I wait for the blue bar to finish and I get a message that says I “may” need to restart when finished. Dawn of War II closes and I get dropped to desktop with no further explanation. I repeated this update process about 5 times with the same results. I then tried to install GFWL (Games for Windows LIVE) gfwlivesetup.exe

Games for Windows LIVE needs SP3

Oh I see. So now I can’t play a game that I paid $50 for – on my stable SP2 XP machine. The machine that played this game perfectly fine a few months ago now needs SP3 or else. There is no work-around and no way to bypass the service pack check. (Although I would bet money that if the SP check were removed from the installer, it would function fine.) No, I see this for what it is: Microsoft forcing their OS upgrades down your throat. I have two choices: Upgrade to SP3 for the next 3 hours and figure out what it broke over the next two weeks, or uninstall Dawn of War II, and play it on my new Windows 7 PC I’m planning to build in a month. OR MAYBE I’ll never re-install it and never buy another “Games for Windows LIVE” game again.

Either way, instead of a fun game night, Microsoft has ruined it and made me think twice about their product offerings. Thanks Games for Windows! 😀

ix2 NAS Drive Failure.

Linux, rant, rave, , , , , , ,

I was copying pictures to my network drive and I noticed that it was responding slowly. Taking a good ten seconds to draw a .jpg preview. I logged into my Iomega Storcenter ix2 and the dashboard told me the news: “A drive is missing from the device”

I immediately made a backup to my workstation. Once copied, I completely shutdown the Storcenter, opened it and checked the connections. In order to see that it was a drive that had failed and not the board, I swapped the SATA cables for the two drives, tightened it all up and turned it back on.

What I next learned was that I have little patience for blinking lights. “What are you doing NAS drive?” I asked. “You respond to a ping, but that’s it.” No web interface… Well, let’s see what’s really going on. Connect via SSH and run this command: cat /proc/mdstat You’ll get actual information about what’s going on. At first I saw that the drive was rebuilding and was at 32.4% with 109 minutes remaining. A few minutes later I ran the command and got something like 33.8% with 132 minutes remaining. Okay – time to get dinner and wait for this to finish.

When I returned, the missing drive was back online and was crisis averted? Nope. The next morning I checked my email and received this from sohostoarge:
The Iomega StorCenter device is degraded and data protection is at risk. A drive may have either failed or been removed from your Iomega StorCenter device. Visit the Dashboard on the management interface for details. To prevent possible data loss, this issue should be repaired as soon as possible.

Awesome. 😐 Well, at least my email script still works.
Later that afternoon I picked up a 500GB WD Caviar Green from BB for $56. The Green drives are quieter, a little slower, and use less power – great for this application. I took the ix2 apart AGAIN, and removed the barely 3 year old Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 out of the device. I know that people have hardware preferences out there, and I know they differ, but here’s mine: I don’t buy Seagate drives. Ever. I’ve been a computer tech for over ten years. (Of course I bought the ix2 without knowing it comes with 2 of them 🙂 )

After closing up the drive I powered the NAS up and watched the magic. The new drive rebuilt and I got a steady blue light on my ix2 when I checked later the next day. No linux commands, no format, no partition, no RAID – just replaced the dead drive with a new one of the same size and we’re back in business. Am I pissed that this drive failed in 3 years? Sure. Did the Iomega ix2 do its job and kept my data safe? Absolutely!

If I didn’t need this data immediately I might have experimented with bigger drives, but I think I’ll upgrade to the ix4 before I ever try to upgrade the capacity of this little guy.

Make a Google Earth Fly-Over Video!

creativity, rave, travel, , , , ,

I organize a stage rally in Ridgecrest, California called the High Desert Trails. For the last three years we have run on a six mile road on private property. In order to grow the event we needed to find more roads. Stepping up to public roads means more insurance, permits, and logistics (more stuff). None of which we can afford if competitors think it’s still a small rally. Competitors (like myself) are often skeptical of new roads. It usually takes a couple of years before ‘everyone’ in the rally community knows what the roads are like at [rally name here]. How do you get rally drivers excited about an event with new roads today?

Google Earth! Imagine what it was like 10 years ago, before publicly available satellite imagery was a mouse click away. Rally Masters would spend hours driving around looking for roads. Even with updated topographic maps, you still have to get out there and check out what it actually looks like. Early in 2003 I spent some time looking for roads in New Hampshire and the topo maps don’t tell you about the flooded marsh, the rocky boulder filled road, or the intersection that home owners just piled dirt and brush on, so that neighborhood kids would stop using the route.

With Google Earth we were able to see what shape the roads were in, and we got an idea of how wide they were and if they were blocked, gated, etc. This reduced the number of ‘road scouting trips’ to a handful. We were even able to scout the route we had decided on when we got back to check for anything we had missed. The ability to see this kind of road detail is a game changer. “I’ve seen it from space.” is now a part of my vernacular.

It was only natural that I wanted my competitors to see it from space as well. I actually prefer this to coordinates, as I don’t want to reveal the exact route until the day of the event. For those rally folks reading this, I’m sure my methods can be re-produced and you could ‘discover’ the area outside of Ridgecrest that we’ll be using for the event. You are also aware of the pre-event testing rules, and the jeopardy to the event should you decide to do any pre-running. 🙂

How was it done?
* You’ll need a copy of Google Earth.
* You’ll need a screen capture program called CamStudio.
* Both of these programs are free!

Setup your view under Google Earth Options: Tools – Options – 3D View. Click ‘Show Terrain’ under ‘Terrain Quality’ and crank the slider to the max for detail. You’ll also need to edit the options for ‘Touring’ under Google Earth Options. Some of these options for recording refer to the Pro version of Google Earth which will make these videos in much higher res. A full version of Google Earth Pro is around $300. Highly recommended for a business or commercial venture. (but you can do just about the same thing for free with Cam Studio *cough) A good place to start is by setting the options to match what I have below. You’ll want to tweak your angles and heights continually to get the shot your looking for.

Go to the area of the map you want to make a movie of. Start by creating a path. A new window will pop up called ‘Google Earth New Path’. I suggest you change the name from ‘Untitled’. When you LEFT click on the map a point will appear. RIGHT click if you made a mistake. Use the controls in the top right to move around to your next point. Hit OK on the ‘Google Earth New Path’ window when you’re done. You can click on the path to add more later as well as changing the color and thickness of the line. You’ll want to hide this when you actually record your movie. This interface took me some time to get used to (especially in 3 dimensions) so be patient with it.

In CamStudio you’ll want to setup the video options to capture a ‘Fixed Region’ (I used 320 X 240). When you hit record a window will appear, place it over the Google Earth window as shown. Start the tour by clicking the “Start Tour” button: Record your shot and hit ‘Stop’ on CamStudio. You will be prompted to save your video.

For the rest of it I edited a group of videos and different shots with plain old Windows Movie Maker. Added a little royalty free music and uploaded to YouTube. As far a the rally is concerned, my first reactions were something like: “Woah! Helicopter? Oh Wait… this is awesome!” It will no doubt get peoples attention and hopefully we’ll get tons of competitors out to the High Desert Trails Rally on April 9th, 2011.