Cleaning up

So, by now, most people know how to clean out their browser cache, cookies and history. The purpose of this post is to touch on places (in Windows) where cruft and tracks can accumulate without you knowing, and to tell you how to clean it up. For the sake of being thorough, I'll also touch on IE and Firefox. All of this is being done in XP; if you're using another flavor, you may need to tweak your approach slightly.

IE cache, cookies, history:

1. Start Menu -> Programs -> Internet Explorer
2. Tools -> Internet Options
3. General [tab]
4. Click the "Delete Cookies" button, click "Ok" at the confirmation dialog
   
5. Click the "Delete Files" button, check the "Delete all offline content" box, and click "Ok" at the confirmation dialog
6. Click the "Clear History" button, click "Yes" at the confirmation dialog
7. Content [tab]
8. Click the "AutoComplete" button
9. Click the "Clear SSL State" button
   
10. Click the "Clear Forms" button, click OK
11. Click the "Clear Passwords" button, click OK

Firefox:

1. Press "Cont-Shift-Del"
2. Select all checkboxes
3. Click "Clear Private Data Now"
   

QuickTime cache:

1. Start Menu -> Programs -> QuickTime -> QuickTime Player
2. Edit -> Preferences -> QuickTime Preferences
3. Advanced [tab]
4. Click the "Empty Cache" button
   

Flash:

1. Click "My Computer" on your desktop
2. Note: if at any point during this process you do not see a directory, do the following to ensure that it isn't just hiding on you:
1. Click Tools -> Folder Options
2. View [tab]
3. Look through the list. There should be "Hidden files and folders". Select "Show hidden files and folders."
4. Click OK.
   
3. Go to your main harddrive (almost always C:)
4. Click on "Documents and Settings"
5. Click on your username
6. Click on "Application Data"
7. Click on "Macromedia"
8. You should see a directory called "Flash Player". Deleting this directory will cleanup cached flash data.
9. Remember: empty your trash after deleting any directory. Windows doesn't believe in deletion at first click.

Windows MRU (most recently used):

1. Follow the previous set of instructions through to step 5.
2. Look for a folder called "Recent" (it could be hidden).
3. Delete it (and take out the trash).

Windows Cruft:

1. In the same directory used by the previous set of instructions, there should be a folder called "Local Settings". Enter it.
2. Look around. Folders like "Temp" can go.
3. There might be a folder called "Application Data". This contains some tasty files.
4. Under "Application Data", you might see:
   • AOL - navigating through this may reveal AIM profiles
   • Adobe - perhaps an Acrobat cache
   • Apple Computer - this could hold your QuickTime cache (cleared previously)
   ... and so on
5. Clean up what you want, and clear your trash. Don't be afraid to navigate down a bit to find out what's in any given directory. Directories like "cache" or "history" can generally go.
6. Also, under the other "Application Data" (off of your user's directory), there's may be a Sun directory. Directories under it, such as: "Java/Deployment/cache" can go.
   

Windows:

1. Start Menu -> Accessors -> System Tools -> Disk Cleanup
2. Wait
3. Keep waiting
4. It's safe to leave most boxes checked, but I strongly recommend against checking "Compress old files".
5. Click "OK", click "Yes"

And so on. The fact of the matter is, cruft can accumulate anywhere. Cleaning it out can improve application performance (though the first time you hit a commonly used site it will be slower, due to the content having to be re-cached). It's a negligible detriment, in my mind.

Stupid printer tricks

Anyone have any insight into this problem?

I have a Windows XP box with a printer (HP 3745) attached to it via USB. This printer is shared with my Linux boxes. If I turn on bi-directional printing, any print job I send to the print share gets stalled out at 64k. The printer makes noises like it's starting up, and then nothing prints out. The job won't cancel without a reboot.

The other half of the problem is the stupid print driver under Windows won't remember what I've said about the printer's cartridges if bi-directional printing isn't on. It thinks that there is 1 color cartridge in the printer, regardless of what is actually in the printer. The net result of that is that all-black jobs tend to get printed with only the color cartridge. That's why I enabled bi-directional printing in the first place (as well as to be able to run diagnostics on the printer).

And no, getting rid of Windows isn't the answer. As much as I wish it was ;).

In Bucky We Trust

Bucky Katt's Pledge: I pledge allegiance, to the can ... of the perfect food that is tuna. And to the fishy, for which it cans, one portion ... just for me, with olive oil, and crackers, on top.

Bucky Katt's Prayer: Thank you, O Can Opener, for this can which you are about to open. You are truly a beautiful can opener, and though I am not worthy of you, I love you.

Bucky Katt's Scripture: "Do unto cats and you'll get messed up." --Bucky 7:45

Bucky Katt's Comedy Routine: Good Evening ... so dogs are pretty dumb, eh? ... and ugly. Thank you. You've been great - My name is Bucky and I'll be here all week.

Get Fuzzy
[original post]

Peanut Butter, Bacon, and Jelly Sammich (v1.0)

My wife asked me to put this up:

Ingredients:

• 2 slices of bread
  
• 1-2 tbsp peanut butter
• 2 pieces of bacon (cooked)
  
• ½ tbsp fruit jelly or preserves
  

Directions:

1. Spread the jelly on one slice of bread.
2. Spread the peanut butter on the other slice of bread.
3. Break each piece of bacon in half and lay the pieces side-by-side in the peanut butter.
4. Place the two slices or bread together, so that the peanut butter, bacon, and jelly are in a nice layer (otherwise it's just way too messy).
5. Slice the sandwich in half (optional).
6. Consume.
   

Slán, outsanity

A few years ago, I put up a site with the expressed purpose of sharing tips and tricks that I had picked up over the years. It initially started when I spent way too much time figuring out how to get groff to print landscape. I was working on automatically generating PDFs for customers, and groff was the cheapest solution we could come up. But getting it to print landscape wasn't in the man page, wasn't in the troff manual, and wasn't in any obvious web searches. Eventually I figured it out, and I decided to put the site up so that the answer would at least show up in web searches (and hopefully save someone else the pain I had gone through).

As I get ready to enter into the world of parenting, I'm thinking more and more about how I spend my money. outsanity.org was a fun journey, but unfortunately, it fulfilled exactly the same need that this blog does. So, it's time to retire the website.

In the spirit of the website, here are a few Tips and Tricks that may be helpful:

• How do I print landscape from groff?
  Add -P-l to your call to groff.
  When groff is done processing your input data, it passes it off to another program called grops. Grops takes the output from groff and turns it in to postscript. By specifying -P-l on your call to groff, you will pass -l on to grops, which tells it that you want to print landscape rather than portrait.


• How do I roll back to a previous version in CVS?
  There are several ways to do it, but the most effect way I've found is: cvs update -j 1.CURRENT -j 1.PREVIOUS file
  
  Below is a short example of this in use. Basically, you want to do an update with two -j options. The first -j specifies the current version, the second specifies the version you want to roll back to.
  
  Once you've made this change, you must check in this file again, to make your changes stick.
  

  $ cvs update -j 1.13 -j 1.12 index.html
  RCS file: /repository/index.html,v
  retrieving revision 1.13
  retrieving revision 1.12
  Merging differences between 1.13 and 1.12 into index.html
  
  $ cvs diff index.html
  Index: index.html
  ===================================================================
  RCS file: /repository/index.html,v
  retrieving revision 1.13
  diff -r1.13 index.html
  1a2,3
  >   changes made in revision 1.13
  >
  
  $ cvs diff -r 1.12 index.html
  
  $ cvs commit -m "rolled back to version 1.12" index.html
  /repository/index.html,v  <--  index.html new revision: 1.14; previous revision: 1.13 done  



• How can I set my GNOME background image from the command line?
  gconftool-2 --type=string --set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename FILENAME


• How do I set a splash image in GNOME?
  gconftool-2 --type=string --set /apps/gnome-session/options/splash_image FILENAME