Give a boy a fancy toy and the first thing he does is break it open to see whats underneath. So when I started using Google Voice, I had to break it.

Now, the most important feature of Google voice is call forwarding where it can ring multiple registered phones when your Google voice number is called. Here’s a bit of fun with this feature –

• From a registered phone, dial your Google voice number
• Key in your PIN, press 2 and dial your registered phone number (the same one you’re calling from)
• Say “hello” and enjoy the infinite loop, its more fun if you love hearing your own voice

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Okay, the Nokia N75 has a serious bug. When you change the default security code from 12345 to something else, it allows you to choose a security code with more than 5 digits. But when you’re required to enter the code, it accepts only 5. This bug and the time gap between when I changed the code to when I wanted to use it meant that I forgot what my code was.

I didn’t want to flash the phone, so I figured out a simpler way of recovering the code off the phone. This may or may not work with other phones and may or may not hose it. Here goes (windoze based) –

• Install Nemesis Service Suite (NSS).
• Connect the phone through a USB cable, choose pc-suite mode on the phone.
• In NSS, go to the Phone Info section and the Permanent Memory tab.
• Read the permanent memory into a file.
• Open this file in a text-editor, it is organised in numbered sections. Locate section [308] and the line starting with 5= within this section.
• The 5 ASCII values (in hexadecimal) following 5= should be the security code. For instance, if the code was 12345, the line would be 5=3132333435 …

For older Nokia phones, just use this master security code generator.

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I use the akismet wordpress plugin to nuke spam. This eventually screws up the consistency of the wordpress database resulting in incorrect comment counts in some blog posts. Thankfully, this is quite trivial to fix with a few tweaks on the MYSQL database. Here is a script to do just that.

Disclaimer: Although the script fixed my database, you should verify that your symptoms are the same. I am not liable for any issues due to this script :-).

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As any spamassassin user would agree, the spammers aren’t dumb either. They update the characteristics of their email to avoid being filtered out. Some of those emails sneak through before you’ve updated your scores. When this happens, if you’ve enabled auto-whitelist, there are chances that the sender (though spoofed) may end up getting a negative AWL score meaning that the next time the overall score is bound to be lower, and the chances of getting the same spam message is not insignificant. I’ve seen this quite frequently with the misses. I thus have to update my scoring to catch the spam and remove the sender from the auto-whitelist. Here is a tiny mutt macro that does the latter -

macro index,pager wa "<pipe-message>grep \"\^From:\" | head -n 1 | cut -d \"<\" -f2 | cut -d \">\" -f1 | (read a; spamassassin --remove-addr-from-whitelist=\$a)<enter>" "Remove from spamassassin AWL"

Here are some other spamassassin related macros I use -

macro index,pager wc "<pipe-message>spamassassin -t | tail -n 30<enter>" "Run through spamassassin and check score"
macro index,pager ws "<pipe-message>sa-learn --showdots --spam<enter>" "Learn message as spam"
macro index,pager wh "<pipe-message>sa-learn --showdots --ham<enter>" "Learn message as ham"

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NOTE: This page has become unmanageable and has been retired. See the project page for further updates.

gmailUnlabelled is a greasemonkey script that creates a special label ‘Unlabelled’ to search for all the conversations without a real label.

Why?

Gmail doesn’t provide a search to search for unlabelled conversations. This is quite handy if you like to keep all emails labelled and have forgotten to label some.

Where?

Install greasemonkey, then, right-click gmailUnlabelled to install. If you’re on the new version of install gmailUnlabelled2.

Tips, Tricks and Gotchas!

1. The search string can’t be formed when the label box is collapsed.
2. If the search throws up ‘conversations’ (threads) with labels, it could be because of two reasons -
   1. The ‘conversation’ has atleast one email without a label – Gmail groups emails into conversations but labels are applied to each individual email. So if a conversation has even one email without a label, it will show up in the search results. Most people will run into this issue if they’ve been using gmail for a while. (See update dated 3rd August 2007 below).
   2. The label has some special characters that gmailUnlabelled can’t handle. Please report this.
3. Firefox only of course! IE users click here.

Update (15th June 2006)

Script updated to work with some recent changes. Also, from this version one could search for ‘-label‘ to find all unlabelled emails in gmail.

Update (3rd August 2007)

If you’ve been a gmail user for a while, the first time you use gmailUnlabelled could be confusing as it’d probably throw up conversations that apparently have email. Select all such conversations and attach a dummy label (‘old’ or ‘read’). Now you’re ready for gmailUnlabelled. Use it often and its easier to keep all emails labelled. In a couple of days, you’d also figure out why the dummy label was necessary. ;-)

Update (13th November 2007)

gmailUnlabelled does not work with “gmail 2.0″. I will work on an update ASAP.

Gmail 2.0 update (16th November 2007)

If you’re on the new version of gmail a.k.a. “gmail 2.0″ (Nov 2007), use the new script – gmailUnlabelled2.

Update (8th Febuary 2008)

Google just tweaked the interface which broke the script (again!). I’ve now updated it.

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