Another week gone by with little progress

On one hand I've made little progress this week, with the BT broadband having been down for 4 days over some unknown area of Evesham. WHY can't they just be honest and say what area is affected so we know where to go to get outside the problem? Waiting now to see if the compensation scheme pays up, although with 6 days out in total in the last three weeks just being paid for two of them seems crass. Something to discuss if the complaints team do follow up on the complaint registered on Thursday.

Actually I have made progress this week as I do now have a nice new server all ready to populate with the updated web services code and which I can toggle to leaving the old server ticking away safe from any mistakes I might make if I tried to update it directly. I also picked up a new wired mouse as the wireless one was giving jip by bouncing around the screen at random. Not sure if that was interference on the wireless connection, but the new wired one has sorted a number of problems which ALL of the older wired mice struggled with. Right click at least is rock steady, something that has been an annoyance for some time.

I've been trying Mistral again for answers to simple questions, and it really is just and 'Advanced Idiot' rather than having any intelligence. I was trying to tidy up a few little steps that make using the desktop easier. One was simply toggling the screen save on and off, which in the past I've just left the Power Management window open, but now it's buried under everything else in 'System Settings' it's difficult to get at. So can I get to it directly or is there a widget to help? According to Mistral, no although it had various suggestions. The one that was missing was that the problem has already been sorted and the power management icon bottom right can be used with just a middle click! Something that Mistral agreed was probably the best option when I told it ... Just had a similar sort of problem with my email setup. I'll cover the setup in another wiki page, but I've been using POP3 and IMAP between the three copies of thunderbird in order to ensure my master email archive is local and with now 70Gb of traffic over 30 years, easily searchable. Mistral came up with an 'upgrade' process which involved changing the POP3 account in thunderbird to IMAP ... which you can't do. So then create a new account before deleting was the next plan and having asked about the problem of not being able to create two accounts for the one email address it agreed that this was a problem and promptly reiterated a plan that did just that. What it SHOULD have pointed out is that creating the second account is no longer a problem! And when asked when that became possible simply failed to answer the question. Anyway I now have a IMAP view and a POP3 view onto the remote server and the next step is to ensure what is visible in IMAP on all three devices is in sync. At some point it would be nice to see the history on the mobile copies of thunderbird but as long as the desktop copy has that and is backed up to a second machine I can do with that for now. Looking at what 30 year old client said is not often needed today but has been nice to have in the recent past! On the most recent occasion I was fairly sure that the email was a scam and a request as to how he was doing with the kit I'd supplied 15+ years earlier cut the conversation. We really do need some better way of providing email addresses that can be shut down and not recycled by scammers?

Next one for Mistral was simply how do I copy the email filters from one account to another, which got the responce that "you can't", you have to write them down and reload them! Fortunately I already knew that the correct answer was just to copy the file with the filters in to the new account, but could not remember which file, although once I looked it was obvious. First pass failed as while I had shut down thunderbird, it was actually still running in the background to get emails. Needed to close down that process as well as while I did the change to the files, it promptly but them back as they were :)

OK just found another error I think in the information Mistral provided. Was told to set 'place a copy in' to a local folder to keep messages, but THAT only applies to sent messages. Then it was 'keep message archives in' but that is only used when the message IS archived, not for every message. Think I probably need to add something to the message filter list but not quite sure yet. Something that I can now play with since much of the rest is under control. 

Also on the TODO list is a look at Betterbird which looks like it will address a few bits I still find backwards. The only problem is that it does not support Android as yet but since the andriod version has a somewhat different interface anyway the 'improvements' are not needed there anyway. I was a little suprised to find the SeaMonkey is still available. Again the same problem but I never signed up to the need to split browser and email anyway, and trying to steal 'firebird' as the new browser's name was never going to happen. Firebird has had an SQL browser for a long time so there was always going to be conflict. The step over to Firefox was the only way forward at that time and following an initial announcement that the new browser would be called 'Mozilla Firebird' it was on the 9th Feb 2024, changed to the now well established Firefox which made much more sense. ( For reference Firebird statement )