Category: Technology

I don’t know if this service is popular, but I have somehow missed it and I really need it. Instagrid.me is a service which allows one to have all his Instagram.me photos to be in a single place in a gallery format. This is really handy when you want to show someone all of your instagram pictures or want to find an image you did some time ago. Instagram has it’s own feed, but in order to see the images one need to be logged in.

My Instagrid is now available here

I rarely (read “never”) dedicate single post for single small thing, but this time I feel like I should do so.

Few weeks ago a friend of mine, in a conversation about Android apps, especially most essential ones like launchers, keyboards and so on, told me he is using SwiftKey 3 Keyboard and that it is really good, though you need to pay something like 3 euro for it. That time I replied that I am kinda satisfied with default keyboard in Jelly Beans and don’t see any point of changing it.

Few days ago I saw a port of Droider.ru about the same piece of software and when to read the complete review. It turned out to be so good that I went out to Google Play and downloaded the one-month-free-trial version. After install it asked me few questions on my way of typing, languages I use as well offered to give it access to my SMS/Gmail/Facebook to learn my way of communicating. Access was granted and in few minutes I was informed that things are fine now and ready to be used.

First thing I noticed is a design. Much better looking keyboard where I could easily touch any key as well as do long-tap for secondary symbols – nice. One day of normal phone use with mostly Foursquare, Instagram and Evernote where I was posting things and writing comments show me all the advantages. Not only SwiftKey 3 keyboard did well with predicting the word I am trying to type, but after pressing space (finishing the word) it was very good on a prediction for coming one. For instance, writing something like “Morning coffee” is done by typing “Mor”, selecting “Morning” as prediction, typing “c” and selecting “coffee”. Or typing “This is a nice keyboard” is done by typing “Thi”, selecting “This” as prediction, selecting “a”, selecting “is”, typing “ni” and selecting “nice”, typing “keyb” and selecting “keyboard”.

I found the layout of keys, the prediction of the text and all other features very useful and paid the small amount for such a useful thing. I don’t normally recommend things unless I really feel like I should (which is a rare case), but this time I do recommend everyone who didn’t try this nice software to go and check the trial version.

One more thing to note is that SwiftKey 3 Keyboard supports multiple languages with the same nice text prediction (at least English and Russian are fine).

Few tips on maintaining maildirs on the server:

To delete emails that are marked for deleting directly on the server:

find current_maildir_location/ -type f -name ‘*:2,*T*’ -mtime +7 -exec rm -f “‘{}'” ‘;’

This is helpful if users email client are sent to hide deleted messages and are not set to permanently delete them. Point is that maildir format has “T” flag in msg file name, which tells that msg is Trashed.

To archive old emails (something like 2 years old)

(cd current/ && find . -mtime +732 -print0) | rsync -ag –remove-source-files –files-from=- –from0 ./current_maildirs_location/ ./archive_maildirs_location/

The above will for recursively through all dirs in current_maildirs_location, find files older than 2 years and move them in archive_maildirs_location, preserving the directory structures.

Keep in mind that many mail clients do not handle large mailboxes well, so such tips can improve the speed for end-users, as well reduce storage requirements on the server (especially when talking about backups).