Map The Same Server Using Different Credentials In Windows

A phrase has been on my mind lately: "The network folder specified is currently mapped using a different user name and password. To connect using a different user name and password, first disconnect any existing mappings to this network share." I'm not sure why my machine is referencing imaginary connections, but it is.

To work around this issue, I have added a new line to my Hosts file. If I'm unable to access 10.1.1.12, I'll add a line that reads 10.1.1.12 a.wagh and now map a.wagh with whatever credentials I want. If I want to use different credentials, I'd add b.wagh or 2.stupidcomputer or user.hostname and map those--really, anything that wouldn't otherwise resolve to a real address and break something.

I'm using Windows Server 2008r2, but odds are this'll work on every version of every OS with a Hosts file that's low-level enough. I haven't actually checked, but I doubt the the *nix fstab file has the dumb one-credential-per-address rule, so this tip will probably only be useful on Windows.

How to paste in Feedly for Android

Good news everyone! I think I found out how to paste a URL (or arbitrary text) from your Android clipboard into the Feedly app's "add new content" search field.

Type a character first, then paste next to it.

If you tap and hold on a blank search field, you get a vibration, but no "paste" pop-up. If you tap in the search field, type a letter, then tap again to get a blinking "I bar" cursor, then tap and hold on that cursor, you get a "paste" pop-up.

Or at least, it worked for me running Android 4.2.2 cyanogenmod on an HTC Desire HD "ace", using Feedly 16.1.542; of course, your milage may vary.

Keep Google Voice From Disabling SMS on Feature Phones

This is a problem that's been driving me crazy for almost a year now, and thankfully it turns out that it's all my fault.

I have an Android "phone" that lives in airplane mode, and a feature phone that I occasionally use to receive calls and texts. Most of my outgoing calls happen either from my Android (via a an app called "GVoice Callback" over wifi to my feature phone) or from my computer (From the Google Voice webpage to the Gmail webpage). Most of my outgoing sms messages are sent from the Google Voice webpage, though many are also sent from my Android's Google Voice app. Very rarely do I send a text from my feature phone, but it happens.

For quite a while now, I would open up https://www.google.com/voice#phones and choose my feature phone, select "Receive text messages on this phone" and for a time it would send any texts received to my feature phone, on the off chance I was away from Wifi and needed to be contacted. After doing that, I would stop getting texts automatically sent to my Google Voice app on my Android. 

To make a longer story shorter: in the official Google Voice app for Android, you're required (for some reason) to set a number for the phone you're using the app on. If you--like me--don't actually have a number for your android and foolishly chose your feature phone's number, then you will have the same issue. It turns out that the phone-specific setting chosen on your Android is synced to the phone-specific settings on the Google Voice webpage. Checking the box labeled
"Receive text messages on this phone" on the webpage, sets the Android app (under Sync and notifications) to "Receive text messages ... Via the messaging app", which disables sms sync on the Google Voice app. 

To fix it, I simply told my Android app that it was my home phone's number. If you don't have a home phone (and really, why would you) then presumably any number that you don't want to receive text messages on will do the trick, be this your SIP number, an old Gizmo5 number, or really any number you can receive a voice call on once a month to verify with Google.

Gmail search: find email that is not in a specified label

I recently updated my Android from 3.2 to 4.2.2 and with this change came "Actionable Notifications" like the ability to archive an incoming email without having to open the Gmail app. This is extremely convenient, but has left me with a lot of unread email going to the archive. Most people know about the is:unread search query, thanks to Google's handy list of gmail operators. This list also includes ways to search only in specific labels like in:inbox or in:afolderofmine but no mention of how to search for mail that is not in a specified label. I tried the usual things like -in:inbox and notin:inbox and !=inbox and even !=in:inbox but none of those worked.

Finally I tried !in:inbox and it worked^*.

In practical use, we could search for is:unread to find all of our unread mail, and visually distinguish between messages with and without the "inbox" label, and only check the conversations not in the inbox, and mark those as read, but why should we do the work of comparison when we could have our robot slaves do that for us?
Instead, search for something like is:unread has:nouserlabels !in:inbox !in:drafts and select all items that match and mark them as read.

Now we just need to implement some automation, and have these archived messages automatically marked as read after a few days. This is where I come up empty. IFTTT.com can search your Gmail for the string I gave above, but it can't do anything with it afterwards. I remember using a service before IFTTT existed that was specific to Gmail and advertised itself as adding features that were (and still are to this day) missing from Gmail, like time-based actions. I've long since lost the link and I only vaguely remember a silver logo and a name that started with an 's'. I also remember it not working well or all the time, but it was a free service, and they didn't seem to be stealing my information, so I didn't hold it against them.

---

^{*. It should be mentioned that you can have one message in a conversation in your archive and the rest of the conversation in your inbox, but when you search for things not in your inbox, the entire conversation will show up in your search results. Regrettably, this means we're not completely free from reading the list before apply an action to all of the items on that list.}

Disable Password Manager in Firefox Mobile

Just purchased LastPass premium and installed the Firefox Mobile extension. After about 20 minutes of use I'm already glad to have it. The soft keyboard that comes with the LastPass app (separate from the Firefox extension) looks like it will be very useful in the future.

This post is about the Firefox extension, and more specifically the Firefox password manager. When you install LastPass in the desktop version of Firefox, it asks if you want to disable the built in Firefox password manager. The mobile extension does not ask this (as of this post, 2013-3-21).
To manually disable the Firefox password manager (in the mobile version, and presumably in the desktop version as well)

1. Type in "about:config" in the address bar (without the quotation marks)
2. Search for "signon.rememberSignons" (also without quotes)
3. The default setting is "true". Click the "Toggle" button to switch it to default. 

This seems to do the trick. I only post this because a few minutes of Googling didn't find me the answer to this apparently uncommon question. I finally found the full list of about:config entries here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries

Here's to hoping I've saved someone else ten minutes.