Ad Blocking in Vienna RSS Reader

I gave up NetNewsWire because of its ad-bombardment. Sure, I understand that free software can be expensive for the developer, but there's a limit of ad-bombardment that a user can tolerate. My threshold is very low.

Newsfeeds such as Slashdot have large and annoying graphical ad banners inserted in the RSS XML content. The size of the ads is larger than the 2-3 lines of content. This had to end.

Fortunately, the Vienna RSS reader supports customizable templates. My solution involves disabling the display of these ads using CSS. Follow these simple and easy steps to suppress the display of advertisements in your RSS feeds.

1. Edit /Applications/Vienna.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Styles/Default.viennastyle/template.html
2. Insert the following lines at the top (before the first <div> tag):
   
<style type="text/css">
@import url("http://adblock.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/adblock.css");
@import url("http://www.floppymoose.com/userContent.css");
</style>

   
3. Save template.html and restart Vienna RSS.

I use the following two CSS files:

http://adblock.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/adblock.css
http://www.floppymoose.com/userContent.css

If anyone comes across a frequently updated CSS stylesheet for adblocking, please let me know. It is easy to add it to "template.html" as shown above.

Quest for a good RSS Reader

I have always been searching for a good RSS reader for the Mac. My criteria for selection:

• Free
• Offline content
  
• No sign-ups, no logins
  
• I don't want Google to learn about what I'm reading
• Good looks
• No annoying ads

For the longest time, NetNewsWire's free version fit my needs. Recently, NNW has become annoying. Overlaid ads, greed and excessively frequent changes and updates (there's almost one every week) killed NNW's appeal. I don't care for Google Reader integration. I don't care for Google Reader, period.

I then switched over to NewsFire. It looks great. It is simple. But it lacked in many features. What killed NewsFire for me was its inability to pull in older content, even if it is on the site's feed. And there are no advanced settings.

NewsFire gave way to Vienna. I still prefer the fonts and styling of NNW and NewsFire, but Vienna does a very good job in meeting my criteria and keeping the ad banners away.

GPGMail no more for Snow Leopard :(

Sad to learn about this, but the developer of the excellent GPGMail plugin for Mail.app has thrown in the towel. Apple has very weak documentation of Mail.app's internals and there's just no support and no thanks for someone's exceptionally hard work.

So, if you're a GPG/PGP user like I am, your move to Snow Leopard shall be without Mail.app. Your only alternative is Enigmail on Thunderbird.

Apple, atleast consider rewarding Stephane for his work and open up some good documentation for Mail.app

Google - this would be a nice idea for a Summer of Code project.

I hope the community can find a way to keep this great project alive!

Carbon Copy Cloner

Today, I upgraded my MacBook Pro's hard drive. I replaced it with a 7200 rpm 500GB HDD from Seagate. My system is a newer model and therefore I didn't require the MacBook Pro EFI Firmware update 1.7, which addressed a problem with higher capacity and higher speed SATA drives.

My upgrade was actually a very smooth process, thanks to Carbon Copy Cloner from Mike Bombich. Mike, thank you very much for building a fantastic product. I shall surely be sending a donation your way, not for saving my butt, but for building a great product!

Step 1: Place your target hard drive in an external USB or Firewire enclosure. I placed my 500GB drive in the external USB enclosure and connected it to my Mac.

Step 2: Partition the target hard drive using the Intel GUID partition format. Use Disk Utility to get that job done.

Step 3: Clone your system's drive onto the target hard drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. My system's drive is a 250GB drive. Carbon Copy Cloner went to work and in a couple of hours, my data was cloned.

Step 4: Remove your Mac's drive and replace it with your target hard drive. I followed the instructions from OWC's upgrade video.

Step 5: Ensure that you have properly closed your Mac.

Step 6: Boot up. It may take a little while at the first attempt, but soon you shall see your system boot up, with an upgraded disk capacity and everything in place as-is! I usually have verbose boot up messages turned on.

Turn off annoying iCal invite replies

Many people have complained about Apple really ruining iCal. I won't go into the depths of that. A month after I moved to a new Mac, I discovered yet another thing that wasn't properly restored from my previous system - the plugin to disable automatic replies to invitations.

iCal.app automatically sends and Accepted or Rejected email for calendar invitations. I want control over this notification, but there is none.

Enter John Maisey's extremely useful iCal Reply Checker. It took me a while to search for this utility - it is hidden in a deep corner of the web. Anyway, I am delighted that I found this utility again and installed it promptly!