Relying more on Desktop Client for Emails

After switching to Akregator from Google Reader and learning to live with a little inconvenience, I was struck by a comment about the danger of email accounts being broken into by the criminal elements.

I now have setup an imap account and am using Kmail. Contents of any folder/label which need not available for easy access online, I plan to move to a local folder. I will miss out on the power of Google search, but I think, along with consuming less energy, learning to live with some technological inconveniences is the preferred/imperative option.

Update - Came across an interesting news of excessive reliance of technology -  When technology fails a news anchor, there are no words.

Life after Google Reader - Akregator

Web based services are convenient. It is far too easy to get used to them. I tend to look at my rss feeds from at least two systems. So, it seemed that I will use one of the online services which are trying to replace Google Reader and make the transition as painless as possible.

In view of the recent disclosures about Prism, opting for a little inconvenience is not a bad idea.

I am now quite comfortable with Akregator. One advantage is that I can see and access the entries I have already read as well. The responsiveness is very good.

To switch between machines, I take a tar backup of  .kde/share/apps/akregator from one machine and restore it on the other. Since it is a bit of a nuisance, I am organizing my net activities to normally use one system only for reading rss feeds and switch rarely.

It is not a very serious constraint and probable saves me distractions.

The mail services of our ISP are very unreliable otherwise I might have seriously considered at least partially moving from gmail.

As long as software read the content, I was unaffected; hence, no impact of Microsoft's criticisms of Google. This is probably more common  than just  for me as stories about Eliza illustrate -

Another story tells of the author's secretary using Eliza when he entered the room. The secretary asked her boss to leave until she had finished her conversation.

The author also considered putting in a module that recorded peoples conversations. This was greeted with accusations that Weizenbaum was spying on their secrets and innermost thoughts.

So, humans reading our content is another issue! 

Robots, however, guide and save humanity :)

Inactive logical volume after upgrading to Fedora 19

I upgraded my netbook to Fedora 19 beta version using yum. The process was smooth and went through without a hitch.

The problem came up on rebooting. Systemd waited and finally failed to mount home, which was a logical volume. This seemed strange as root and swap were also on the same volume group and were being used.

Finally, lvscan showed that the home logical volume was inactive. The command

lvchange --activate y 

worked and it was a relief to realize that the home logical partition was perfectly fine.

Unfortunately, rebooting the system showed the same problem. The cause of the problem was that all the lvm2 services were disabled.

Enabling lvm2-monitor.service resolved the issue :)