Do you see strange characters on man pages in your Cygwin? After upgrading to Cygwin 1.7, I noticed that the soft hyphens in man pages were replaced with the “â” character. Somehow, the character set wasn’t right. I remember having to deal with this problem several years ago, but couldn’t recall how I solved it. I found some old messages floating around the web going back at least a decade about setting environment variables, locales and whatnot to cure this. Fortunately, the solution turned out to be easy with the latest Cygwin and PuTTY.

As it turns out, Cygwin 1.7 now defaults to using the UTF-8 character set. PuTTY, at least on my system in the US, defaults to ISO-8859-1, a.k.a Latin-1. So, the fix is as follows:

1. Open the PuTTY Configuration dialog
2. Under the Window category, click on Translation
3. In the “Character set translation on received data” section, select UTF-8 in the drop down list box
4. Save the configuration

Now man pages look normal again. Of course, if you’ve changed the locale and/or character set in your Cygwin to something other than UTF-8, be sure to set PuTTY’s character set to match.

Are you using a different terminal/ssh program with Cygwin than PuTTY and encountering this? Share the corresponding steps to apply the cure for your terminal emulator in the comments.

Tags: Cygwin, how-to, Windows

Today, my Pidgin IM client started giving the error, “Received unexpected response from http://api.oscar.aol.com/aim/startOSCARSession”, when connecting to the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) server. Apparently, it can also happen when connecting to ICQ. Fortuantely, the fix/workaround on Windows and Linux is really easy.

1. Go to Accounts
2. Modify the AIM or ICQ account
3. On the Advanced tab, clear the checkbox labeled Use clientLogin
4. Save

Are you using Adium? It may also have this issue on the Mac. If you’ve solved it, post the steps in a reply.

Update: Alternatively, in step 3, you can clear the checkbox labeled Use SSL

Tags: AIM, how-to, ICQ, Linux, Pidgin, Windows

So you’ve recently installed or upgraded Kubuntu to 9.10 Karmic Koala and installed Firefox. To your horror, you find that all the menus and labels in the browser’s interface are either HUGE or tiny relative to the included KDE applications. Here’s the quick fix.

1. Click on the K menu
2. Select System Settings
3. In the Look & Feel section, click the Appearance icon
4. In the left panel, click the Fonts icon
5. At the bottom of the Fonts settings, the Force fonts DPI drop down list control is set to Disabled by default
6. If you want to make Firefox’s fonts smaller, select 96 DPI; to make them larger, select 120 DPI
7. Click the Apply button
8. Restart Firefox

If you’re using Ubuntu with the Gnome desktop and run into this problem, there should be a similar DPI setting for either fonts or the display. Let me know how you resolved it on Gnome.

Tags: Firefox, how-to, KDE, Linux

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There are many articles about completely clearing Firefox’s form auto-complete history. However, I’ve often mistyped something into a form and then either had to live with those typos always showing up or lose my complete form history by clearing it. There is a better way!

Although you can’t easily edit or modify the characters that are stored, you can remove individual items in the form history with just a few keystrokes.

1. Go to the form that has the field with the auto-complete history entry that you want to delete
2. Type the first few characters of the value you want to remove. You’ll see the value appear in the drop down list below the form field as usual. In this example, I want to remove the misspelled entry, “knwoledge”.
   
3. Use the down-arrow key to highlight the history item to be deleted. Don’t click it with the mouse.
   
4. Press the Delete (Del) key, instead of Enter, and the item will be gone
   

Yea! No more garbage in your form auto-complete history.

This method is also useful for security and privacy purposes to selectively remove data, such as credit card, Social Security, bank account and other identification numbers, that you don’t want lying around in Firefox’s form history.

Tags: Firefox, how-to, security

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• Can’t Save PDF Form in Acrobat Reader

Have you downloaded a PDF form that enables you to fill in the fields using Acrobat Reader? Many government forms such as federal and state tax return documents have this feature. Have you ever filled one in only to find that you can’t save all of the data you just typed in? That’s got to be one of the worst “features”, ever. What’s the point of being able to save the file without the data? Here’s a workaround.

The next time you see a PDF form that shows a message such as,

“You cannot save data typed into this form. Please print your completed form if you would like a copy for your records.”

do the following:

1. Install a PDF printing tool such as the one included with the full Adobe Acrobat package or a free one such as PDFCreator.
2. Fill in the PDF form as you normally would
3. When you’re done with the form, print it
4. Rather than using your default printer, select the one from the PDF tool you installed in step #1

Voila! Now you’ll have a PDF of the filled-in form to save for your records.

Tags: how-to, PDF

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