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Restoring the Calendar or Tasks Tabs to Mozilla Thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird likes to close the calendar and tasks tabs and then gray out the options to restore them. This is how to make Thunderbird show the calendar and tasks tabs.

I get a whole lot of email across many accounts. Sure, there are other email clients, but I use Thunderbird. I’m used to it and it more or less does the job it’s meant to do.

Just recently, I had to remove the calendar plugin so that I could install the calendar from my package manager. Yes, the beloved calendar plugin ceased working without any in-app notifications and took a bit of debugging before I figured it out.

Anyhow, if you use Thunderbird long enough, you’ll eventually have the calendar and/or tasks tabs disappear and no longer able to be selected under the view menu. It looks like this:

thunderbird view pane — Hmm… That’s helpful, Mozilla.

Good looking out, Mozilla! That’s really helpful!

But, don’t fret. It turns out that you can just use the keyboard shortcuts to make them visible again.

Oh, wait… Those keyboard shortcuts don’t actually appear to be mentioned anywhere within Thunderbird. So, what are they?

View the Calendar tab with: CTRL + SHIFT + C

View the Tasks tab with: CTRL + SHIFT + D

There. Those are the magical keyboard incarnations needed to restore the tabs even when you can’t select them via the view menu. It makes sense that the calendar is a C, but I have no clue why tasks is a D. If you have any ideas about the reasoning behind that decision, please feel free to leave a comment.

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Put it all Together

This is just a quick article that may show one of the reasons I write this material. We’re just going to put together a couple of pages from this site in an example of real-world use.

So, if you remember, I told you how to use dpkg to get a list of installed applications. The command I used on that page was:

dpkg -l > Documents/installed_apps.txt

Well, the output from that is more information than I really need. It looks like this:

ii abiword 3.0.2-6 amd64 efficient, featureful word processor with collaboration  
ii abiword-common 3.0.2-6 all efficient, featureful word processor with collaboration -- common files  
ii accountsservice 0.6.45-1ubuntu1.3 amd64 query and manipulate user account information  
ii ack 2.22-1 all grep-like program specifically for large source trees

That’s plenty informative – but I want just the name of the applications. Sure enough, we can use ‘AWK‘ to do this.

On that page, we have this command:

awk '{ print $2 }' countries.txt > finished.txt

So, let’s mix the two together! We can do that!

Let’s see… I’ll obviously need to change the paths and file names. Coincidentally, I’ll not need to change the column (the bit about { print $2 }) because I still want the second column.

What does it end up looking like?

awk '{ print $2 }' Documents/installed_apps.txt > Documents/InstalledApps.txt

Now, navigate to your documents folder and open InstalledApps.txt with your favorite text editor. You’ll see that it looks a bit like this:

abiword  
abiword-common   
accountsservice
ack

You’ll still have some unwanted text at the top of the page, but it works well enough to get the job done. It’s reasons like that which motivate me to write this material.

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How To: Uninstall the Default Music Player in Elementary OS

The default music player in Elementary OS is kinda lame. There are many better choices. Once you’ve chosen one, this is how you remove the default music player in eOS.

This was asked on a forum that I visit and I took the time to find the answer. I figured that I’d not been able to easily find the answer with a search engine, so I might as well turn it into an article. It’s actually pretty simple.

eOS lacks any handy GUI system monitor that I could find, so I installed one. You might as well do the same. With eOS, you’re eventually going to want it – though top or htop or even atop do the job just as well. Anyhow, I installed one and found that closing the “io.elementary.music” process closed the music player. Obviously, you can’t uninstall that. It’s part of some bigger package and eOS does things in unusual ways.

With further digging, I finally noticed an application called ‘noise’ in the list of running processes. Killing it would kill the music player, just like killing the io.elementary.music process would. Finding this out pleased me.

sudo apt remove noise

It was actually pretty neat when I ran that command. It uninstalled the default music player but the dock still had the music player icon showing – and the command made that icon fade into a partially transparent icon. Slick move, eOS. Slick move…

At that point, I just decided I’d reboot. Y’all know how to do that already, but let’s do it from the terminal.

sudo reboot

Or, if you want, you can put them all together with one grand command that looks like this:

sudo apt remove noise -y && sudo reboot

Press the enter button, type in your password, and go grab a snack – but just a quick one as it won’t take long before you’re back at the login screen without the default music player installed any longer.

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Remove Title Bar From Firefox

If you, like me, appreciate clean and simple layouts. The Firefox Title Bar is a bit annoying, wastes space, and adds unneeded clutter. Here’s how to remove it.

If this site (and the rest) doesn’t make it obvious, I like my layouts to be simple. I don’t want to waste space that doesn’t give me information that I need. That’s one of the reasons I use Linux – I can make the OS get out of my way and get my work done.

So, what am I talking about? A picture is worth 1,000 words…

firefox title bar — That. That there is wasted space.

It’s actually easy to get rid of, if you know where to look.

In Firefox, look in the upper-left. You’ll see three vertical dots and those open the menu. Click that and then click on “Customize”. Then, simply scroll down and untick the box for Title Bar.

disable firefox title bar — It’s easy, once you know where to look. Also, I suck at editing images.

You don’t even have to restart the browser.

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Installing Google Earth on a Remote Computer

I wanted to test Google Earth Pro, but I didn’t want to install it on this computer. I wanted to install Google Earth Pro on a remote computer and test it there.

This is really just an expression of why I like Linux as much as I do. It allows me to be elegant and lazy!

First, I went to Google’s site for their Google Earth Pro application and found the download. It tried to make me download it automatically, and I canceled that. Instead, I right clicked on their link to ‘try again’ if the download didn’t start automatically and copied that link. Tada!

Then, I opened my terminal…

ssh kgiii@kgiii-lmde.local

I entered my password and was logged into that computer in the terminal.

The next steps were just as easy.

wget https://dl.google.com/dl/earth/client/current/google-earth-pro-stable_current_amd64.deb
 && sudo apt install ./google-earth-pro-stable_current_amd64.deb

Then I just waited and let it finish the task I’d set for it. Now, when I next go to that computer, or if I login with VNC, I can use Google Earth Pro and won’t have to go find the download, download it, and wait for it to install before I can use it. It’s already there, waiting for me to play with it.

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