Continue pulling from your pop3 server that you mentioned. When the home box is off, pull using the laptop. Make sure your.procmailrc or whatever's in sync between the two. Then, keep your IMAP server on your home box, and investigate one of these 3 tools to propagate changes on both boxes to each other:
isync - Synchronize a local maildir with a remote IMAP4 mailbox
I, of course, mean the "some" users who seem to think that they should dictate what platforms your freeware runs on. Really, there might be a valid argument if these people were paying you gobs of money on each release, but they aren't. Since it won't exactly hurt you financially, I don't see the issue with telling them to take a long hike off a short pier, or probably the better approach of "I'll give your suggestions the consideration they deserve. Thank you."
Alternately, here's a money-making opportunity... "Whichever platform raises the most money by $DATE will be the one that's supported":-)
Ok, so if I have specific network hardware on a specific network, with specific additional hardware from a specific provider that charges monthly fees, SIP will be rock solid? Care to address my original points of:
* random networks * no special hardware * no monthly fees
I could add to that the implied points of:
* Not having control of the network or hardware * Not having control of the firewalls
though those could reasonably be assumed to be part of the "random networks" requirement.
I really didn't want to have to learn the intricacies of a protocol in order to get everything up and running. I'd been seeing various things that at least *implied* that I'd have to start mucking about with firewall rules in order to get SIP running. This was something I had zero interest in doing at the time. I also wanted something that would be cross-platform in an easy manner (I was looking at this so my manager & I could keep in touch while we both worked from home, without using cell minutes or LD charges....him Windows, me Linux).
Then I needed to be able to call out to POTS lines. Enter SkypeOut. No monthly charges, just a relatively low per-minute charge (which was OK, I still, after 16 months, haven't used the initial 10 Euros I put in). Then I needed people from work to be able to contact me, and I didn't want to give them my cell or house lines. Enter SkypeIn. $38 for a full year, with voicemail. Usable anywhere. That was a big draw. So long as I had a network connection, I could head off to a family member's place for a long weekend out-of-state, and still be reachable. No problemo spending 8 hours with sun and surf in the background and me being several hundred miles away...
And then things soured... I tried to renew my SkypeIn number. Failed. Again and again and again. Skype's purchase process is rather....opaque. They use a variety of 3rd party payment processors, and all Skype can tell you is "success" or "failure" until you start bitching about being unable to pay. Though don't expect an immediate response, as it will take up to 4 days. And then, if you're like me, you'll be told that your NATed laptop running Linux on a static IP with no proxies is "an anonymous proxy", and be told to check you IE settings to ensure you're not using a proxy (yes, IE settings in Linux...). You'll be told to, get this, try a different ISP. And even though you'll have already tried multiple credit cards, and multiple browsers with them, you'll be told to try another credit card, or another browser. Or worse (IMNSHO), another payment method that until just recently announced, had practically NO consumer protections (way to pay, pal!).
Ultimately, I ended up with access to work's terminal server, and after one too many complaints from the muckety-mucks who'd already been given my cell number (remember I didn't want to do that?) because I couldn't renew my SkypeIn, I decided that I could make a business case for using company resources for attempting to renew. And....it worked. NFC why, but it did.
So, now I have about another year to come up with another solution that'll work for me on random networks, doesn't require special hardware (other than a headset or speakers+microphone), and doesn't have recurring monthly fees, as I don't actually make calls every day, or even once a week. SIP still gives me a headache just trying to wrap my head around. Trying to figure out WHICH providers offer WHAT parts of what Skype offers as an all-in-one package is something I tend to just grow bored trying to research. Some of the more promising-looking clients seem to be geared towards specific providers, while others leave you trying to guess who to go with. Ick. I really don't want to stick with Skype having experienced the bad side of things, but I'm afraid momentum an just how unfocused SIP solutions are for what I want will force me to stay.
(Let's not even get into the whole Skype's Linux client lagging way behind their Windows client, with the Mac client having leapfrogged Linux at some point. There HAVE been a few betas that have finally brought support for ALSA, and some UI improvements. Still miles behind Windows & Mac, which is frustrating, but there's been at least some progress now almost a year after their last major Linux release)
You mean "EXIF"? And yes, EXIF really is pretty damn useful for anyone who wants to actually know what type of comera setup was used, exposure info, focal length, whether a flash fired, etc...
"We are sorry that these talks are not available as plain HTML, PDF, or text, however under present IST policy we are not allowed to provide plain HTML, PDF, or text."
And turn off SMTP VRFY. Either that, or having windows systems @ my ISP managed to get the address associated with my account on spam lists. This is an address that's *only* used internally by my ISP (I use pobox or my own domain whenever someone asks for an address). Even that wasn't enough to provent it from getting harvested.:-(
You're thinking along similar lines to me. If anything, I'd much rather see electoral votes divided in a state, either based on popularity or congressional district. We already have candidates that only pay attention to the most populous areas of the states with the most electoral votes. Going with a national popularity contest would just make the problem worse, and basically disenfranchise huge numbers of voters. Making a candidate actually WORK for each and every electoral vote would mean no more "let's concentrate on NY, CA, TX" style campaigning, and would likely in several areas result in electoral votes for third party candidates, which is something else this proposed system would more than likely make impossible.
A Maine/Nebraska (or finer-grained) scheme would also address problems such as those in the 2000 election, thanks to, at most, 3 electoral votes being up for grabs, instead of an entire state's worth.
You just convinced me OO's PDF is superior. I cringe ever single time I'm subjected to audio & animation, and timing is pointless if people are constantly interrupting.
Tell me it prevents garish and low contrast color schemes, and tiny unreadable fonts, and I'll believe I've died and gone to heaven.
Bingo. It gets even worse when the "company" is "the government". I'm aware of at least one situation where a group in a government agency is using OpenBSD for their firewalls. They can't legally make a donation, but have absolutely no problems spending $500+ on software, even "free" software. They have bought CD sets, but really would like to do more (and had approval to spend more than $50), but AFAIK the OpenBSD project makes it *extremely* difficult for companies and organizations to do this. "Donation" just doesn't parse financially for a lot of groups, while a $500 or $1k "enterprise", "professional", or "corporate" product, even without any material difference to the downloadable or $50 version, is a lot easier for companies to justify, account for, and get approval and funds for.
So, I can't say I'm really surprised that they're having difficulties, as their stance on accepting money is the same as the perceived stance on everything else, namely "our way or the highway", even when it causes them more potential harm than good.
(Yes, I'm aware that some third parties do offer a "more expensive" option of obtaining the CDs, and throw in some consulting, donating the monies above the material CD cost back to OpenBSD, and applaud them for that)
Documentation? About all I did was check linuxprinting.org for printers known to work, then went out and found one. All the foomatic, cups, hplip, etc packages were installed, and just went through the default steps for adding a printer through http://localhost:631/ (the default cups admin interface). I've no idea where to put freshly-downloaded PPDs to make them available to CUPS, however. For printers not listed on linuxprinting (I get the impression that it's not as up-to-date as it could be), their forum archives might have additional info...
I've been using an Epson Stylus Color 850, an Epson Stylus Photo R300, and an HP LaserJet 1320. The 1320 actually caused the retirement of the 850, as it was bought when I finally got annoyed at various issues I've been having with the 850 (carts drying out, cleaning cycles not clearing the nozzles sufficently, the nice long set of calisthenics it would go through before it would print, hating manual duplexing, and a general feeling of dissatisfaction with inkjets for things I didn't want smearing), and I've been missing having the speed of a laser at home for about the last 8 or so years when my Okidata whatever monster gave up the ghost.
The R300 is mostly used for printing one-off photos, and so sees rather light use, but was a present to the gf in 2004 because she wanted a photo printer since she'd recently gotten a new digicam, and the 850 wasn't going to cut it. For bulk photo printing, it's probably cheaper to go elsewhere, either online or in a B&M store, but it's nice to have when here sister sends the latest pic of the nephews, or whatever.
I'm also running debian/unstable (both i386 & the red-headed stepchild amd64), and haven't been noticing problems. The latest CUPS did have an issue with one of debian's postinst scripts using the shell's echo instead of/bin/echo to create one of the newer files (only apparent if you weren't using/bin/bash as sh), but other than that, printing's Just Worked for everything I've thrown at it since the switchover. It might have something to do with my almost fanatical devotion to installing the "recommends" packages when I installed CUPS initially, or could just be pure dumb luck here.
I lived in fear of each LPRng upgrade potentially breaking working printing functionality, and got tired of choosing a print filter package, only to have it disappear in upgrades to my distro. Then there was the fun when I was on the road, and needed to print at a client site (at least, when hooked to their network...), and needing to figure out the next magical incantaion. And I never really liked the config file for lpr anyway. Then I wanted to get photo printing working easily.
So, coupled with needing to look into it for my then-current job anyway, since there was a requirement of "no unencrypted traffic" when something could be considered "privileged", as some print jobs to the network printers could be (don't ask, it wasn't physical so much as potential sniffers on the network), I finally looked into CUPS. I decided to convert the least-critical machine on my home network to CUPS under the belief that I could always switch back by copying over a working config. You know what? That same night, I converted all the other *nix machines at home. It was that nice, that easy, that painless. Aside from CUPS already knowing about all my printers, sitting off on a stand-alone 3-port print server, it also was able to make better use of their features.
So, I'm now a happy CUPS user, and even had an easier time last week getting an HP LaserJet 1320 working on my *nix boxes (both simplex and duplex, draft, medium, and high qualities) than I did even getting the drivers and one printer instance onto my gf's XP SP2 laptop. (After the first, I just tarred up the modified files from/etc/cups, and scped and untarred on the remaining machines, restarting the CUPS daemon, though I don't know if that was strictly necessary)
If you like LPRng, and it works for you, stick with it. For my money, I'm much happier with CUPS. And as a bonus, with all the print filters for a lot of common formats already there, I don't need to go through different steps to print PDFs, graphics, etc, I just lpr them.
And the feature I miss most from them seems to be coming to gaim in 2.x (all conversations with one person in a single chat window, regardless of protocol)
BIOS by default booted disk 1,2,3,4. Grub wouldn't boot unless 3 was first. Which has some interesting implications for reliably booting a sw raid setup with grub, unless you go through a wholly manual process of telling grub to explicitly put the MBR on each disk, and then either edit the boot config in grub when needed, or have duplicate entries for each disk changing the root line each time.
And why in the world would BIOS *ever* handle a linux software raid setup itself?
Which completely misses the point of booting from raid. Not to mention that the machine won't boot unless you know which disk grub thinks is the first.
You beat me to it. I was using LILO on my last system, and installing my most recent one, GRUB was the default boot loader. Only problem being that / and/boot are both software RAID1, which once I found the magical incantation worked flawlessly under LILO. Apparently GRUB and my BIOS disagree as to what disk is actually the first though, so after a bit of frantic googling from a system that worked, I discovered I needed to tell the BIOS to boot disk 3. Joy. I also can't believe that GRUB's made it this far without native support for booting from any raid disk in the array...
What I find works for me is getting outside more often during the daylight hours... whether a walk, just sitting there, getting lunch, or joining a smoker-friend for their cigarette break, the warm sun beating down (even in sub-freezing weather) seems to help. At the least, try to get some time near a bright window.
Also, making sure at night to have the lights on early seems to help, but then I spend a lot of my time near some home aquaria that have both "plant" and "sunshine" bulbs, so it could be a similar effect to others' recommendations of a sun lamp.
Having a pet or two that's cute & cuddly, or at least doesn't mind the extra affection & attention (like 2 of 3 cats here), also helps when I ust need to feel a warm body and the S.O.'s asleep. (As I type, I need to take constant breaks and/or type 1-handed because I'm not paying enough attention to the "too feral" cat that climbs onto my laptop and curls up begging to be loved)
Develop a new hobby or concentrate on an old one. Be it stamp collecting, programming, walking around mall parking lots with keys in hand trying to get the most cars following you, or whatever, having something that you derive pleasure from that you can fall back on really helps. This year, thanks to some gifts I received, I'm learning all about the world of cigars. And I'm learning some new programming languages. I've even re-interpretted some stuff I'm doing at work to approach what I consider a dead-dull sub-project from a new direction as a related but interesting problem.
What I avoid: things I know make me uncomfortable. I don't like crowds, even "family" crowds (remarried parents post-high school does a LOT to suddenly expand families way past what one is "used" to), so I try to avoid situations where there's a huge group of people without a clearly visible "safe area", be it the car, garage, sunroom, etc.
Drinking excessively. Sure, I made a play on Pinky & the Brain in another post. But alcohol depresses. Drink some to be social or get a little lubed, but stop after a few drinks, especially if you'll be driving later, but even if not. Drinking when depressed (for me, at least) just leads to more depression and more drinking, so I stop early enough to not hit that spiral. Switch to water... folks who are farther gone will likely think you're hard-core, drinking straight vodka.
Being alone. See mention of the pets above. Find a family member or good friend to hang out with. Spend a lot more time and be more affectionate with a loved one. It's really easy, if you start to isolate yourself from everyone, to start spiraling down into a "no one loves me, no one cares about me" cycle.
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I, of course, mean the "some" users who seem to think that they should dictate what platforms your freeware runs on. Really, there might be a valid argument if these people were paying you gobs of money on each release, but they aren't. Since it won't exactly hurt you financially, I don't see the issue with telling them to take a long hike off a short pier, or probably the better approach of "I'll give your suggestions the consideration they deserve. Thank you."
:-)
Alternately, here's a money-making opportunity... "Whichever platform raises the most money by $DATE will be the one that's supported"
More like the initial was "what's simple enough for a management-type person running windows that's interoperable with linux".
I make one at least every 180 days, which is enough to keep it from expiring.
Ok, so if I have specific network hardware on a specific network, with specific additional hardware from a specific provider that charges monthly fees, SIP will be rock solid? Care to address my original points of:
* random networks
* no special hardware
* no monthly fees
I could add to that the implied points of:
* Not having control of the network or hardware
* Not having control of the firewalls
though those could reasonably be assumed to be part of the "random networks" requirement.
One word: laziness
Longer reason:
I really didn't want to have to learn the intricacies of a protocol in order to get everything up and running. I'd been seeing various things that at least *implied* that I'd have to start mucking about with firewall rules in order to get SIP running. This was something I had zero interest in doing at the time. I also wanted something that would be cross-platform in an easy manner (I was looking at this so my manager & I could keep in touch while we both worked from home, without using cell minutes or LD charges....him Windows, me Linux).
Then I needed to be able to call out to POTS lines. Enter SkypeOut. No monthly charges, just a relatively low per-minute charge (which was OK, I still, after 16 months, haven't used the initial 10 Euros I put in). Then I needed people from work to be able to contact me, and I didn't want to give them my cell or house lines. Enter SkypeIn. $38 for a full year, with voicemail. Usable anywhere. That was a big draw. So long as I had a network connection, I could head off to a family member's place for a long weekend out-of-state, and still be reachable. No problemo spending 8 hours with sun and surf in the background and me being several hundred miles away...
And then things soured... I tried to renew my SkypeIn number. Failed. Again and again and again. Skype's purchase process is rather....opaque. They use a variety of 3rd party payment processors, and all Skype can tell you is "success" or "failure" until you start bitching about being unable to pay. Though don't expect an immediate response, as it will take up to 4 days. And then, if you're like me, you'll be told that your NATed laptop running Linux on a static IP with no proxies is "an anonymous proxy", and be told to check you IE settings to ensure you're not using a proxy (yes, IE settings in Linux...). You'll be told to, get this, try a different ISP. And even though you'll have already tried multiple credit cards, and multiple browsers with them, you'll be told to try another credit card, or another browser. Or worse (IMNSHO), another payment method that until just recently announced, had practically NO consumer protections (way to pay, pal!).
Ultimately, I ended up with access to work's terminal server, and after one too many complaints from the muckety-mucks who'd already been given my cell number (remember I didn't want to do that?) because I couldn't renew my SkypeIn, I decided that I could make a business case for using company resources for attempting to renew. And....it worked. NFC why, but it did.
So, now I have about another year to come up with another solution that'll work for me on random networks, doesn't require special hardware (other than a headset or speakers+microphone), and doesn't have recurring monthly fees, as I don't actually make calls every day, or even once a week. SIP still gives me a headache just trying to wrap my head around. Trying to figure out WHICH providers offer WHAT parts of what Skype offers as an all-in-one package is something I tend to just grow bored trying to research. Some of the more promising-looking clients seem to be geared towards specific providers, while others leave you trying to guess who to go with. Ick. I really don't want to stick with Skype having experienced the bad side of things, but I'm afraid momentum an just how unfocused SIP solutions are for what I want will force me to stay.
(Let's not even get into the whole Skype's Linux client lagging way behind their Windows client, with the Mac client having leapfrogged Linux at some point. There HAVE been a few betas that have finally brought support for ALSA, and some UI improvements. Still miles behind Windows & Mac, which is frustrating, but there's been at least some progress now almost a year after their last major Linux release)
You mean "EXIF"? And yes, EXIF really is pretty damn useful for anyone who wants to actually know what type of comera setup was used, exposure info, focal length, whether a flash fired, etc...
Why would the esser, the esurb, the naahcpuh, and ozdin not be acronyms?
"We are sorry that these talks are not available as plain HTML, PDF, or text, however under present IST policy we are not allowed to provide plain HTML, PDF, or text."
Just repeat after me... "They're comin' right for us!"
oh, wait, you can't use that anymore. Try "Aw, look, they're starvin' to death! We have to thin the herd!"
And turn off SMTP VRFY. Either that, or having windows systems @ my ISP managed to get the address associated with my account on spam lists. This is an address that's *only* used internally by my ISP (I use pobox or my own domain whenever someone asks for an address). Even that wasn't enough to provent it from getting harvested. :-(
You're thinking along similar lines to me. If anything, I'd much rather see electoral votes divided in a state, either based on popularity or congressional district. We already have candidates that only pay attention to the most populous areas of the states with the most electoral votes. Going with a national popularity contest would just make the problem worse, and basically disenfranchise huge numbers of voters. Making a candidate actually WORK for each and every electoral vote would mean no more "let's concentrate on NY, CA, TX" style campaigning, and would likely in several areas result in electoral votes for third party candidates, which is something else this proposed system would more than likely make impossible.
A Maine/Nebraska (or finer-grained) scheme would also address problems such as those in the 2000 election, thanks to, at most, 3 electoral votes being up for grabs, instead of an entire state's worth.
You just convinced me OO's PDF is superior. I cringe ever single time I'm subjected to audio & animation, and timing is pointless if people are constantly interrupting.
Tell me it prevents garish and low contrast color schemes, and tiny unreadable fonts, and I'll believe I've died and gone to heaven.
No! 32 bits is too small! We'll have to go right to...128 bits!
*gasp* 128-bits? Is that wise?
What's the matter, Colonel Sanders? Chicken?
(No, I have no idea why that popped into my head)
Bingo. It gets even worse when the "company" is "the government". I'm aware of at least one situation where a group in a government agency is using OpenBSD for their firewalls. They can't legally make a donation, but have absolutely no problems spending $500+ on software, even "free" software. They have bought CD sets, but really would like to do more (and had approval to spend more than $50), but AFAIK the OpenBSD project makes it *extremely* difficult for companies and organizations to do this. "Donation" just doesn't parse financially for a lot of groups, while a $500 or $1k "enterprise", "professional", or "corporate" product, even without any material difference to the downloadable or $50 version, is a lot easier for companies to justify, account for, and get approval and funds for.
So, I can't say I'm really surprised that they're having difficulties, as their stance on accepting money is the same as the perceived stance on everything else, namely "our way or the highway", even when it causes them more potential harm than good.
(Yes, I'm aware that some third parties do offer a "more expensive" option of obtaining the CDs, and throw in some consulting, donating the monies above the material CD cost back to OpenBSD, and applaud them for that)
Documentation? About all I did was check linuxprinting.org for printers known to work, then went out and found one. All the foomatic, cups, hplip, etc packages were installed, and just went through the default steps for adding a printer through http://localhost:631/ (the default cups admin interface). I've no idea where to put freshly-downloaded PPDs to make them available to CUPS, however. For printers not listed on linuxprinting (I get the impression that it's not as up-to-date as it could be), their forum archives might have additional info...
I've been using an Epson Stylus Color 850, an Epson Stylus Photo R300, and an HP LaserJet 1320. The 1320 actually caused the retirement of the 850, as it was bought when I finally got annoyed at various issues I've been having with the 850 (carts drying out, cleaning cycles not clearing the nozzles sufficently, the nice long set of calisthenics it would go through before it would print, hating manual duplexing, and a general feeling of dissatisfaction with inkjets for things I didn't want smearing), and I've been missing having the speed of a laser at home for about the last 8 or so years when my Okidata whatever monster gave up the ghost.
/bin/echo to create one of the newer files (only apparent if you weren't using /bin/bash as sh), but other than that, printing's Just Worked for everything I've thrown at it since the switchover. It might have something to do with my almost fanatical devotion to installing the "recommends" packages when I installed CUPS initially, or could just be pure dumb luck here.
The R300 is mostly used for printing one-off photos, and so sees rather light use, but was a present to the gf in 2004 because she wanted a photo printer since she'd recently gotten a new digicam, and the 850 wasn't going to cut it. For bulk photo printing, it's probably cheaper to go elsewhere, either online or in a B&M store, but it's nice to have when here sister sends the latest pic of the nephews, or whatever.
I'm also running debian/unstable (both i386 & the red-headed stepchild amd64), and haven't been noticing problems. The latest CUPS did have an issue with one of debian's postinst scripts using the shell's echo instead of
I lived in fear of each LPRng upgrade potentially breaking working printing functionality, and got tired of choosing a print filter package, only to have it disappear in upgrades to my distro. Then there was the fun when I was on the road, and needed to print at a client site (at least, when hooked to their network...), and needing to figure out the next magical incantaion. And I never really liked the config file for lpr anyway. Then I wanted to get photo printing working easily.
/etc/cups, and scped and untarred on the remaining machines, restarting the CUPS daemon, though I don't know if that was strictly necessary)
So, coupled with needing to look into it for my then-current job anyway, since there was a requirement of "no unencrypted traffic" when something could be considered "privileged", as some print jobs to the network printers could be (don't ask, it wasn't physical so much as potential sniffers on the network), I finally looked into CUPS. I decided to convert the least-critical machine on my home network to CUPS under the belief that I could always switch back by copying over a working config. You know what? That same night, I converted all the other *nix machines at home. It was that nice, that easy, that painless. Aside from CUPS already knowing about all my printers, sitting off on a stand-alone 3-port print server, it also was able to make better use of their features.
So, I'm now a happy CUPS user, and even had an easier time last week getting an HP LaserJet 1320 working on my *nix boxes (both simplex and duplex, draft, medium, and high qualities) than I did even getting the drivers and one printer instance onto my gf's XP SP2 laptop. (After the first, I just tarred up the modified files from
If you like LPRng, and it works for you, stick with it. For my money, I'm much happier with CUPS. And as a bonus, with all the print filters for a lot of common formats already there, I don't need to go through different steps to print PDFs, graphics, etc, I just lpr them.
And even with preview, I screw up "ayttm". Might as well include links too...
everybuddy WAS at everybuddy.com, but a quick look says it's been squatted.
AYTTM is at http://ayttm.sourceforge.net/
And the feature I miss most from them seems to be coming to gaim in 2.x (all conversations with one person in a single chat window, regardless of protocol)
So has everybuddy or ayytm (I forget when it first appeared). Uses babelfish to do the translation, works with any protocol supported.
Of course, I've since moved to gaim so I don't know if current versions still do this, or have improved on it.
BIOS by default booted disk 1,2,3,4. Grub wouldn't boot unless 3 was first. Which has some interesting implications for reliably booting a sw raid setup with grub, unless you go through a wholly manual process of telling grub to explicitly put the MBR on each disk, and then either edit the boot config in grub when needed, or have duplicate entries for each disk changing the root line each time.
And why in the world would BIOS *ever* handle a linux software raid setup itself?
Which completely misses the point of booting from raid. Not to mention that the machine won't boot unless you know which disk grub thinks is the first.
You beat me to it. I was using LILO on my last system, and installing my most recent one, GRUB was the default boot loader. Only problem being that / and /boot are both software RAID1, which once I found the magical incantation worked flawlessly under LILO. Apparently GRUB and my BIOS disagree as to what disk is actually the first though, so after a bit of frantic googling from a system that worked, I discovered I needed to tell the BIOS to boot disk 3. Joy. I also can't believe that GRUB's made it this far without native support for booting from any raid disk in the array...
What I find works for me is getting outside more often during the daylight hours... whether a walk, just sitting there, getting lunch, or joining a smoker-friend for their cigarette break, the warm sun beating down (even in sub-freezing weather) seems to help. At the least, try to get some time near a bright window.
Also, making sure at night to have the lights on early seems to help, but then I spend a lot of my time near some home aquaria that have both "plant" and "sunshine" bulbs, so it could be a similar effect to others' recommendations of a sun lamp.
Having a pet or two that's cute & cuddly, or at least doesn't mind the extra affection & attention (like 2 of 3 cats here), also helps when I ust need to feel a warm body and the S.O.'s asleep. (As I type, I need to take constant breaks and/or type 1-handed because I'm not paying enough attention to the "too feral" cat that climbs onto my laptop and curls up begging to be loved)
Develop a new hobby or concentrate on an old one. Be it stamp collecting, programming, walking around mall parking lots with keys in hand trying to get the most cars following you, or whatever, having something that you derive pleasure from that you can fall back on really helps. This year, thanks to some gifts I received, I'm learning all about the world of cigars. And I'm learning some new programming languages. I've even re-interpretted some stuff I'm doing at work to approach what I consider a dead-dull sub-project from a new direction as a related but interesting problem.
What I avoid: things I know make me uncomfortable. I don't like crowds, even "family" crowds (remarried parents post-high school does a LOT to suddenly expand families way past what one is "used" to), so I try to avoid situations where there's a huge group of people without a clearly visible "safe area", be it the car, garage, sunroom, etc.
Drinking excessively. Sure, I made a play on Pinky & the Brain in another post. But alcohol depresses. Drink some to be social or get a little lubed, but stop after a few drinks, especially if you'll be driving later, but even if not. Drinking when depressed (for me, at least) just leads to more depression and more drinking, so I stop early enough to not hit that spiral. Switch to water... folks who are farther gone will likely think you're hard-core, drinking straight vodka.
Being alone. See mention of the pets above. Find a family member or good friend to hang out with. Spend a lot more time and be more affectionate with a loved one. It's really easy, if you start to isolate yourself from everyone, to start spiraling down into a "no one loves me, no one cares about me" cycle.
I was tempted to respond, "The same thing we do every night, Pinky... Try to out-drink the WORLD!" but, as usual, someone beat me to the gist of it.