494. Very briefly: issue with thunderbird, failed connections and repeatedly being asked for the password

Even if you've set up thunderbird so that everything is working perfectly most of the time you occasionally end up in a very annoying situation: you keep on getting error messages about failed connections, and you keep being asked to supply the correct password. You can hit retry, or you can enter the correct password -- but why would you, given that you know based on previous successful connection attempts that your password is correct?
Leaving things along for 5-10 minutes tends to resolve it (or restarting thunderbird, given that you don't do it too quickly i.e. you basically let things stay quiet for a little while).

Anyway, while there are a number of potential reasons for this, in my case it's always been due to too many simultaneous connections, so that some of them are rejected. Not that that's what the error message really says, but whatever, the solution is actually pretty simple -- limit the number of simultaneous connections.

Go to Edit, Account Settings, select the account (typically a gmail one), Server Settings, click on Advanced, and change the 'Maximum number of server connections to cache' from the default 5 to e.g. 1.

On the computers I've done this on I've completely gotten rid of the annoying password requests.

493. Very, Very Briefly: libreoffice 4 on wheezy -- wheezy-backports

I might be the last person who 'gets' it, but I always presumed that since package versions in backports would be newer they'd automatically be installed.  But apparently that's not the case.

So, enable wheezy-backports, e.g. put this in your /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://ftp.iinet.net.au/debian/debian/ wheezy-backports main contrib non-free

Then install libreoffice 4:

sudo apt-get install libreoffice -t=wheezy-backports

That's it.

Post-script:
To see what your policies are:

apt-cache policy libreoffice

libreoffice:
  Installed: 1:4.0.3-2~bpo70+1
  Candidate: 1:4.0.3-2~bpo70+1
  Version table:
 *** 1:4.0.3-2~bpo70+1 0
        100 http://ftp.iinet.net.au/debian/debian/ wheezy-backports/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     1:3.5.4+dfsg2-0+deb7u2 0
        500 http://ftp.iinet.net.au/debian/debian/ wheezy/main amd64 Packages

and as it turns out the backports repo only has a score of 100, and looking at man apt_preferences:

       If the target release has been specified then APT uses the following algorithm to set the priorities of the versions of a package. Assign:

       priority 1
           to the versions coming from archives which in their Release files are marked as "NotAutomatic: yes" but not as "ButAutomaticUpgrades: yes" like the
           Debian experimental archive.

       priority 100
           to the version that is already installed (if any) and to the versions coming from archives which in their Release files are marked as "NotAutomatic:
           yes" and "ButAutomaticUpgrades: yes" like the Debian backports archive since squeeze-backports.

       priority 500
           to the versions that are not installed and do not belong to the target release.

       priority 990
           to the versions that are not installed and belong to the target release.

To see what's available in backports, do

aptitude search ~Awheezy-backports

492. Briefly: fixing no sound when playing youtube videos in chrome, iceweasel/firefox

Not sure what caused this, but I suddenly had no sound when playing flash videos in the browser.

Playing flv files using e.g. mplayer works fine. I'm using pulseaudio, and have an ~/.asoundrc file:

pcm.!default.type pulse
ctl.!default.type pulse

alsamixer is working fine and the channels are unmuted.

The solution:
I moved ~/.macromedia to ~/.xmacromedia as suggested at the end of this post: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=134892.

Didn't even need to restart the browser -- suddenly everything worked.

The question is why is there a ~/.macromedia folder, and what does it do? Might have a look into that at some later point.