I like Google Groups a lot, but it’s far from perfect. Of all its annoyances, the lack of a killfile (filter) is the biggest.
Fortunately there is a solution for those using Firefox:
2. Install Damian’s Google Groups Killfile script
3. View one of the offending posts in Google Groups and click on Ignore User. Hooray, now I can finally read melb.general free of all those MI5 Persecution posts! (You can read all about that here, if you wish.)
Look, I’m all for citizen journalism. And Cameron Reilly is a good guy — an intelligent, witty, talented individual.
But “Man disputes $66 traffic fine” is NOT news. Something that happens thousands of times a day across Australia is NOT news. Not unless the protagonist is a senior cop or politician.
Certainly it’s worthy of a blog entry. But showing up on a news site (particularly as the top item) just makes a mockery of what citizen journalism could be and should be.
Surely there must be some real news people could be reporting on? I mean, stuff that actually matters to more than one person?
Does anybody still use Mailwasher?
“MailWasher retrieves information about all the emails on the server. With that information (some of which is also processed by MailWasher) you can decide what to do with each individual email – download, delete, or bounce back.
If you check your account with MailWasher first, you can delete or bounce the emails you do not want. Then, when you use your email program, it downloads only the remaining emails, those that you want to read.”
MailWasher’s been around for a while, and I know some people still use it. I tried it some time ago, and it just didn’t seem worth my time to review the headers and choose which items to delete/bounce, as a prelude to actually downloading and reading my email. I might feel differently if I was still on dialup, or perilously close to my download limit. But as it is, if any spam gets through to my mailbox, I’m happy enough deleting it from my email client.
And given the spammers use fake originating addresses and rarely seem to validate the lists they use (I know this because they’ve faked my address as an originator, so I’ve seen the bounces), I’m not convinced bouncing spam back does any good.
So Mailwasher was great in the olden days of dialup, but these days… I guess some people still use it, but I don’t see the need.
Some people have taken to passing their email through Gmail (forward from your email address to Gmail, then read via Gmail’s POP or IMAP access), to make use of Gmail’s spam filters. My ISP has spam filters which work fairly well, so I haven’t resorted to that yet.
So I tried IMAP for Gmail in Thunderbird. And to be honest, while it works, I’ve stopped using it because it’s too slow. Probably due to the sheer distance to the Gmail servers, it plods along compared to my other IMAP servers, and indeed compared to Gmail itself.
In fact, Gmail appears to have had a further upgrade in the last few days which makes the web site even more responsive. Actions such as Delete now appear to happen immediately, with little lag after clicking the button. I reckon they’re doing more processing behind the scenes — the give-away is that if you try and leave the Gmail page straight after doing something like deleting a message, it warns you that you may lose your changes.
They’ve tweaked the interface too, with a highlight > icon showing the current message, a nicer popup for email contacts, and you can Sign Out of chat if you don’t want it bothering you.
And the space available is still creeping up; mine reckons I’ve got almost 5Gb available: “You are currently using 373 MB (7%) of your 4731 MB.”
(I haven’t yet moved all my old Outlook mail to Thunderbird. Want to test out the Windows Desktop Search add-in for Thunderbird, so I know I’ll still be able to find stuff! Alternately I might switch to another search; preferably one that supports both Thunderbird and Gmail.)
A new example: http://sl-weekly.com/
Basically an excerpt from a blog, with a random introductory paragraph up-front to make it look human, presumably in the hope that the trackback will be accepted.
Random introductory paragraphs:
Of course, it’s pretty obvious if you look at a few posts in a row. Less so if you’re getting the occasional trackback request.
Trying to hire a car in Adelaide for a single day, a Sunday. I’d really rather not have it overnight, so I don’t have to park it somewhere. As it turns out, it looks like none of the car rental places are open beyond 4pm on Sundays, but the problem with their web sites is how they tell you this:
Budget: “Your return time is after the location’s closing time.” — So what’s the location’s closing time? Surely you’re not going to make me guess? Wait, check the Locations page. OK, found the list of nearby branches. Click on the chosen one. No opening hours shown. … (sometime later) … Wait, if I mouse over the location on the map, it tells me the opening hours! Not that there’s any prompt to the user to say that’s how it works.
Hertz: “Return Date or Time – This location is closed at the time indicated. Please adjust your return or select an alternate location. [DE357]” — But at least there on the screen it’s showing me what the times are.
Thrifty: “Your rental details could not be processed because the return time is outside the opening hours for the return location. The return time has been changed to be the location closing time.” — Better, but why didn’t you tell me the opening hours when I was checking what your locations are?
Europcar: “Your Return Time could not be accepted because the operating hours for our Adelaide City Branch on 10/28/2007 7:00:00 PM are between the hours of 09:00 and 16:00.” Bravo!
Avis: tells as I click through where the branch is and what its hours are, but ignores it for another screen or two. But when it does notice, it eventually tells me everything I need to know in one message: “The Return Location selected is closed at the time requested. The Return Location operates from Sun 08:00AM-02:00PM; Mon-Fri 07:30AM-06:00PM; Sat 08:00AM-02:00PM. The Return Location Service may be available after hours. Please call this number (61) 08-84105727 to contact this location for further details.” — Bravo Avis, you win.
Of course, the aggregator sites like VroomVroomVroom don’t do too well out of this either. Oh well. SimilarlyDriveNow.
I ended up booking with Avis (closest to the hotel) via DriveNow (the best mix of good prices and nice web interface). And when I discovered (after placing the booking) that I’d entered the wrong dates, I went to avis.com and changed them. Neato.
Works as advertised. A little slower than my local ISP IMAP/SMTP servers, but not too bad, and because Thunderbird will happily wait for a server while you do other stuff, it's not painful at all.
Gmail's tags don't quite translate into IMAP folders, but it's probably close enough.
Conversations display as separate email messages in Thunderbird. You can use View / Threads to make it similar. Filing stuff in Thunderbird only does one message though, whereas in Gmail that'll do the whole conversation.
Deleting from Thunderbird moves it to a folder (eg gives it a Label) called [Imap]/Trash — which is how it appears over in GMail. Ideally it would move it to [Gmail]/Trash which seems to match the “real” Gmail Trash, but TB doesn't have that option.
Sent messages by default go into the TB folder Sent, but this can be changed to match Gmail's [Gmail]/Sent Mail in TB: Gmail account properties; Copies & Folders; When sending messages; Place a copy in: Other / Sent Mail on Gmail.
Moving messages to [Gmail]/All Mail appears to be the equivalent of pressing the Archive button in Gmail.
There's a bunch more help on comparing Gmail and IMAP actions.
All in all, works well.
(Reminder: Gmail IMAP is rolling out this week. If your Gmail preferences say “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” then you've got it. At present you'll need to switch to US English for it to be given to you.)
With GMail now offering IMAP (but it’ll take about a week, and you have to switch your Gmail account to US English) I can read all my email boxes from the comfort of the desktop when I’m at home, as long as I have a good IMAP client.
So I’ve tried Thunderbird. I’m quite impressed so far with it; it’s as smooth-as-silk on the IMAP account that Outlook 2007 seems to have so much trouble with. And overall it’s much more responsive (Outlook seems to periodically go out to lunch).
More critical will be the long-term storage of my mail. I’ve got a lot of old stuff in Outlook, and would need to ensure I could migrate it across and make it easily searchable (as easy as via Windows Desktop search) to get rid of Outlook entirely.
One thing about Thunderbird bugs me though: the sort by date column uses icons that seem to be backwards. What’s with that?
And why does the icon look like an envelope wearing a toupee?
I’ve got Pinnacle Studio 10. It was definitely worth the money; great for video editing, and heaps better than Windows Movie Maker. It may not be up to the standard of Adobe Premiere, but it’s much cheaper.
But the Pinnacle video capture devices (one bought before Studio 10, the other was a freebie that came with Studio 10) that I have seem to be somewhat troublesome. That is, it’s not the hardware, but the software… it burns up CPU like there’s no tomorrow. For most of the time I just want a simple viewer/capture application, but the stuff they pack with the hardware is all-singing, all-dancing, all-consuming.
MediaCenter 3.4 came with the PCTV 310i. It installs big heapem SQL Server Desktop and takes up heaps of disk space.
MediaCenter 4.11 came with the PCTV 60e, and is a little better space-wise, but manages to burn up lots of CPU, dropping frames left, right and centre.
TV Center Pro 4.9 is a free download to 310i owners (and some others) and is promoted by Pinnacle as needing less resources… though from what I can see, it’s also burning up CPU and dropping frames.
(What really caught me is that it wouldn’t recognise the 310i unless I installed the drivers with one of the MediaCenter disks. Just installing the drivers off the Pinnacle web site didn’t work, no matter how many times I tried it.)
All in all, it makes for an irritating experience.
Oh, of course once the drivers are working, you can also capture with Windows Movie Maker, which is a bit easier. But its default “best” capture spec is only 320 x 240 at 25 fps. Not very impressive. Try and change that, and it gives you a lot of alternatives… but they’re all at 30 fps! NEWSFLASH! PAL is 25 fps! And of course it only outputs as WMV, whereas ideally I’d like to store stuff in MPEG2, in a format I can burn straight to DVD without further encoding, and is somewhat more futureproof.
Maybe I should try Windows Media Encoder or Windows Media Capture. I know from the last time I tried WMC (years ago), it didn’t grab resources like some others. The old version only wrote out in some uncompressed AVI format, but it was easy enough to use something else (such as Pinnacle Studio) to crop and encode to MPEG.
This is one place I didn’t expect to see a review of an exported, cracked iPhone: Telstra’s Now We Are Talking blog.
Meanwhile, Greenpeace has pulled one apart and gives it the thumbs down. The bottom of the article notes what Apple’s competitors are doing in this area, with Nokia in top position.
What was I saying the other day about being wary of SecondLife?
Cam and The Podcast Network got scammed over SL “real” estate.
But if SL is the Wild West, is Facebook a totalitarian regime? Evidently FB has a team of BOFHs who will apparently suspend your account for any number of reasons.
What idiot designed the email component of Lotus Notes? How is it possible that something so broken can be so popular?
Who decided that replying to an email with an attachment inside it should send the attachment back to the original sender? It’s in my Sent Mail; I don’t need to see it again. Waste of space and bandwidth!
And who decided that when replying it should ignore the From address and use the Sender address instead? Yeah sure I sent it from my Gmail, but it was on behalf of xyz; replies should go to xyz!
And why does it sometimes screw up email names and addresses? I’ve just seen something CCd (unsuccessfully, I assume) to John.Smith@company.comJohn.Smith — WTF?!
(And elsewhere in Lotus Notes… have you seen the state of the permalinks it produces in web sites?! I mean really, does anybody think something like http://www.doi.vic.gov.au/DOI/Internet/transport.nsf/AllDocs/CF55EBCAB40CEB3DCA2571F80004823E?OpenDocument is a sensible URL to present to human beings?)