Comet Holmes is now suddenly a naked-eye comet even from my light-polluted Boston suburb with a bright moon. Binoculars revealed a nice glowing ball. No tail yet. I'll have to break out my big 8-inch telescope from the basement for this one.
Jim on 10.28.07 @ 09:31 PM ET [link]
Radiohead finally released their new album In Rainbows. It's downloadable in MP3 form from their site, and the cost is...well...whatever you want. You can choose to pay anything, including nothing. I decided that it was worth £4.00 to me.
Anyway, it's a beautiful album. And I can't believe the opening track is in a 5/4 meter! Hooray for Radiohead!
Jim on 10.26.07 @ 06:02 PM ET [link]
I'm volunteering several hours per week at the Charles River Public Internet Center, doing various tech support jobs. They have about 18 PC's in the public area, all running Windows XP. I'm trying to push them to try at least one PC with Linux. The advantages to them are many: no licenses, better security, immunity from viruses. They are warming to the idea.
The gave me an old PIII with 128MB RAM to try this on. I decided to use Xubuntu since the machine was so limited. Xubuntu is a lightweight version of Ubuntu Linux, with the Gnome Desktop replaced with Xfce.
This project is just getting started, but I'll post updates as I go.
Jim on 10.23.07 @ 11:45 AM ET [link]
These pocket tools made by Peter Atwood are expensive things of beauty to covet, but I can't imagine I'd find a whole lot of use for them. Mr. Atwood makes each and every one of them by hand, hence the high price.
I also stumbled upon a strange related forum called EDC, which stands for Every Day Carry. These people (almost always men) discuss all the gadgets, knives, tools and other geegaws that they stuff in their pockets, belts, or keychains.
Jim on 10.13.07 @ 07:22 PM ET [link]
In the past I've always run my mail clients in POP3 mode, really without thinking much about it. But our family reads mail on at least five different computers: my desktop, my laptop, my Palm, Barb's Mac and my work machine. They all pull their mail from the server in my basement. We often ended up with multiple copies of mail in our inbox, among other problems.
So yesterday I switched all our mail clients to the IMAP protocol, which allows all clients to be completely synchronized. Send a message from machine A, and you can see it in your "Sent" folder on machine B. Delete a message on machine B, and it moves to the trash on machine C. All the client machines look the same.
But the problem was of marking mail as "read". Both Barb and I share 4 different mail accounts, which are fetched and dumped into one big pool on our server. Sometimes mail addressed to her is of interest to me and vice versa. So if I were to go through all the new messages and read them on my machine, they would all show up as "read" on her machine (courtesy of IMAP synchronization) and so it wouldn't be obvious to her what she has read or not.
The key to making this work was to do mail sorting on the server. Based on subject line keywords and addresses, I wrote a .forward file for the EXIM server that sorts the mail into folders for "Jim", "Barb", "Misc", etc. For example, anything from our kids' school goes into Barb's folder, regardless of to whom it was addressed.
This way, I can read all my mail without having Barb's mail marked as "read". And I still have access to her folder since there is often stuff there that is of interest to me. And if I manually delete a message that's obviously spam, then it gets removed from all the other machines, reducing the amount of spam deletion we need to do.
So far, so good.
Jim on 10.05.07 @ 09:12 AM ET [link]
Email: jim@jimandbarb.DELETETHISPART.net
(please remove the DELETETHISPART before sending me mail!)
