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Article on Gizmodo.com by Alex Roy, famous Gumballer from Team Polizei, reviewing radio scanners to help avoid the highway patrol.

Personally, I have all the THP frequencies programmed in my handheld scanner, but I never pick up anything from them. I’m using frequencies from an old list however, so they may have gone to a digital trunked system. I still find a Valentine One to be the single most important driving aid. That investment alone has saved me thousands.

Article on MBoffin.com: Using Gmail as a Spam Filter

I set up an adaptation of this last night for my domain here. So far, after 12 hours, I’ve received 73 messages, 61 of which were SPAM, and Gmail caught 57 of those. It also has claimed 3 false positives, which is a problem.

There are some downfalls to using Gmail like this. Mainly, if Gmail flags a message as Spam and it isn’t (a false positive), when you move the message back to your Inbox it will not forward the message to your mail account. The message is stuck in your Gmail account, with no way to move it to your mail server.

On the up side, it has cleaned my mailbox up enough that I can use the push service from Verizon to get email on my Treo without getting floods of Spam. I’m going to continue to evaluate this, and I’ll keep you posted.

*Update* After one week, I must say I’m pretty impressed. After getting three false positives the first day, I was worried that may be a problem. However, Gmail hasn’t nipped any more legit messages since then, so I’ll just assume that was an anomally. 511 messages have been flagged as SPAM the past week, and Gmail is letting around 5 messages per day slip through. That’s an acceptable ratio to me. The experiment continues…

Butler Networks turned up my DSL connection to 3.0Mbps/384Kbps today.

It’s absolutely been worth the wait, and only $10/mo extra. Thanks, Bill!

The 2.5 gigapixel photo (via The Agitator)

Really cool photography (I love city-scapes and such), and amazing resolution/clarity/blahblahblah. What Radley failed to mention is that this is a stiched panoramic image (a composition of over 600 individual images), and not a super new high-res camera.

I found a link to a pair of articles by a singer/songwriter named Janis Ian. These are very well-written, and while already almost two years old, the login within holds up well. Basically, Janis takes the position that downloading music online creates EXPOSURE for artists, which leads to more CD sales. She also pretty much blames the state of the industry on the RIAA itself.

THE INTERNET DEBACLE – AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW
FALLOUT – a follow up to The Internet Debacle

I still feel that the RIAA and MPAA continue to set themselves up for massive destruction as they continue to accuse all their customers of being crooks, cheats, and theives.

Courtesy of Steve’s Sublimemail service, here are the email stats for my domain in 2003:

total messages: 70,733
flagged spam: 39,293
percentage spam: 56%
avg daily spam: 108
false positives: 0

I’d say Steve is catching about 75% of my spam before it ever hits my inbox. Of course, he reminds me, it would be higher if I’d submit the messages that make it past the filters. So, if the Mozilla MailNews developers would get on the stick and implement the Redirect option, it would make it a lot easier.

Reinventing Email :: Collaborative User Experience Group :: IBM Research

“The Collaborative User Experience (CUE) team in IBM Research has spent nearly a decade studying email. Not only has email become one of the most pervasive and successful collaborative tools available, it has also become a key component of IBM’s Lotus Software offerings. In many ways, email can be seen as a victim of its own success – users increasingly suffer from overload and interruptions as well as use email in a manner for which it was not intended.”

So, just tonight have I discovered why IMAP is so superior to POP3. While I’ve used it a bit before, I’ve never really had the need to get my mail on multiple machines all the same before. For the past few months I’ve needed to read @miklm.com mail from home, work, and on my laptop, so I resorted to webmail for the task. Now that I’m using Mozilla Thunderbird, I’ve discovered that IMAP will allow me to keep folders, filters, and such all the same on all accounts. I’m such an idiot for not doing this YEARS ago, when it was all the rage. Critch told me all along…

RJ45 Network Cable Pin-out

I found myself today having forgotten the pin-out for a crossover cable. Consider this a bookmark for myself.

Q&A: Windows Server 2003 kernel guru
Looks like they are serious this time around about not making another lame-duck server product. From what I’ve seen in limited testing of Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, it certainly looks like a huge improvement.

In other news, @miklm.com mail is working again, as I transferred it to the iGiles mail server. I’m still debating whether I’m better off getting one newer server to replace the two aging HP boxes, or whether to just repair regan.

The [primary&&only] SCSI drive in regan.miklm.net failed this afternoon, so it looks like @miklm.com mail will be offline until I get some sort of solution rigged up.

So… if your email to me bounces, just resend later, or email me @igiles.net.

Note to self: read this article soon.
Getting rid of the disks

In the meanwhile, I’m back to fighting AGP conflicts.

CDT has released a new report based on a six month project entitled “Why Am I Getting All This Spam?” The results offer Internet users insights about what online behavior results in the most unsolicited commercial email and also debunk some of the myths about spam.

Recommended reading. I’ll also take this opportunity to pimp Steve’s Sublimemail.

“What is the difference between a hub and a switch?”

Answer 1, Answer 2

Bells not happy about sharing lines — mentions BellSouth, with whom we are currently in negotiations to drop DSL service into rural areas for our clients…

I really find it hard to believe that people actually take Chris Pirillo as a voice on technology. After seeing about 10 minutes of him on a TechTV show while in Murfreesboro last year, I swore off the network forever. Now he’s harping this Lindows Laptop — a device I have mixed feeling about on my most generous day. It looks terribly under-powered, and the lack of a CD-ROM drive is a killer. The price looks decent, though, but Lindows can’t be much (and has a quirky license) — further, for just a couple hundred bucks more, you can get a more fully equiped laptop from a major vendor (Dell, Compaq, etc.).

I dunno, color me a skeptic, but if Pirillo is pimping it, I probably don’t want it anyway.