Technology

Ever since Google released Gmail to the public, Yahoo and Microsoft have been watching the hipster geek crowd move away from their webmail systems (Yahoo Mail and Hotmail respectively). Gmail shows users that webmail doesn’t have to suck. It lit a fire under the ass of webmail providers. Ultimately, it prompted the two companies to actively develop their offerings, and adopting the Google model, release them as “beta”. “Beta” in this case can be read as “if something don’t work, you’re on your own.” ...

Because Mike still doesn’t have comments, I’m forced to respond over here to another of his posts. The gist of the article is that some punks at myspace were using his images on their profile pages, sucking up his bandwidth. I had the same thing happen with a punk at Xanga. The conversation I had with him was: “Hey, could you either attribute my photo or take it off your site?” (My site address was given.) ...

I use my Gmail account to manage several mailing lists I’m subscribed to. I also regularly re-evaluate it for use as my main email address. So far, no dice. I just like desktop email clients much more. One of the more compelling things about Gmail is the amount of space allotted for each user (2686 MB at the moment). With most emails being only a few kilobytes big, users aren’t going to fill up that space (particularly because that allotment grows every day). There are exceptions, such as Adam Curry (who receives lots of audio files in his email), but other users aren’t going to have an issue. ...

Over at Mike’s blog, he’s redirecting all mail from a domain that gets over 3000 pieces of spam a day. I’m really looking forward to his results because he usually puts together pretty visual results that are fun to look at. I’m still waiting for an objective comparison of the various spam filters out there, particularly the ones built into the big webmail services like Yahoo and Hotmail. I’ve found those services perform pretty terribly. Despite trying to “train” their filter, I regularly get mail with similar subjects dropped right into my inbox. I’ve heard Google’s is better, but I’d rather not pollute my own account for experimentation. ...

I regularly SSH into my desktop at home to both run things from the command line and also set up tunnels to connect via VNC. The problem with this has always been knowing your IP address. Consumer broadband connections have no guarantee of retaining an IP for any amount of time. As a result, so called Dynamic DNS services were created. These services allow one to regularly change a domain name to match your current IP. ...

I’d hope that readers of my weblog would be familiar with Planet d00dism. It’s a website run with Planet Planet that uses my various RSS feeds to construct an aggregation of what I’m doing online (stolen wholesale from Erik Benson). There’s even an RSS feed for it. However, installing the software (which still hasn’t had a formal release), is a bit much for most people. Some don’t even have proper web hosting. That’s why I was so excited to read that 43People has added this capability. By default, it includes your 43Things, 43Places, 43People, and All Consuming. ...

Heather noticed that I turned on several of the FeedFlare features for my RSS feed. I fall in love with FeedBurner more and more every day. Email this Send a link to your item to someone via email. Email author Allow subscribers to email you directly. (If there is no email address in your feed, this will be hidden.) Technorati Cosmos Display the number of links to your item from blogs, as measured by Technorati. (If there are no links, this will be hidden.) ...

I’ve become really addicted to Digg. Slashdot has simply become too slow and excludes far too many worthy stories. The unfortunate side effect is that some stories get more attention than they really deserve. This month, it was a whole class of stories: “Best of”. Pseudonyms include “things you didn’t know about”, “things you should download”, and “things for new blank users”. They’re just lists of things that people like. They’re not noteworthy and usually, they’re not even original. ...

A big ado was made when the Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer team announced they would use Firefox’s feed icon. I guess it’s better than yet another icon, but I never what the problem was with the original XML icon, etc. was in the first place. Mozilla seemed to create the icon because “RSS” wasn’t considered kosher considering the number of Atom feeds out there. As an aside, what’s even more maddening is that Safari still opts for Atom feeds over RSS feeds despite ordering in the source when one clicks the RSS subscribe button. Not only is that an inconvenience for webmasters, but it confuses the hell out of users. ...

Next to my TV, I have an EyeHome and a Playstation 2 (with ethernet adapter). I originally bought a D-Link DWL-G810 wireless to ethernet bridge. That way, devices with only an ethernet port could join the wireless network I had running out of my loft. It worked, but only for one device because it only had one port. To remedy this, I bought a D-Link DSS-5+ switch. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, that don’t work. It seems the bridge will recognize only one MAC address at a time. ...