Recent Posts

851

Best E-mail Client / Re: A new start -- IMAP, FastMail, Windows Live Mail

« Last post by iphigenie on October 08, 2007, 07:27 AM »

I use fastmail - have just renewed my account for a year. I have about 12 domains on that account and it works very nicely, filters and all. Coming from godaddy's broken mail it is a delight. Granted fastmail has no funky web2.0 functionality but I couldnt care less.

I have managed to make it work with the following clients:

- opera's mail client. I keep returning to this one, even though it is not quite a fully fledged solution
- mulberry, probably the best cover of imap functions I have tried, but I keep using opera instead
- mahogany, a shame that one isnt really developed anymore, it is fast
- outlook 2003, to allow the kind of tagging i am used to for my work email, but havent used it long enough to check how it deals with imap
- evolution, since i have outlook i couldnt see the point
- the latest poco/barca mail. I like the poco/barca products, used poco for years but imap is still a tad weak (i.e. couldnt integrate properly with fastmail's trash / draft folders, althought it did work with sent), if they ever improve it just that little bit i might upgrade my license.
- pegasus, an old classic but not quite that useful in imap mode (the connect-to-imap system is a pain at least with fastmail)
- thunderbird (too slow esp. moving things around)

I am planning to try mail client in the new version of opera this week, they say imap support was extended so it might support draft folders and the like... would be neat.

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Living Room / Re: BioShock Demo Shock!

« Last post by iphigenie on October 05, 2007, 08:10 AM »

System Shock 2 was a perfect game in many ways. I played it again last year and it still managed to grip me.

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Living Room / Re: BioShock Demo Shock!

« Last post by iphigenie on October 05, 2007, 08:05 AM »

I think that is the weakness of bioshock - it builds this very atmospheric place, but then puts a rather standard shooter in it. So the first encounters are great, but before you know it you are just doing the same thing over and over and it rather means that the whole atmosphere ends up wasted.

A slightly more involving gameplay would have made it an absolute perfect game

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General Software Discussion / Re: Should I Move To (Gasp!) Microsoft Outlook As My Main Email Client ??

« Last post by iphigenie on October 05, 2007, 04:08 AM »

I used to not like outlook much, way back when.
But since using 2003 it is so useful - although not in its default, out-of-the-box configuration. I like it so much I am considering buying it for my home PCs too.

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Living Room / Re: Psychic Whois Service :)

« Last post by iphigenie on October 05, 2007, 03:46 AM »

thats kind of neat!

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General Software Discussion / Re: Shareware that don't have freeware replacements

« Last post by iphigenie on October 02, 2007, 04:19 AM »

That's not fair. Spinrite recovered data of a dying drive for me once, when all else failed and the other alternative was spend £400 for recovery services. It also recovered everything on a drive where the partitioning had been messed up by a linux installation.

I don't necessarily know enough to determine whether the "preventive" claims of spinrite are anything, but the recovery tools are real.

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Living Room / Re: UK Government wants your crypto keys... by law.

« Last post by iphigenie on October 02, 2007, 04:13 AM »

Still, let's not forget that in the UK the police cannot even ask people for an ID on the street. So they're not about to walk up to random people and demand access to their USB keys. We are talking about a judge being able to grant a warrant which demands that people decrypt information, within the confines of a police investigation...

We do seem to live in a world where governments and media (including the fiction industries) do seem to like to create constant alerts and fear, so we feel things are getting worse all the time and meekly accept to sacrifice liberties - from big civil liberties to simple things like the right to take a bottle of water on an airplane! We also seem to be creating "thought crimes" which is something that really really bothers me. So I have a tendency to be suspicious and wonder why such a law is needed, and how it could easily be abused, and what the agenda is.

Encryption is a challenge, and as much as I defend my right to privacy, (eg. using Tor even for mundane stuff because one day I might need it) and worry about the growing concept that what people think and imagine needs to be policed... I have to be honest and admit I also find it disgraceful that people can escape conviction just by encrypting their stuff. I can understand the frustration of the police and justice system at this... and why we might find it acceptable to let them demand the keys in certain circumstances.

I think it is a fine line between fair rights and letting people hide unduly behind the right not to incriminate themselves. If they kept the documents then it could be argued that they have already incriminated themselves by keeping the documents.

Of course I am all for putting "watch the watchers" in place, limits as to what kind of crime warrant this (real crimes not thought/planning crimes) etc. which there never seems to be in the UK - and without such controls and public monitoring I can easily imagine it could be abused...

So I am not sure where I stand on issues such as this one, really, worried about my privacy (and who knows when their kind of thinking might be made a crime!) but also outraged that money launderers, fraudsters, people trafficers, slave runners etc. could get away thanks to good encryption practices...

858

Living Room / Re: Wiki Democracy

« Last post by iphigenie on October 01, 2007, 07:14 AM »

I don't know - sounds a bit gimmicky to me - governed by wiki???

Although the parallel to ancient greece is a good one: you could only participate if you were from the right family, fortune, owned slaves etc.

Its a great PR stunt but if things like wikipedia, technorati, digg etc. are anything to go by, lowest common denominator policy is not necessarily the best way to create laws. Things are hugely complex and interconnected, and people on average seem to only be able to see one or two aspects... I have been in England long enough to know that governement by public opinion (as represented by media reports and surveys) does not create the best space for people to thrive in...

And, put simply, where's the "debate" space in a wiki?

859

General Software Discussion / Re: Libra - organizer software

« Last post by iphigenie on September 27, 2007, 06:25 AM »

kind of reminds me of the shelfari website.

I must say I am a very happy user of librarything - if you have lots of books then being able to catalog them is invaluable. And anything that can scan barcodes will make things much easier (librarything has the cuecat  but if this thing works with a webcam it could be quite clever!).

On the topic of librarything - it is not as "glitzy" as shelfari and others but the functionality is just right for it to be useful and stay useful - less gimmicks, more "meat". It is also one of 3 sites I ever use on my mobile as being able to double check I dont already own a book (or how far I have gotten in a particular series) from the bookshop floor has saved me a lot of embarrassment!

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General Software Discussion / Re: Shareware that don't have freeware replacements

« Last post by iphigenie on September 25, 2007, 05:43 AM »

I was trying to think of the cases where I use shareware, and I can't think of any which don't have some freeware alternative. Maybe slysoft's anydvd and maybe fraps... the alternatives are just very very fussy and low-level fiddling.

All others have alternatives that do similar things. Obviously I use the shareware because it either has a few features that the freeware doesn't have, or it packages it better and is just nicer/easier to use, or i like the software and am used to it and will support it.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for an E-Mail Client which can be run on an USB Stick

« Last post by iphigenie on September 25, 2007, 05:34 AM »

I use the portable opera version - not a particularly lightweight option but great for imap

862

General Software Discussion / Re: What linux needs?

« Last post by iphigenie on September 25, 2007, 05:24 AM »

So presumably Apple would simply stop selling their computers in Europe since they only see computers with MacOS and don't distribute MacOS as an alternative OS anyway.

-Carol Haynes (September 24, 2007, 07:17 AM)

It would be pretty silly for the EU to do a law but say that only "PC" manufacturers are affected - only if your hardware can run windows do you have to offer alternatives, if your hardware runs macos or solaris then it is ok to force people to buy the OS. That leaves a huge window to challenge the law as anticompetitive or unfair.

Besides, why shouldnt i be able to buy Mac hardware but run windows or BSD or linux on it - people do it - or if I have already have an old mac with osX and i want to use that license on my new hardware... It doesnt make a lot of sense (apart from the cases the hardware is very standard) but it should be an option offered.

It would be up to Apple but I can't imagine they would withdraw from the european market, they would just offer the option knowing 99.99% of people would go for the the OS anyway. Of course they could decide to stop selling in Europe but considering how some european countries carried Apple through the bad years it would be pretty silly of them to do that.

863

What's the Best? / Re: Newsreader programs

« Last post by iphigenie on September 25, 2007, 05:15 AM »

The archive function moves the articles you have chosen to a different area -an archive folder- although it will remember where the post came from and keep the threading if you archive multiple messages from a thread. You can also still "reply" to them etc. You can organise them in multiple folders and for example set a folder per group, per server etc. etc.

I can't remember whether the topic in the newsgroup window itself is tagged so you know you archived it or not.

The whole program is nowhere near as slick as some of the commercial newsreaders. It is unashamedly the work of someone who probably grew up using XRN or similar tools and wants that same kind of news browsing experience.

864

General Software Discussion / Re: Cracked while installing Linux :)

« Last post by iphigenie on September 25, 2007, 05:06 AM »

But to go back to the original topic, if I had to use a linux desktop I would probably pick suse - my husband uses it (when not playing WoW) and I have used it and it is well crafted.

In the past when I have used a linux desktop it was a german distribution which suse bought (dld, if i recall), which is how we ended up with suse in the first place. Things have moved on quite a bit and I have had to use at least a dozen other distros since - from the source-based ones to the slick-we-claim-to-be-a-desktop ones and I still would pick one of slackware/vector or suse if I had to use linux for a workstation.

865

General Software Discussion / Re: Cracked while installing Linux :)

« Last post by iphigenie on September 25, 2007, 05:02 AM »

I have a very soft spot for Solaris - first it was the first Unix I really used professionally, and the CDE was a lovely thing to use compared to some of the things I had learned on. I have a sparc 20 with solaris 7 in my basement, for nostalgia's sake.

The newest version has some beautiful features especially for clustering / replicating etc. If you have the money Solaris certainly is a great product.

It is probably because I have used unices first that I like slackware and BSD - slackware is a very unix-like distribution.

BSD is superbly stable, and I removed a lot of hassles in one of my previous lives by moving a whole farm of servers from redhat to BSD - uptime increased dramatically and a lot of mysterious crashes and failures simply never happened again.

I wish I had the time to make them do the same thing where I am now, but I am no longer the person doing the work and I dont think we have a sysadmin skilled enough to succeed 

In the end when it comes to my desktop I am just too used to all the windows software I found over the years to want to try to switch to any other I just havent found anything to even tempt me in any category. The mac is another matter.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Cracked while installing Linux :)

« Last post by iphigenie on September 24, 2007, 06:17 AM »

my husband swears by suse and I can say it is a good distro.

I am old fashioned and I like slackware linux, and sometimes when i need a quick install i go for the slackware based vector distribution -  you get a nice lean desktop in 5 minutes.

But i just rely on windows for my desktop and BSD for my servers if given the choice.

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General Software Discussion / Re: What linux needs?

« Last post by iphigenie on September 24, 2007, 06:13 AM »

Interesting if this became law - would Apple also have to comply?

-Carol Haynes (September 24, 2007, 05:55 AM)

of course they would - it is a computer.

Although most manufacturers already offer PCs without the OS. And more and more offer a linux distro option (eg. lenovo with Suse) but at the moment it is the lack of maturity of most distros that makes it difficult for a small assembler to get a quick install with the kind of features you expect (final user friendly step by step "first start" set up procedure, factory restore reset etc. etc.) but also that could support the business model of many small assemblers which change the hardware composition every other week and have to have drivers etc.

868

General Software Discussion / Re: What linux needs?

« Last post by iphigenie on September 24, 2007, 06:06 AM »

well even with the command prompt most of the tools and software would be GNU or third party 

The point was simply that linux is a kernel, linux distros are this kernel packaged with one team's choice of everything everyone ever did in open source (and some closed source)... and this is both the power and the curse of it. A thousand such choices to choose from and most of them not quite finished and polished in the drive to always have the latest of everything.

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General Software Discussion / Re: What linux needs?

« Last post by iphigenie on September 24, 2007, 05:49 AM »

I always find it so weird that people seem to think that kde or gnome or any of these things are "linux". They are not.

870

Living Room / Re: Fanless computer

« Last post by iphigenie on September 24, 2007, 05:43 AM »

Hi

If you dont play games there's no reason a fanless PC couldnt work, within reason (i.e. dont expect to beat benchmarks etc.)

I can understand the problem - buy a new PC from a shop and it is guaranteed to have some very loud components and you have to start swapping bits again and on and on.

I have been a silent pc activist for years. I am very glad it is now quite easy to get a decent quiet in the mainstream, although I still go above that. I have not gone fanless just yet, mostly due to the cost of PSUs.

I have a fanless PC in the living room based on a C3 chip which is totally fanless but it is a small server and i couldnt play the latest games on it especially in such a small case. It could work as an office PC (has been used to run Sage at some point, on just a 1Ghz chip it was fine), i now use it as a media server.  A pc like this needs a LED indicator so you know it is on, i have it in an old plastic case which only has a drive light and i usually have to touch the power supply to see if it is on... My main PC has a passively cooled 9800Pro, 12cm super silent fans everywhere, vibration dampening kits everywhere, a very silent but not fanless PSU, silent drives in vibration dampening mountings, some foam which was a total waste of time... and a stupidly infuriating tiny fan on the mobo which is hard to remove

I would say if you already have a passively cooled card and a really good silent case, it might be better to build a computer within these - that or sell that case to me cheap


Some general thoughts based on what I have heard and read... not as much for you (you are obviously well informed) but others being a tad curious

• You cannot overclock. Many silence fanatics underclock.
  
• You need a good case and well organised air circulation in the case - this is especially important without fans to push the air around. Dont skim on the case - get one which is known for good airflow, and ask around for the optimal placement of drives etc. Buying a ready made machine should guarantee that.
  
• It might be an idea to have a few temperature controlled fans for backup, set to only turn on if things go suspiciously hot. If something ever goes hot (or you get a heatwave next summer) they might save you a lot of money.
  
• get lower rpm drives - 5400. If you need the storage speed that 7200 or 10000 rpms bring, then you need some fancy cooling on your drives.
  
• Realise that you might lose some power - components are a bit less performing when they are above 70C (or something like that).
  
• Think about the temperature in the room you work in - if you are a person who likes it cosy warm, then fanless might not work as well as if you keep your office at 17-18C...
• vibration resonnance - often just putting rubber grommets around screws or using dampening screws to mount everything can make a huge difference. very cheaply.

One thing worth doing is figuring out which fans make the noise that bothers you in your current PC. An exercise I do is turn the computer on with the case open and put your finger on a fan to stop it for a very short instant. You might be surprised at what is causing the noise. In my computer the loudest fan was the tiny one on the motherboard northbridge/southbridge components.

871

Living Room / Re: Conserving energy

« Last post by iphigenie on September 21, 2007, 05:35 AM »

Yes, there is a risk that the whole current Global Warming bandwagon makes everything about grams of carbon and not about sustainable living.

Dont worry about polluting, ruining resources, or toxic/unhealthy substances in your food/product. Just pay someone to plant trees or offset in some way and you can claim to be carbon neutral, and appear green.

872

What's the Best? / Re: Newsreader programs

« Last post by iphigenie on September 21, 2007, 05:32 AM »

it works for my kind of offline reading - what it won't do is keep copies of all the messages you read, it tends to dynamically retrieve messages, then lose them when you close the program, unless you tell the system to specifically save/archive them. Now i tend to want to read only a few messages and keep even less, so it suits me. I dont want to keep a copy of every message i ever read, only a few for reference.

So it works that way:

1) get headers. disconnect
2) select messages to retrieve. go get them.
3) archive messages which you want to keep so they get stored permanently

But as they say, it is not a true off line capability, but it works for my needs.

873

General Software Discussion / Re: IBM Lotus Symphony

« Last post by iphigenie on September 20, 2007, 10:23 AM »

You dont have to worry that if you register with IBM you will be swamped with anything, or sold on, so there is no need to bypass the registration.

Heck in the UK you can't get a sales rep to call you back about a demo of a 15K product

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Living Room / Re: Conserving energy

« Last post by iphigenie on September 20, 2007, 09:49 AM »

Actually we replaced all our lightbulbs with good energy saving bulbs and we noticed a very noticeable drop in our electricity bills. And none of my bulbs are on all the time.

Now there seems to be a huge difference between the energy saving bulbs you can buy in the supermarket, which here still seems to have a startup delay, wobbly light quality etc. and the bulbs I have bought online from online shops or ebay. Only the other week I was moving to a new flat (workweek residence) and changing bulbs so I picked what looked like the same philips lightbulbs which i have used in some places in our main house. The bulbs bought in the supermarket would take several seconds and flickers to turn off and were distinctively darker.

I went to ebay and bought some philips lightbulbs to see if I was mad. But no, these turn on immediately and are brighter (for the same wattage). I wonder why the supermarkets seem to be selling the 5-years-back technology.

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General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« Last post by iphigenie on September 19, 2007, 04:08 AM »

Oh I expect this thread to go on forever, but it would be helpful if people clarify what type of "note taking" they have in mind when they write an opinion/criticism/praise

On my personal quests I have found many decent programs for #1 and #2 - all of which have been mentioned somewhere on this thread. But for #3 I haven't found anything, tried many outliners and write-oriented word processors... and end up not using them after a first "burst" of activity. And I don't have a mac so I cant try the sexiest program in that category :S