Using GMail to wash emails for Thunderbird

For some reason, one of the three family accounts gets a lot of spam and phishing mails, and it's not mine or my wife's. It's our six year-old son who gets between 20-50 messages a day offering him penis extensions, Rolex watches and cheap meds. This weekend, I had a brainwave - why not use GMail as a spam filter? It works very well on my GMail account and since you can get mail from POP accounts, and forward mail to POP accounts with it, why not put it in the loop?

It's an easy process, here I shall describe using Thunderbird with GMail, but I reckon pretty much the same should be true of other POP3 email clients.

1. First set up a GMail account you want to use. It doesn't matter the name or email address, as long as you remember it and the password you are going to use with it. You will be asked for a "safety" email address in case of problems with your GMail account. Don't put the address you are forwarding through GMail. If you're having problems with your GMail account, the last thing you want to do is to have rescue emails sent to the same address!



2. Then set up an account in Thunderbird. Use the final email address you want - here we're going with made-up relative Brian Vost at my hostname podpics.org. We're just using the standard server details that I use for Podpics.


3. Then we set up a new POP3 import for GMail on this page in the GMail settings like so:

4. Then we set up forwarding like so (you can choose to keep the mails in your GMail inbox, but I find it easier to archive them. If you want to see them in GMail you can go to the All mail "box"):



5. Now we get Thunderbird to use the GMail POP server like so:



6. For outgoing messages I used the same SMTP server as I was using for my other accounts, but it seems you can also use GMail for that - I haven't tried.



There is a delay for getting your messages, so if you're the type that needs instant access to your emails you should probably just use GMail anyway. If you aren't as bothered, the security given by using this method is great.

Reading ebooks just got much better

The first image shows one breakthrough in ebook reading: calibre. This tool will convert between the many incompatible ebook formats and most importantly output in .epub, the open, XML-based ebook format to hopefully rule them all. First step out of the way, converting the hundreds of .pdb and .prc format ebooks I have on my Palm to .epub.

Next step, finding an ebook reader that works on the Nintendo DSi now that I have System 1.4 because that killed the previous reader I had, a basic effort called DS Reader that has had no development for years, only handles plain .txt files and doesn't work with international characters like é and ß for instance. Lo and behold, DSLibris comes to the rescue (second pic), with an author who is interested in pushing further, so it supports .epub, .otf fonts (OpenType) and uses the DS held like a book. It doesn't handle .epub files with multiple html entries in the manifest very well yet, yet being the operative word, and some of the translations performed by calibre have had questionable results in DSLibris, but I'm not sure yet whether that's down to DSLibris or calibre since that's also in beta. Best of all with both, they use the Trac system for bug reporting, which means that the bug reporting and feature requesting system is completely open.

To my mind there are two real obstacles to making the DSi a Kindle for those with more sense than money. One is for Nintendo to allow access to the SD card on the DSi through a more open SDK, the other is to allow better third party access to the DSiWare shop and it seems progress is being made on the second front at least: http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/newsArt.cfm?artid=19854.

An exciting time, but more and more we see Nintendo holding back innovation.

Vista bashing is sooo tired

For the umpteenth time reading on the web I get the message "Vista suxx, XP rules". I for one would never go back to XP. I have a modern machine with enough memory, a good enough graphics card and processor power to spare to be able to run Vista and you know what? It's better than XP for me.

• Aero? That thing that you get "advised" to switch off if you have to use Vista? Get real bitches, turning off Aero reduces Windows to the kind of relationship it had with your graphics card in XP and before! I like the fact that now a whole bunch of operations can be offloaded to the graphics card, like window redraws for instance, without tasking the CPU.
• The Start menu? We get told to replace it with Classic, just like Win2k, well, no, the fact you can hit the Windows key and just type the name of your app quickly to get to it rather than cruising up and down lists of items without handy identifiers like program icons in a carpal tunnel syndrome-inducing fashion is better why?
• The fact that indexing is done behind the scenes for quicker searches? That's good too (not that it matters when I use Directory Opus anyway, the one program that no version of Windows is complete without.

I'm sure there are plenty of other technical reasons why I can rightly prefer Vista over XP, but I can't think of them right now and a rant is supposed to be written in a hurried fashion, otherwise the passion goes from it. Oh yes, and those that tell me I should use Linux? Maybe I will when the apps that I put bread on the family table are available for it. The time is getting closer, but it's not there yet.

Gah, an article without a picture?

Voilà Wuala

I've been using Wuala for a couple of weeks now. It's a very handy p2p file sharing tool that means that you can have private online storage without needing to set up an ftp server, that works faster than an ftp server. You can create shared directories or better yet groups to which you invite your client and it gives you a two-way street for sharing assets. It's free of charge, multiplatform and all data is encrypted. Have a look for yourself: Wuala

Downloadable DS demos on the Wii

Just a very quick one here. Did you know that you can download demos of games to your DS from your Wii (if you have both of course)? On the Wii you need the Nintendo channel. You go into it and choose the "Our Titles" item from the top of the screen once you have the list of videos. Now choose the bottom item from the list "Downloadable DS content" and you will see a whole bunch of downloadable stuff. You just need to make sure your DS is on, and in Download Play and the Wii will start sending the file once it has it. I just played Ninjatown on it, which is a cutesy RTS game with DS elements.

The only downside on the DSi is that the download is not permanent in the way software from the DSiStore is.

PS. We have a DSi and a DSLite here in the house, and the Wii is set to WPA for wi-fi (and so is the DSi) but the DS Lite had no problem downloading...

PPS. Please excuse the execrable page layout. Making tables in Blogger isn't fun in a hurry with the stupid size of the edit window, having to do it in HTML and so on. Also, the text in the pics is obviously in French - no choice since we live in France even though the rest of the Wii is in English - but the locations of the buttons to hit will still be the same.

DDD update

Well it may be that all is not lost. I have confided the drive to a friend who has an industrial-grade data recovery package that may be able to find my stuff... - update, yeah, all was lost. :( Had to start again from scratch.

Dickhead data destruction

So yesterday (or rather the early hours of yesterday morning) should have been great. After months of trying I finally cured a problem I had where I had had Vista installed on two drives and the one that was D: wouldn't relinquish being system even though everything was done on the C: drive, even to the point where D: was absolutely necessary for the booting of C:, without D: on the bus the computer wouldn't boot. After hunting around for ages and having tried all manner of things to fix the situation I found this intriguing thread and piped up with my problem wondering if it could be resolved using the same method as hnyman on the forum had cured his similar-seeming problem. Pages of thread ensued, complete with my photographs of the monitor for situations where copying pages of info out by hand was not a realistic idea. So 4AM 18.06.09 I finally solved the issue, not using the software that the forum was for: EasyBCD, but another tool called BootIt NG, commonly known as BING. It's a scary tool for neophytes like me, but with handholding and patience from the marvellous Jake Johnson - Coolname007 on the neosmart forum - I got it so that D: was no longer necessary to my machine! Yay!

I should have left it at that I retired to my bed, fatigué mais heureux, but oh no. In my exhaustion the thought obviously meandered through my brain that I needed to teach D: a lesson - mess me about for months would you? I am your master now.

So what did I do? What the fuck did I do?! I formatted D: HA! That'll teach this inanimate bit of electronics a thing or two about the real boss of the computer... Great, I even felt satisfied. I could definitely go to bed now... no, wait a minute. Let's call this partition "NewTek:" and put all my NewTek-related stuff on it! Yes, great idea, I can just go to that temp directory I set up on E: and copy everything out of it onto the defunct D: That way I'll have my LightWave on there (ooh look, peak speed of 89MB/s), plus all the documents and images I've worked on for the company (hey, nearly done now, just another 500 MB to go) and what else? Oh yes (the copy has finished), I know I'll put my LW Content folder on there, complete with the lighting plan I made of our living room when we wanted to move stuff around, and the very important project I'm working on for Nelson Mandela, and all the example content I can learn fr... hang on, where's the lw content folder? The blood drained from my face and I could feel an incipient duodenal ulcer just ready to spring into blood-curdling action. The fucking. lw content. directory. Containing about 5GB of assets and material. Was. on. D:!

And so started the day for me. I went to bed thinking that things would look better in the warm light of day, but after about ten minutes of thrashing around and gnashing my teeth I got up again and tried to recover my fuck up. And here I am at nearly 3AM the next day thinking to myself over and over "why don't you need qualifications to run a computer? A licence or some kind of training to make sure you don't charge around like a bull in a china shop as I had done"

So here I sit, writing this blog post as I wait for GetDataBack for NTFS to go through all the files on the drive, knowing inside that it won't do any good and that I could probably have recreated my work in the time I've wasted trying to repair the damage I did. So, I'm going to bed. This saga will end in one of two ways: the worst, but most likely I fear, is that I've lost ten years of work and had better get a move replacing it. The sunny alternative is that a program, perhaps even GetDataBack recommended by my good friend Peter Jespersen, will completely recover all my lw content. I'd like to say a big thank you as well to everyone that has helped me with this, as much for their shoulders for me to cry on as actual technical help.

That's it. My eyes have gone woggly. It's a technical term. G'night. I shall keep y'all posted on progress and make this post a little purtier with pics, etc. maybe even dancing girls, I don't know.