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A week or so ago, I mentioned trying out the new release of Mailsmith 2.0. At the time, I said that I couldn’t use it full time because the majority of my mail comes through an IMAP account. For some reason, I had got the idea that the computing service actually blocked POP connections to the mail server, but in fact they just “strongly recommend” using IMAP. My worries were also eased on the other issue (the proprietary mailbox format), when Matt Gemmell commented that you can easily export to mbox format just by dragging mailboxes to the Finder. So, I thought I probably owed it a decent test as my full time mail client.

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I’ve just watched a fun documentary on Channel 4: ‘The World’s First Time Machine’. It was rather dumbed down, but this—as it turned out—was just as well, because this branch of physics can explode the brains of the unwary (it nearly did with mine, anyway). They had some of the clearest explanations (no doubt very simplified) of the ‘great-grandfather paradox’, parallel universes, and how Superman could save Lois Lane that I’ve ever heard. They featured a physicist called Ronald Mallett, who is actually trying to build a time machine—rather touchingly inspired by a wish to go back and meet his father who died young.

Describing his experiment, he said that it was quite possible that when he switched it on, he might see a particle that (brace yourself for this) was the result of an experiment that he would do some weeks or even years in the future. That really made me go, “Wha?”

The reeds and rushes in the water meadows are now almost as tall as I am. In the breeze, they ripple like a green sea, a froth of creamy meadowsweet flowers capping the waves. If I close my eyes, I can imagine myself on a quiet shore. As I walk the path through the meadow, I smile, feeling like Moses parting the waves.

Everything is lush.

We’ve just been watching Jon Snow on Channel 4 news interviewing Alastair Campbell. For those of you not based in the UK, Campbell—an un-elected Press Secretary for the Labour party—is complaining loudly about the neutrality of the BBC and their defence correspondent, Andrew Gilligan. Gilligan reported that souces inside the intelligence service were unhappy about the Iraq dossier being beefed up (or ‘sexed up’ as the media seems to have it) with some rather dodgy information at the last minute, to make the case for war stronger.

Alastair Campbell seems to be acting like a complete bully over this. If he’s so sure that the report was inaccurate, why doesn’t he sue the BBC for libel? Perhaps because he knows that the case wouldn’t stand up in court. He even said that the ‘file on that correspondent is growing’. What’s that—a threat? “I’ll set MI5 on you.”

All through the interview, we were shouting at the TV, urging Jon Snow on: “Get ‘im, Jon, go on!” How Jon Snow stopped himself actually hitting Alastair Campbell is beyond me.

I subscribe to MacUser magazine: a very fine publication for hopeless Mac fanatics everywhere. The last issue came bundled with another magazine called Jack, in a small, paperback sized format. “What’s this?”, I thought. I read the explanatory letter which was included:

Dear subscriber, Along with your regular issue of MacUser, you’ll find a copy of Jack. Why are we sending you a free magazine? Well, we’d really like to know what you think of it. What you like, what you don’t like and what we could do better. As a Mac User subscriber you will have more than an interest in design and creativity, so we would like your opinion on Jack. It has an eye for detail and design that will be refreshing to regular magazine readers, especially as Jack’s designer has just won Magazine Designer of the Year.

OK, so far, I’m interested. I read on:

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So, it has been confirmed: women are valued less than men, even when they are virtual men and women. Edward Castronova has done a rather clever study on the prices which EverQuest avatars (a computer generated body with skills and assets) fetch in online auctions. Female avatars fetch 12 to 16.5% less than male avatars with comparable skills. Given the fact that female avatars only make up 20% of the population, you would think that rarity might give them more value, if nothing else. It’s also odd that scantily clad female avatars feature quite heavily on the official EverQuest site. This is pretty depressing. Has Buffy taught men nothing?

[via BoingBoing]

This morning I received a superficially very convincing email which appeared to be from PayPal, asking me to update my account information. I might have been taken in, but for the fact that I received 8 indentical emails together (not even PayPal is usually that inept), and that the message was sent to an email account that I have not registered with PayPal. A closer inspection of the message source revealed that the link in the email was being diverted to another server:

http://www.paypal.com@207.44.196.35/~redbarpr/cgi-bin/ webscr%3fcmd=verification/ (not linked so that you won't be tempted to click on it )

Apparently, it’s a known scam, though a slightly more sophisticated one than others that have been attempted. By coincidence, it’s also the first spam that Merlin Mann has caught in his spam honeypot. It turns out that Red Bar Productions—who own that site—was hacked, and they have nothing to do with it. So, some git or gits have hacked this poor guy’s server to run this spam, and even stolen PayPal’s bandwidth as they used the original PayPal images in the email.

I wouldn’t be able to hold my hand up and call myself a MacGeek if I hadn’t spent the best part of last night peering at a rather wibbly, randomly-morphing stream from the WWDC ‘SteveNote’ in San Francisco. So—where’s the beef? Others have done a better job than I could of being timely and exhaustive, so here are my random thoughts:

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I’ve just put up some more Lomo photos at wings open wide. Most were taken in the Covered Market—a wonderful bastion of small independent traders who manage to hold out against the tide of Starbucks and McDonalds outlets.

The light levels are rather low in the market, and there are lots of colourful displays, so the Lomo is the perfect tool for taking shots. As usual, the results were wildly variable and somewhat unexpected, but I was quite pleased with the way that some of them turned out—reflections figured prominently.

I wasn’t far wrong: the brilliant developers at SliMP3 have updated the server again to support AAC encoded files, using the LAME MP3 encoder which transcodes to MP3 on the fly—very clever stuff. I haven’t listened to enough AAC encoded tracks yet to judge the difference in quality (and whether it makes any difference transcoding it back to MP3), but with a casual listen, it sounds pretty good. There’s also support for cover art, so album covers imported into iTunes now appear automatically in the SliMP3 web interface. More proof—if proof were needed—of the power and flexibility of Perl.

As commented upon by John Gruber of Daring Fireball (among others), Mailsmith 2.0 has been released. As an enthusiastic user of Bare Bones’s other main product, BBEdit*, I thought I would try it out. It is indeed chock full of nice touches. The filtering, text manipulation and searching is very powerful, and the glossary and stationery facilities look like they would be pretty handy. I don’t mind the somewhat minimalist look at all—I think it’s quite classy.

But. You could see that word coming, couldn’t you? I personally can’t use Mailsmith as a full time mail client yet as about 90% of my mail comes through my work IMAP account, and Mailsmith only supports POP. Another worry is the mailbox format. One of the (many) reasons I switched from Entourage to Apple Mail as soon as it had enough functionality was that I worried about keeping so much precious information in a proprietary format. Not only are you up certain riverine formations without a means of propulsion if the database gets corrupted (which seemed to happen alarmingly frequently with Entourage), but you can find yourself locked in to using that client forever, or losing your email archives.

There are plenty of annoying problems with Apple Mail, but it does at least use the ‘mbox’ format. I know that if I ever want to take my custom elsewhere, most other email clients (including Mailsmith) will allow me to import the file fairly easily. If not, it’s just plain text, and I could (assuming that my knowledge of Perl improves a bit), write a fairly simple script to extract and convert the information into an appropriate format. In the very worst case scenario, I could just read or search the file. I’m sure that Bare Bones have their reasons for using a proprietary format (perhaps mbox is less efficient to deal with), but it does make me think twice about possibly switching to Mailsmith in the future if they implement IMAP, in a way that the price doesn’t.

*Though I much prefer the neat and fast-evolving skEdit for HTML editing.

There’s an interesting article in the Guardian about pointless technology (or rather, pointless gadgets). Despite being rather a techno-head and somewhat gadget-obsessed myself, I do agree with the majority of the points. Before I get too over excited about some new piece of hardware, I do try to sit the excitable geek in me down and have a long, serious chat about whether this particular gadget is really necessary. However, I am aware that my definition of “necessary” might not be the same as other people’s (see my excitement over viewing my uptime on my T68i). The author, Stuart Jeffries, cites the slow uptake of 3G mobile phones as one example of technology that attempts to create a need rather than satisfy one.

I did have to take issue with the article on one point though. In a section deriding various useless bits of kit (TV glasses, anyone?) he includes the Dualit 4 slice toaster”

It costs £175 and combines a silvery retro-toaster look with four slots that can produce 130 slices an hour in your home. Ask yourself this, though: if you and your family need 130 slices of toast an hour, perhaps you should spend £175 on consulting a dietician instead. There’s a six-slice version, but that’s beyond a joke.

I have a Dualit toaster, a 2 slice model, which was a wedding present. Yes, they are expensive, but they are the very antithesis of a useless gadget; they do one thing—toast bread—and they do it extremely well, reliably and without pointless gimmicks. The toasters may have recently become fasionable (all that stainless steel, I expect), but Dualit has been making them for over 50 years, so they are hardly new gadgets. The “retro-toaster look” is genuine; it really is a retro toaster.

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Why is it that office buildings are so badly designed for ventilation? My office—in common with many, I’m sure—has been like a sauna for the past few days, with none of the benefits of being able to sit around semi-naked doing nothing. It’s cold in winter, boiling and airless in summer, and even when it’s bright and sunny outside, we need to have the lights on. Quite apart from the discomfort, it seems a terrible waste of resources. Our building is by no means unusual in this; most of the office buildings I’ve been in are stuffy and hot, or stuffy and cold if they have air conditioning.

Surely it doesn’t have to be like this? I know that there are awkward limitations caused by trying to pack a lot of different rooms into a large building, but it must be possible to get a reasonable airflow through the rooms, and not have others which act like giant greenhouses. Our flat is remarkably cool in summer, even on the hottest day, and yet is quite cosy and warm in winter. It’s just a pity that I have to spend so much of my life in the office—especially in the summer.

For months now, we’ve had raiding parties of tiny ants swarming around our flat. We find the odd ant in the bread bin, in the bathroom basin or crawling over the carpet, and since I’m generally tolerant towards wildlife in the house, I haven’t really done much about it. But now they’ve pushed me too far. The espresso machine was spluttering this morning as if it was empty of water, so I removed the reservoir to refill it. To my horror, hundreds of kamikaze ants were clogging up the exit valve.

That does it—I don’t mind the odd ant in my sandwich (I think of it as free protein), but no-one messes with my coffee supply.

While I was working on whale watching tours in the Isle of Mull, the secretary of the tour outfit and I were discussing the kinds of music we liked. When I mentioned that I was quite fond of non-traditional folk, she said, “Oh, then you might like the band that my fiancé is in then—they’re called Capercaillie. She lent me a tape, and it wasn’t long before I was singing ‘Fear a bhata (Oh my boatman)’ at the top of my lungs into the wind when all the tourists were huddling inside the boat. I’ve been a firm fan ever since, even though the fiancé (John Saich) has since left the band.

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