Category: Tech

World’s Greatest… Radio Scanners

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.

Posted on by miklm

Using Gmail as a Spam Filter

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…

Posted on by miklm

Articles by Janis Ian on the music industry and the Internet

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.

Posted on by miklm

2003 e-mail stats

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.

Posted on by miklm