Month: November 2005

Cops who… catch crooks?

The cop who nicks crooks

What a foreign concept that’s become — police working to curb crime, arrest criminals, and not just generate revenue with silly traffic citations, needless “drug-related” arrests, and harassment of law-abiding citizens. Maybe some US police chiefs can take note of this?

Posted on by miklm

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

Rumor: Chrysler to show Challenger concept at Detroit

http://www.autoweek.com/news.cms?newsId=103629

“To all those purists who still can�t forgive Dodge for building a four-door Charger, here�s your answer: the 2006 Dodge Challenger concept. The Dodge boys released a sketch of the car to the world, but we obtained these exclusive spy photos of the car, which will premiere at the North American International Auto Show in January in Detroit.

“Built on a shortened Chrysler 300/Dodge Charger chassis (116-inch wheelbase vs. 120 inches), the Challenger gets a 6.1-liter Hemi hooked to a six-speed manual transmission with a pistol grip shifter.”

If Chrysler builds this car with a six speed manual, I will own one at any cost.

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

Something worthwhile for Valentine’s Day

So instead of being doing some sappy romantic garbage for Valentine’s Day ’06, why don’t you sit back, turn on the TV, and tune to TLC for an all-new episode of Overhaulin’?

February 14 is the air date for the episode that was filmed at SEMA. Look for me somewhere in the front left of the crowd during the reveal of the car to Merrick.

It will be lots more fun than buying roses.

Posted on by miklm