2002-07-21»
no popups the mozilla way»
I wrote in the Sunday Times a couple of weeks ago about how relatively free of spam and popup windows my online life has been since I started using Mozilla and SpamAssassin. Quite a few people wrote in to ask for instructions on getting hold of these programs for Windows. I don’t have a place to stick Sunday Times feedback (I really should get around to archiving the old articles), so I’ll dump the instructions here.
I haven’t used it myself, but there’s now a commercial version of SpamAssassin for Outlook. You can get a trial version from the Deersoft’s SpamAssassin Pro homepage.
Mozilla has always been available for Windows machines. You can download it from the Mozilla site. To turn off popups, you need to dig into the advanced preferences a little. Here’s what my preference panel looks like:
Hope that helps!
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playing around with tinderbox»
I downloaded the 14 day trial of Tinderbox, Eastgate’s fascinating new hypertext organiser. It’s a sort of outliner-cum-mindmapper-cum-hypertext-cum-blogging app. On first glance, I really liked it. I especially liked the fact that the file format is in a clear and simple XML. I have an outliner on my Palm – Progect – which has a huge chunk of my life in it. It’s GPLed, and there’s a great Perl library that can parse its database contents. So I installed the Perl program, and converted my outlines to Tinderbox’s XML format to play around with. Six months worth of notes seems a good thing to test out their organiser, and if it makes sense to commit to using Tinderbox, I can probably write a decent Palm->Tinderbox syncing app. That’d be great!
The trial version of Tinderbox isn’t having any of it. It tells me that I can only create a few notes in this limited version, and politely declines to do much more.
Fair enough, I guess.
Sigh.
So far, since borrowing this iBook, I have, or have seriously consider spending the following wodges of cash:
- $ 80 – bust iBook power supply
- $129 – Jaguar
- $100 per annum – .Mac subscription
- $ 95 – Tinderbox
- $ 80 – QuicKeys
- $ 20 – Keyboard Maestro
- $700 – Apple Developer Connection subscription
Some of these don’t really count – I didn’t ponder the ADC membership for very long, and QuicKeys is just a more expensive version of Keyboard Maestro. I really didn’t consider any of them for very long, to be honest, because I can’t afford any additional expenses right now.
But all of this is mounting up – to a lot of virtual money, and a very unsettling sensation.
Every time I get to something interesting in the Mac world, I bump into a barrier of dollar signs, where upon I have to spend more money to access the secret levels. It feels strange to have the possibilities of what I can do on my own PC suddenly limited by how much I can afford.
No, that’s not right: it feels odd to be unable even to ascertain the limits of what I can do, by dint of what I can afford.
Of course I understand that this is the way the world is. I’m not complaining about people asking for money. I’m guessing that Tinderbox is worth $95 – perhaps not to me, not right now, but certainly to many others, and definitely to the people who wrote it.
But you know what? I feel poor. And I never felt poor with Linux.
On the contrary, I felt drowned in riches.
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