Month: October 2006

I usually don\’t quote news sources, but maybe I should begin. World climate, or more specifically, the global catastrophe we are heading for, have been on my mind since I recently watched The Inconvenient Truth, a very disturbing but also biased movie by Al Gore. (Watch it – I promise, you need to do that).

As for the news quoting: BBC just released news about a report on world climate by sir Nicholas Stern. Sir Stern is not an environmental buff – he is a \”distinguished development economist and former chief economist at the World Bank\”, and he is not a person to exaggerate the threat, pr as BBC puts it, \”not a man given to hyperbole\”.

Go ahead, read the news. Or let me quote selected parts for you:

[…] he says \”our actions over the coming few decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th Century\”.

he warns that we are too late to prevent any deleterious consequences from climate change.

Further down:

How do we start to pay a price for carbon that reflects its true economic and social costs, or a price that includes the present value of future climate change?

And one of the answers given, which I personally support, is:

through rationing the amount of carbon emissions that any business – or any individual – can make, and then creating a proper global market.

I will round off with my own thoughts on the topic. I have since long been aware, some might choose to call it \”persuaded\”, that the environment is deteriorating in an exponential fashion – i.e. it will get worse, faster and faster. An Inconvenient Truth makes this trend painfully obvious, but most source material agree – you can look it up yourself. The trend is exponential – and anyone with only a limited background in science knows this will cause big change.

By now, I am fully prepared that within my life span, the environment will be the worst enemy of man (well, the man is seemingly the worst enemy to the environment, so it only seems fair, doesn\’t it?). The sea levels will rise, every part of the world will see severe climate change. It is, by any measurement, the largest catastrophe in human history. I hope I am wrong but in the end it all boils down to this: when there is signs showing a similar catastrophe, even though nothing might be proven – it is just plain stupid not to take precautions. If a scientist told you that an earthquake is coming – would you refuse to believe him until he can convince both you and the whole science community, or will you, just in case, take precautions? Denying climate change is pure stupidity – the debate is how we should deal with it, not if.

As so many others, I have been using Gmail for a long time by now. With ~3 gigabyte of storage, high reliability and capable of handling multiple accounts, it is far better than any other e-mail based solution. But for a long time, I have also had to live with Microsoft Outlook, partly because it contains a huge amount of old emails, and partly because I used it for my universities IMAP-mail. Now that I transfered the handling of these accounts to Gmail, Outlook is just a big container of old emails, emails that never will be found in any search by me, as I only use Gmail. Time to export the email to Gmail.

There are a couple of ways to go about this, that is, moving your emails from Outlook to Gmail. After some quick research, I chose to use Mozilla Thunderbird with it’s Mailredirect extension. It seemed simple an reliable – but after this how to, I will link to some other proposed methods:

1. If you haven’t already – get the Gmail account. As far as I know, you still need an invite to be able to register. Comment in this post and I will invite you (but beware, don’t post your email address without rewriting it with, for example, [ at ] instead of @ so spambots won’t catch it).
2. Download and install Thunderbird
3. Start it and choose to import from Outlook – hopefully it will automatically find your files and import them. This might take a while if you have lots of emails. You might save some time if you first delete all trash emails from Outlook, so Thunderbird won’t import unnecessary emails.
4. Install the Mailredirect extension as shown on their web site.
5. Restart Thunderbird. Now, make sure you have an account to send your emails through. Which one won’t matter, as long as you are allowed to send emails through it. Set this up as instructed by Thunderbird. Note: you will be sending lots of emails through this server. It is possible that it will block you if it thinks you are sending spam. This completely depends on how the SMTP-server is configured.
6. Now, it’s time to configure Gmail. Go to Settings, then Labels. Create a label to identify the email you will import (not compulsory, but it helps). For example, name the label as your old email address from which you are importing. Then make a filter from the Settings. I choose to filter all email with my old email address as recipient – this however might miss emails that was received to other addresses, such as some mailing lists. You can detail the filter more to be sure to catch it all. And if the filter don’t catch all you can clean up the rest manually. Make the filter apply the label you just created, and preferably, archive the email so it won’t block your inbox.
7. What Mailredirect does is that it copies the emails, with (almost) all their headers intact. This is what makes this approach so much better than just forwarding all emails to your Gmail account. The emails will be presented with their original sender and recipient in Gmail, and even original date (although, in Gmail they will be sorted according to the time they were redirected). To redirect, select a bunch of emails and right click – select Redirect. Write your Gmail-address in the To-field. Then press redirect and wait… (you should not send too many emails in one batch, begin with a few and verify that it works).
8. Now, in a perfect world, everything should work. But unfortunately, that’s not always the case. For me, the SMTP-server stopped responding quite often, and Thunderbird said it failed to copy sent emails to the Sent-folder (which it shouldn’t even try to do, according to Mailredirect). And when the SMTP stopped answering, Thunderbird crashed on me. This might very well be because of the SMTP-folder blocking me when I send too much in a short period of time. I had success when I lowered the amount of simultaneous connections to the server – go to Extensions – Mailredirect – Options and set a lower number than the default 5. Other problems that may arise are encoding problems – the emails may look scrambled in Gmail. If you only have plain English emails, I’m sure you won’t experience this, but other’s might. I have yet to find a solution to the problem.
9. Finally, verify that your emails arrived in Gmail. Click your label in the label menu, and hopefully you will see all your emails with correct headers. To be safe, look through your Spam folder and verify that there aren’t any redirected mails. Remove the filter(s) you created for sorting the incoming email if you don’t have any more use for them. Now you’re finished!

As I stated earlier, there are some other ways to do this:

• Forwarding emails from any mail program. Always works, but it might be impossible to do in batch, and it will replace the headers with new ones, such as new sender, recipient and time. Not a good solution.
• Use the gExodus program and other tools found at marklyon.org. These approaches also requires you to export your email from Outlook to another format.

I have had my Eten M600 for almost 9 months now, and I am still a happy customer. It is true that when using Windows Mobile, you have a full fledged computer in your pocket. However, what dents this truth a little is that the PocketPC and Windows Mobile software market is a jungle – a jungle full of small pieces of $20 software from no-name companies. The open source revolution has not yet arrived in the pocket. With some searching, however, it is possible to find a couple of must-haves and almost-must-haves free pieces of software, and I will share with you what I have currently installed on my device:

• Adobe Reader for Pocket PC – a must have to read PDFs, such as e-books. The program is a bit bloated though.
• Flash Player 7 for Pocket PC – lets you play flash games and flash movies from your device, however, it doesn’t always work together with the browser.
• MiniMo – the pocket version of Firefox. However, the MiniMo is just version 0.016 in the time of writing, so expect bugs. Opera offers a much more stable Opera 8.60 for Windows Mobile Pocket PC, but it doesn’t really count as it is a 30-day trial version, and we all know trial versions are very unfashionable.
• S-Tris 2 – a glossy and cool Tetris clone, completely free, from Elements Interactive Games.
• PocketDict – a good, freeware English dictionary application that can be fitted with any dictionary, as long as it is in the right format. It comes with the OPTED, a public domain version of Webster’s 1913 Unabridged English dictionary.
• PocketPuTTY – everybody needs SSH for the PocketPC, right? In any case, here is the free version for your PDA.
• btCrawler – not extremely useful but fun. It searches the vicinity of Bluetooth devices and lists them. The best part, is however, that you theoretically can download information from other Bluetooth devices without their users approving. Try it, but be responsible 😉
• PHM Registry Editor – a decent and free alternative to the famous Resco Explorer.
• Freak Othello for Pocket PC – okey, I’m far from an Othello expert, but this game is hard to beat! I have yet to meet anyone that can put up a decent fight against the AI of this game, and that on the Amateur level! If you beat this game, you are officially an Othello expert!
• Virtual Earth Mobile – even though Google Maps should work with your device, you can try this stand alone program that fetches map data from Microsofts Virtual Earth, now Live Local. UPDATE: Windows Live Search is just released. Sounds like it would be Virtual Earth and more in one package.
• Orneta FTP for Pocket PC – an FTP app, if you need it. Only the 1.0.3 version seems to be freeware, you have to pay for the never version.
• Skype for Pocket PC – a must have application if it’s not already pre-installed (Eten has it pre-installed). The quality is as good as GSM, and it just works!
• MiniStumbler – if you are lucky, MiniStumbler will work with your WiFi-card. It is the Pocket PC version of the famous NetStumbler, used for mapping WiFi-networks and for wardriving.
• WiFiFoFum – if above software won’t work for you, try the WiFiFoFum, that boasts even more features, such as a “radar” view that maps in which directions transmitters are (although some basic testing showed that there is a lot of inaccuracy, almost too much).
• The Core Pocket Media Player – THE media player for Pocket PC – certainly a must have.
• Weather Watcher – “your personal weather station”. Thanks eimmo1 for the tip!

Others have also tried finding good and free software, so if you still hunger for more freeware, take a look here:

• Lifehacker 11 Killer Freebies for Your Pocket PC
• Pocket PC Software suggestions at Tux:Tops
• Freeware PPC Ratings With Screenshots

And while I’m at it – if you are as lucky as me and owns a Eten M600, you can find all the needed information at the Eten User Forum. In particular, you find the latest ROMs, as well as a sometimes needed patch for low volume.

Now and then I’ve stumbled upon the somewhat unique, and by now, old, site of zompist.com. It mixes boring politics with conlanging, fictional worlds, nerdy stuff and sometimes, tha marks of a genius. Today, I saw some titles of, ehm, logs, and maybe it’s just me, but I find them hilarious to say the least. It is understandable if you don’t.

• “Awww, shit, dude, someone sewed her mouth shut!”
• Remind me to remove everything on my desktop that says ‘Hitler’
• Everything I Know About Quantum Physics I Learned From Watching SciFi Network
• […]
• I Can’t Believe It’s Not Otter Cock!
• This is like 1001 decorating ideas using only your pecker and common objects from the junk drawer
• Lugnut and Wheatabix and Poonjuice and Ax and Piggy and Wallet and Scumbo and Monad and Half-Tard and Poopants and Mr. Britches and Peggy
• “Triscuits! TRISCUITS!! for the love of GOD why don’t you BUFFOONS have your own TRISCUITS”
• “I accidentally commited bukakke.”
• The Fraternal Order of Some Dumb Wussy Farming God
• His fur is the color of suffering
• THE CORN IS NOT AMUSED

-from