Emil's Wicked Cool Blog

I read this piece on lifehack.org today, and saw this killer tip:

Send spam to trash. Instead of having Gmail-filtered spam go into your Spam folder (and have the annoying count of unread spam by the folder’s name), set up a filter with “is:spam” in the “has the words” field (just click “OK” on Gmail’s warning dialog box when you click next step) and “Delete it” as the action. Now all spam messages will go in your trash.

Just ask a yes/no question in a FAQ about whether or not a feature exists. The answer to that question is clearly "Yes". For instance, this question from Google calendar's FAQ:

Can I check my calendar information via SMS?

Clearly I can check my calendar information via SMS. I don't see another question saying "Can I check my calendar information via carrier pigeon?". The reason I don't see this question, is that I can not check my calendar information that way, and Google isn't typically going to put a FAQ item out there to tell people what they won't do...FAQs are as much of a marketing tool as a way to disseminate information.

So the answer is yes, the real question is how would I do that? Click the link and find out. Kind of makes you wonder why they don't rephrase the question as "How do I check my calendar information via SMS?"

According to
popular baby names from around the world, my name has ranked #7 in Finland this year and #10 in Sweden. As my name is definitely not known very well in the US, it's good to see this kind of news from time to time.

I've had now 3 different fraud attempts in the last week (we need your help to claim x million dollars...) appear in my inbox, both at work and at my personal address, making it past all spam filters. I have another 2 in my junk email at work, where I hardly get any spam at all. It's odd to me that this has happened so suddenly. Maybe these people are in the US and have more time over memorial day.

In other spam news, I was going through my spam the other day to make sure nothing important was being filtered out (I actually found that the filters were grabbing my Vonage email, so it was a worthwhile exercise). Most of the spam was related to certain drugs, and it made me wonder what caused these drugs to be responsible for 80% of my email. This is my conclusion:

• Viagra/Cialis/etc. are marketed to help with issues that people might not want to discuss out in the open - email gives them anonymity and frees them from embarassment.
• They are expensive, and those that want the drug have a strong desire to realize some cost savings. This thought is reinforced by the fact that a good portion of email not relating to these drugs are referring to ways of getting cheap drugs in general.
• They are expensive, meaning that the spammers realize a lot of profit if they can sell fraudulent (or maybe even real?) pills.
  

Next in the list was spam related to attempts to gain access to my personal information (phishing), followed by stock tips. Stock tips have historically been the most successful at getting through the filters. They tend to also use images containing text, rather than just sending their message as text in the body. I don't usually look at any spam that sits in the spam filter, so it's unclear to me how many other messages use the technique.

I noticed a while ago that google toolbar in both firefox and IE has a very nice feature. As you type a search, it will do an autocomplete based on popular searches. However, if you put in google calculator terms, it will also provide the calculator answer in the dropdown, so you don't even have to hit enter to see the answer. I used this yesterday, for instance, to determine how many teaspoons it takes to make 1/2 a tablespoon (1/2 tblsp in tsp).

Sometimes it's the little things that just drive you nuts. Like all the meeting requests I get from people with location "TBD". At Intel it takes about 1 minute to schedule a conference room or phone meeting. You're already spending at least 2 or 3 minutes finding the right attendees and putting together an agenda for the meeting, why postpone this minor inconvenience? Inevitably this "TBD" gets sent in another update about 15 minutes before the meeting. Spend a little bit of extra time and save yourself the hassle of:

• People who printed out or downloaded meeting information and don't have network connectivity just before the meeting
• Forgetting about to fill in the TBD completely and having to start the meeting 5 minutes late as you scramble to schedule something (1 minute because you're late to begin with, 4 minutes trying to go through a 1 minute procedure while people are IMing you to tell you that you forgot to add phone conference information)
  
• Not getting the information to people who have been forwarded the request

I like HP's printers, but absolutely hate their software. Here's a list of problems I've had with them off the top of my head:

• Software assumes you can connect to the printer at all times - if you're not, periodic episodes of 100% CPU utilization occurs. Disabling WIA (Image Acquisition Service) cured that problem.
• Software periodically crashes for no particular reason, and when not using the software actively. I believe this is related to the "always connected" issue above.
• Software works about 50% of the time when scanning.
  
• Software is extremely slow to shutdown and sometimes refuses to do so
• Software blue screens the machine
• Software that likes to update itself but usually can't connect either due to firewalls (despite proper proxy config) or some other reason
  
• Software allows copying data off a memory card inserted into the printer, but does not copy/set a create date on the files, which crashes lots of other applications
  

I haven't seen the last problem for a while, and a higher % of the issues I see seem to revolve around scanning functionality. I've been trying to document a way to consistently scan without spending an hour trying to do it, and I've finally found the way...avoid the software as much as possible. Here's my current method:

1. Insert memory card into printer
2. Scan document and send the scan to the memory card
3. Copy the files from the memory card to the computer
4. Use a "touch" utility to set the create date on the file to avoid the last problem above

As a software guy, this stuff probably bothers me more than most people. I can't imagine trying to work around all these issues if I were a normal person - I'd probably try to scan once or twice and then return the product. I understand the need for HP to ship early and ship often, but you need a complete product...not 75% of one (hardware and half-working software).

I recently used Wal-Mart's Site to Store (not a bad service!) to buy an entertainment center for our house. The particular store I had it delivered to, however, was ickier than most Wal-Marts. Allow me to illustrate this store's placement on a standard statistical bell-curve of Icky-ness:

I just got my Picopad in the mail and slipped it into my wallet. Everything seems as advertised so far, but I have yet to try it out in a live environment.

I've loved my Signature knife for a long time, but I've had a problem with using it while traveling. I don't like to take it off my keyring and check the knife, so I'm stuck leaving it at home, and it's when I travel that I seem to need it most. 90% of the time I pull the knife out is to use the pen that it has. The picopad solves this problem, and gives me something to write on as well. When not traveling, I'll almost definitely keep my knife with me, but now it's not so critical.

I like the idea of being able to quickly have a full OS and environment available for use through the distribution of files for a virtual machine. Especially with the cost of VM software driving down quickly (for personal use without support this is now usually free), this is especially useful for development and testing.

A couple quick links on this:

• rBuilder Online - Release: LAMP appliance (I found the latest release to be broken, but this one works - your results may vary)
  
• Orcas Community Technology Preview. Next generation Visual Studio on a virtual machine - no need to risk pre-production software on a machine you care about.
  
• Windows XP with IE6 or IE7. Great tool for testing
  
• Directory of user-contributed VMWare images for a variety of purposes
  

Also there are some conversion tools for those that prefer VPC over VMWare or vice-versa:

• VPC to VMWare conversion
  
• VMWare to VPC conversion
  

I'm sure other converters are available for Xen, etc. As other food for thought, many virtual hard disks could fit on a USB key, making these OS's fairly portable.