Friday, July 3, 2009
GMail Archival Project
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
My New Cell Phone

I got a new cell phone this past weekend. For once in my life I'm actually impressed with a cell phone that I own. Most of my cell phones have been provided by my employer and haven't been top of the line to say the least.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
A Complaint About GMail
I've been mulling what to do about it. I have considered deleting email I no longer want or need. But let's face it. I would have to delete thousands of emails and I simply don't have time to go through them one-by-one to determine what I need to keep and what can be thrown away. Another thought is the good folks at Google, being the great people they are, will see I am quickly approaching my limit and will bump that out a bit for me. Dang, still at 7261 MB. Sometimes flattery gets you somewhere. A third option is to create archive GMail accounts and move everything like Father Roderick just did. But then my email isn't all in one place.
I believe GMail should follow Yahoo Mail's lead and give truly infinite email storage. What does Google have to lose? Google hosts my domain and I can create about an additional 20 email accounts. That's nearly 150 GB of available space for moi if I wanted it. I would gladly exchange 10 of those email accounts for an additional 75 GB or so. And don't forget I could just as easily create an infinite number of regular GMail accounts. Wouldn't it be easier just to allow users all of the space they need rather than have them trick the system?
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
GMail is More than Just Email
gallon. I never thought $3 would sound like a bargain, but today it
does. The rise in fuel costs has made some people consider alternate
commuting methods. Something I have adopted, as have many other
Americans, is the bicycle. It's good to see so many other cyclists
out there everyday, but there has been a downside. Bicycle thefts are
up here in Austin and around the country. If your bicycle were to be
stolen and the police recovered it, could you prove it was yours?
Your bicycle should have a serial number engraved in the frame at the
bottom where your pedals attach. You will need to provide this serial
number to police to recover your bike. If your bicycle does not have
a serial number you will need to engrave your driver's license number,
school ID number, Social Security number, etc. yourself. If you've
engraved the information yourself it should be straightforward to
recover your bicycle. Most of us know our Social Security number by
heart and could easily produce a driver's license or school ID. But
what about the serial number? Where did you write down? Did you
write it down? Could you find it when you need it? Could you
describe your bike to the police?
I was pondering all of the above last week when I remembered that
GMail isn't just an email provider. It's a fully indexed, taggable,
database full of meta data. I took several photographs of my bicycle
including a closeup of the serial number. I emailed these photos to
my GMail account. In the body of the email I entered the make, model,
description, and serial number of my bicycle. I hope I will never
need it. But if I do need it I know right where my information is. I
can very easily print out all the information I need or simply email
it to the police.
I plan to record all of my information information such as driver's
license number, passport number, credit card information, etc. and
send myself a GnuPG encrypted email. I'll be able to recover the
information quickly, but it's safe from prying eyes.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Fwd: Blogging with GMail
I'm playing with Mars Edit again on my iBook. It's blogging software. I like it. It has nice features while remaining simple and intuitive to use. But as of today I don't plan to purchase a copy when my free trial ends. Why? I like the idea of doing everything in GMail. I already read RSS feeds in GMail, so why not use GMail to post to my blogs? Many of my postings are simply forwards from blogs I read (I don't plagerize, I keep the entire entry intact, it's just my way of sharing). I can do all of this from any web browser anywhere in the world (okay, maybe not North Korea).
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
A New Way to Read RSS Feeds in your Email
I installed rss2email on my iBook and it works great! You have to be comfortable with a Unix shell window to get it going and know something about your SMTP server. But if you're comfortable with that, it's the way to go. I first attempted to use it on a SunOS system I have access to. It didn't work. The author of the software worked with me and got it going, but I was having issues sending email which I don't think is related to the rss2email software. I will revisit using the SunOS system, but for now it works fine off my iBook.
Friday, May 2, 2008
Read RSS Feeds in your Email
I am a big fan of GMail. The power of GMail lies in the fact that you have over 6 GB of storage and a powerful search tool. I subscribe to many email lists. I don't necessarily read everything that comes across, but I do archive it so I can search for information later. I was looking for a way to do the same with certain RSS feeds. Note I didn't say all RSS feeds. 43 Folders and Lifehacker post valuable information throughout the day, information I want to have at my fingertips. Perhaps you want to save your daughter's Flickr photostream of your new grandchild in your email. Or maybe you have a hobby and want to keep track of others with the same hobby and reference their information. Or recipes. Or how-to articles.
Both Thunderbird and Apple Mail 3 have built-in RSS readers. If there's a post you want to save you can simply copy it to a local folder. If you use a service like GMail or AIM Mail with IMAP you can copy the post into your webmail account. But there's an even better way! RSS to email services. Two I like right now are RSSFwd and SendMeRSS. Both are free and will send RSS feeds right into your inbox.
Now you're an Inbox Zero sort of techie, right? If not you'd better be! You can use GMail's filters to tag incoming feeds. Be sure to check "Skip Inbox" when you setup the filter. I also suggest using the "+" sign. What is this? Suppose your email address is john.doe@gmail.com. If you subscribe to 43 Folders you can sign up using john.doe+43folders@gmail.com. This will still arrive in your GMail account and it gives GMail something to key off of for filtering purposes.
