Archive for October, 2007
Posted by Matthew on October 24, 2007 at
8:28 am
GMail just keeps getting better and better. As if the conversation-style view, instant search, integrated calendar and chat, and the best anti-spam in the business weren’t enough, they just started rolling out IMAP access yesterday, a feature users have been clamoring for ever since GMail was launched. IMAP is similar to POP in that it allows you to access your GMail through nice email programs like Outlook, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail, except it provides a two-way “sync” that keeps your online GMail inbox (and therefore every email client program) in step. So if you read an email through Thunderbird on your laptop, and then pull up your email in Thunderbird on your desktop computer, that message will be appropriately marked as “read”. Until now I have always used GMail’s web interface to access my mail because I use many computers and don’t like dealing with POP’s inconsistencies; that will probably change now.
In related news, I found a post on the official GMail blog saying that in a few months, everyone’s storage space (including Google Apps accounts, finally not stuck at 2GB anymore) will hit 6GB!
Posted by Matthew on October 20, 2007 at
8:52 pm
Bayonne, NJ: Squirrel chews on power line. Squirrel ignites. Flaming squirrel falls onto parked 2006 Toyota Camry. Camry is engulfed in flame. Squirrel and car both meet their maker.
Imagine filling out that insurance claim.
Via Amazon Automotive Editor’s Blog and Autoblog.
Posted by Matthew on October 19, 2007 at
8:33 pm
We’re once again back to my favorite Mac apps, by popular demand. This time I’ll be showing you a program called Vienna, a popular free RSS reader. It can revolutionize the way you consume information on the Internet, even if you’re not a “techie.” This review is geared toward newbies to RSS.
A quick aside about RSS for the uninitiated: RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication,” and it’s a standardized way for web sites to provide their content to third parties. It’s an extremely popular and convenient way to quickly consume a large amount of information from various web sources. If you want to learn more about RSS, check out the Wikipedia article.
Now that we’re up to speed on RSS, let’s look at Vienna. Vienna is a free program for OS X that allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds from any site on the ‘net and manage them with ease. 
It’s ridiculously easy to add a feed: in most cases, you’ll see one of these icons at the right in your browser’s address bar when a page you’re looking at has a feed available. You just click it, and if you’ve already defined Vienna as your default RSS reader it is instantly added. It’s that simple. You can also add feeds by inputting the URL directly into Vienna. The real beauty, however, comes how Vienna helps you manage a large number of feeds.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Matthew on October 18, 2007 at
9:53 am
There’s some nasty storms rolling through the Midwest today, as CNN.com is reporting in the main story on their front page. The lead line under the photo is especially interesting:
Violent thunderstorms rolling through the Midwest spawned tornadoes and flash floods in Missouri and razed beer tents in Oklahoma.
No! Not the beer tents!!!
Posted by Matthew on October 17, 2007 at
7:39 pm
I know it’s been a few weeks since my last post, and I apologize. Things have been crazy. I couldn’t let this story pass by though.
Lots of planets have been discovered in the last few years thanks to some great advancements in detection techniques. Few, however, are as exciting as the one discovered earlier this year: a warm, rocky planet, with average surface temperatures of 0-40 C (just the right temps for liquid water…and life), located just 20 light years away from our solar system. It’s about 1.5 times the size of Earth, and although it is quite close to its sun (14 times closer than Earth, actually, resulting in a “year” that’s only 13 Earth days long) the temperature of that star is substantially cooler than our own, generating the reasonable temperatures mentioned previously despite the proximity.
This is, by far, the planet most resembling Earth out of all non-Sol planets discovered so far, and it’s practically in our back yard, astronomically speaking. 20 light years is still…well, 20 years away even if we could travel at the speed of light, but considering that our galaxy alone is 100,000 light years in diameter, and the known universe is hundreds of billions of light years across, 20 light years is virtually next door. This kind of proximity means that if there were to be intelligent life on that planet, we could actually send a message and get a reply back in less than 50 years! Far fetched, yes, but fun to think about.
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