While in Arizona this weekend, I managed to drop by SonicBlue’s branch office in Scottsdale. I scored a refurbished Rio Riot jukebox (20 gigs!) out of the visit, and a few great photos of their office and internal paraphernalia.
Don’t miss this poster spelling out their corporate motto: AWESOME. I guess it could be worse.
Get free DVD/VHS rentals from Blockbuster Video until August 15. Just fill out this form, preferably using a temporary e-mail address from a site like Spamgourmet or Spamhole. They’ll e-mail you the URL for a free rental coupon. Repeat as necessary. Enjoy! (Thanks, Phil!)
Update: The promotional offer has long since passed.
After installing SpamAssassin last March, the spam on my 7-user server dropped from roughly 80-100/week to one or two a month.
So it’s not a big surprise that e-mail marketing firms are getting nervous, starting with a smear campaign against SpamAssassin. Gord Sears’s column in his marketing newsletter calls it a violation of free speech, demanding a law against server-side filtering software. Paul Myers, in his You HAD Mail column on Talkbiz.com, claims that SpamAssassin could bounce valuable mail like “discussion list posts,” “newsletters that you requested,” and “LOTS of personal emails from friends and family.”
I want to clear up a couple misunderstandings: First, the recommended SpamAssassin configuration flags e-mail as spam before forwarding it to the user, allowing for simple filtering in the client. It doesn’t delete the mail, although you can configure procmail that way, if you like. Any ISP that quietly deleted e-mail without consent wouldn’t be very popular for long.
Second, Spam Assassin has to be tailored for the individual. For the first week after installation, I had to add a few newsletters and discussion lists to the “whitelist,” which tells Spam Assassin never to filter e-mails with a particular “From” address or subject. After that, Spam Assassin very rarely accidentally flagged good e-mail as spam. And it has never once mistakenly flagged an e-mail from someone I know as spam.
It’s not a perfect system, but it’s a depressing necessity.
Make a fist. That’s the size of a regular kidney. Now hold your breath and take a look at this. (Warning: Icky medical photo.)
That’s a photo of Dedair’s father’s polycystic kidneys, which were successfully removed a year ago. Weighing between 16 to 18 pounds combined, they were the second-largest set of kidneys the University of Pennsylvania has ever seen. The staff retained them for teaching purposes. Blecch!
This weekend, I found that there’s an obscure sequel to one of my favorite games from the early 1990s, Out of This World (released as Another World in Europe). Only released for the short-lived SegaCD system, Heart of the Alien (front/back cover) lets you play the original game as a second character, much like Opposing Force and Blue Shift allow you to see Half-Life from new perspectives.
The game is playable on the PC, but it’s a small pain in the ass. You’ll need the outstanding GENS SegaCD/Genesis emulator and the American Mega CD BIOS v2.00. Then download the 224MB ROM from The Underdogs. (Update: Here’s a guide to burning the ISO/MP3 archive to a CD for playing on your official Sega CD system.)
Unzip the ROM archive, then use WinRAR to unpack the RAR files inside. If you want sound and music, you’ll need to burn the BIN file to a blank CD-ROM, using a burning application like Nero. If you don’t care about sound, just point GENS to the BIOS file in the Options->Directories menu and then load the BIN. It’s just that easy!
Now, does anyone have a copy of Night Trap hanging around?
