guapacha.com

From this entry at Boing Boing:
Laptops, which reach high internal operating temperatures, can heat up the scrotum which could affect the quality and quantity of men’s sperm. (…) “It is very difficult to predict how long the computer can be used safely,” [ Dr Yefim Sheynkin, an associate professor of urology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook] told Reuters. “It may not be at all, if the testicular temperature goes up high within a very short period of time.” Adolescents and young men who use laptops several times a day over many years face the greatest risk. Sheynkin fears that if laptop use is not curtailed, in 15-20 years when they want to start a family the men could face problems.

You may have missed Microsoft’s announcement that they have entered the blogging world with their MSN Spaces. However, it appears that Microsoft doesn’t want you to write about just anything, some words are censored and won’t be accepted by their submission form. Maybe this is so that people can’t use their service to write what they really think about Microsoft?!

I pride myself on having never fallen victim to a computer virus or email scam but I came close to believing a phishing email at the weekend.

The email claimed to be from ebay, the headers were so good that Eudora filed the email in my Ebay folder. It said that they had recently been unable to verify my details and would I click on the link to provide them again. My first thought was to laugh, yeah right someone wants my details. But the URL looked good in the email, and the actual URL behind the link was the same and in the back of my mind was the fact that perhaps my now-closed credit card had been on file with them. So I thought I would click and see where it took me.

First thing that happened is Firefox popped up a window warning me that although the address in the URL was ebay.com, I was actually being taken to a different site and did I still want to go there – score one for Firefox!! I bet Internet Explorer wouldn’t have caught that. Knowing for sure I was being phished I said yes, just to see how good the fake page would be. But instead of getting a page I was prompted to save or execute a dll!! Well, I certainly wasn’t going to do that so I cancelled the link and had a little laugh that I almost, only just, but almost got suckered.

If you’re worried about phishing scams read this page for some sound advice.

I have completed the first step in migrating away from Eudora but some things bother me about how it looks like Thunderbird works so for now I am running the two in parallel for a while (which is probably the sensible thing to do anyway).

In particular, it doesn’t look like the program fetches mail from all my accounts, only the one I’ve deemed the default. I have 8 POP accounts defined, all set to fetch every 10 minutes, but its been 25 minutes since I sent a test email to one of the non-default addresses and it hasn’t shown up. The one I sent to the default account was fetched. I am sure I don’t need to click the “Get Mail” button for every account but right now I don’t have confidence that it will fetch all the emails for every account. Something I will watch for this weekend.

The other annoyance is that it seems like I can’t import my Eudora message filters of which I have probably a 100. I really don’t want to have put them all in by hand but it looks like I have to. And that is made worse by the fact that it doesn’t look like Thunderbird lets you do filters the easy way: in Eudora you can select a message, click on ‘make filter’ and the new filter window appears filled in with all the likely filters from that message pre-populated. You just choose the ones you want and there it is. No such neatness here, it seems.

Well, you still have to type in a search string so its not quite a new way, but it is a new way to see the results. Snap is a new search engine from the guy who invented Google’s AdSense program. The difference between this and, say Google, is that you get a spreadsheet style results page where you can sort the results on popularity, pricing etc. For instance, take a look at this search for digital cameras.

It seems like we are getting a lot of new search engines these days though nothing that has displaced Google in my heart, yet.

I’ve built quite a few PCs in my time and after every one I say “never again” and yet still I am lured by the promise of a cheap machine in exchange for an hour of construction. But it never is an hour, if the machine starts at all, there will be a problem with memory, or if not, the drivers won’t work with the OS etc etc.

My most recent machine built without problem but I discovered that the motherboard was so cheap that the CPU was running real slow, and this machine was going to be my main video compression platform. So I bought a new mobo but destroyed the CPU trying to get it out. Now I have a new CPU (P4 3.2GHz) in the new mobo and the damn thing doesn’t boot into the BIOS, but isn’t giving any errors.

Next time I’m just buying a G5.

It seems like the right time to do it… the Thunderbirds movie is out, and my mail app for the last 8 years, Eudora, keeps crashing when a message has in-line graphics. Further, it likes to put email from potential customers of the business in the Junk folder without me seeing them. I’ve emailed support but all they can tell me is to put the incoming email addresses in my address book. Well, er, I don’t know who these people are before they email me so how the !@%!@ am I supposed to do that?

I’ve already made the switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox with a fair bit of success, so now I’m going to try the email client, Thunderbird. Initially I’ll just use it for the business email but if it looks like a success then Eudora will be history.