"life hacks" entries

Alien Camel: Just the Email, Ma'am

After I made the first post about email annoyances, I was contacted by Alien Camel with an offer of a trial account. It's a full email service with spam filtering, a webmail client, and IMAP access. I really like the fact that it offers remote IMAP access, as it avoids the "black hole" phenomenon of Gmail. The basic principle of…

Thunderbird: An Open Source Email Client

When I switched away from Mail.app late last year, what I switched to was Thunderbird. Overall, I've been very happy with it. I love the fact that I can use Thunderbird from both my Mac laptop and my Ubuntu desktop. I wish I could share address books between the two, but I'll probably eventually resolve this by setting up a…

MailChannels: Spam Filtering Plus Traffic Shaping

Even though spam isn't my biggest problem with email, if I could cut down on the amount of time I spend on spam, it would at least leave me more time to process other email. The first solution I tried is MailChannels. I know the people who developed it, and I've been intrigued by their combination of spam filtering with…

Apple's Email Solution

At Simon Cozen's suggestion, in my recent post on solving the problem of email, I decided to try Apple's Mail.app with MailTags. I've used Mail.app before. Several years ago, when my volume of mail grew too great to manage it easily in mutt or pine, I switched to Mail.app. My favorite feature from it was the fast, accurate searching. If…

Personal Kyoto

I already mentioned this on the Wesabe blog, but I absolutely love the idea behind Personal Kyoto. The site offers a way to track your energy utilization against a nominal "household target" to comply with the Kyoto Protocol. Currently only available for New York/ConEd, but what a fabulous way to take your data and make it work for you. Great…

The Economist on Life 2.0

(Personal comment: I first wrote a draft for this post a week ago when I originally read the leader (Playing Demigods) for the Economist report in question. I'm now sitting in a delivery room at a Copenhagen Hospital, waiting for the arrival of my third child. Synthetic biology/life seems so akward in a situation like this, yet it just might…

Burning Man Travel Tip

It's probably too late for those of you going this year, but the other day, I heard a novel bit of advice from Christine Herron (to Mark Shuttleworth) about travel to Burning Man: bring a gallon of vinegar. Apparently, the dust in the Black Rock desert is very alkaline, and will dry out and crack your skin badly. Washing yourself…