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technological disappointments
Spam subject line of the day: "mollusk suffrage". On consideration, giving them the vote probably wouldn't make things worse.
I cleaned out my spam traps last night; the problem has definitely gotten worse recently. There's more spam and the distribution (or performance of various filters) has changed:
My filters, in order of firing, are:
- Pobox bounce: 200 messages/day (these generate unknown-address notices)
- Pobox trap: about 75 messages/day
- Procmail 1 (SpamAssassin score 7+ and a few specific targets): about 100 messages/day
- Procmail 2 (aka "maybe spam"; gets about 5% false positives): about 10 messages/day
Gak. That's about 400 pieces of spam per day aimed at my mailbox, of which about a third are getting through to my mail host. (I want this stuff to be caught as far upstream as possible.) Pobox used to catch a higher proportion; in addition, the ratio of Pobox bounce:trap used to be about 5:1, not the current ~3:1. I can't say that this is a Pobox degradation, though, as it wasn't long ago that I got about 100 pieces of spam a day, total. Pobox is presumably trapping everything it used to and a good deal more, but the spammers have gotten more clever. (I should write a procmail rule to catch any message that begins with an image.) I used to browse the traps about once a week looking for legitimate mail, but even with search that's getting impractical. I no longer inspect the bounce trap at all.
The spammers have caused email reliability to revert to that of the UUCP days, when there was a chance that your legitimate message just plain never got there. Thanks, guys.
OT
Re: OT
Being able to open the machine and auto-detect wireless networks in airports and hotels was nice. The access was never free and in all cases, launching a browser brought me to the hot-spot page telling me how to get access. (I assume that's all standard behavior.)
I took a mouse with me because I've had a lot of trouble with PC trackpads, but most of the time I didn't actually use it. I would have used it for finer-grained activities, but starting the machine, launching emacs, typing an LJ entry, launching a browser, and pasting it in was not that big a deal with the on-board hardware. (Sometimes I plugged a mouse in for the cut-and-paste operation.) Ditto reading comments on my entries -- the trackpad was fine, at least for the amount of time I was spending online. (Access was metered so I didn't even try to read my friends page -- just comments on my own entries, and my email via shell.)
I mostly couldn't use the machine on the planes for two reasons, one likely personal. It was hard for me to get the laptop into a position where I could both type and see the monitor on those little tray tables -- that's just me, due to my limited vision. The other problem might have been hardware, and I may have to pay a visit to the local experts: I discovered that the machine was very sensitive to being tilted. Once on the plane it made an awful squealing noise and wouldn't boot (at the beginning of the trip, so this was scary); later it was fine on a hotel desk but when I picked it up to carry it across the room (running and on battery power only), it made that same noise and the screen blanked. (I set it down and things went back to normal.) Before the trip I bought a new battery (brand new, not used); that's the only hardware change I've made. Both times this happened it was running on battery power. Are those facts related? I have no idea.
I had forgotten that I hadn't configured a decent-sized emacs font before leaving, and machine-local exploration (like querying emacs' font set) wasn't turning up anything useful for me. (I haven't tried Google yet, having forgotten until just now.) I used the zoom functionality built into OS X to handle that; it meant the entire screen wasn't on-screen, but since I was just using a text editor that was ok so long as the text I was directly working on was there. One down-side: the center point of the zoom is dynamic and based on mouse-cursor position, so I couldn't just shove the mouse off to the side out of the way. I found places to put it where it didn't bother me, and I understand why they did it that way, but I think I would have liked an option to specify a center point for this kind of case.
The other thing that was a little frustrating was that plugging in a mouse didn't disable the trackpad, so an accidental brush there produced surprising results. (If you're using the trackpad you expect it to raact, but when I plugged in the mouse I began to think of the mouse as the sole control, not just one of two, so I was startled every time the trackpad activated.)
Some people who know about my vision expressed surprise that I chose a 12" monitor, but that was (1) fine for my purposes and (2) a feature when considering portability. I knew I was going to be using it to (functionally) do just one thing at a time anyway, so if my emacs session or browser or ssh session wanted most of the screen, fine. This would be completely unacceptable for a work or primary-home machine, but it's just fine for a travelling machine. And being able to easily put the machine in my backpack without worrying about either footprint or weight was nice.
Oh, I also used it for downloading pictures from the camera (and backing them up on a thumb drive). For that I used the mouse. I did not attempt to do any editing of said pictures on the laptop.
Overall, definitely a positive experience.