Thunderbird Gets Even Better

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned an app called FreePOPs that allows email clients like Thunderbird to access web-based email accounts. Well, forget about that. Yesterday I decided to take a look at Blogzilla, "a weblog about Mozilla," for the first time in several months to see if a new post had finally appeared (the last update was in early December). Sure enough, Jonathan had written back on April 10th about a Thunderbird extension imaginatively called Web-Mail that does the same thing as FreePOPs, only much faster and completely transparently. Plug in the Web-Mail extension along with an auxiliary extension for your web-based service (currently limited to Hotmail, Yahoo, Lycos, and Mail.com), and you can retrieve mail as easily as you can from any other POP3 service.

Now that I'm using Thunderbird for my Yahoo Mail accounts as well as my Gmail account, I've decided to remove my RSS feeds and go back to using Firefox's LiveBookmarks. So for quick browsing (without waiting for all the feeds to load), I'm reverting to K-Meleon 0.9 (Gecko-based) and Avant Browser 10.1 beta (IE-based).

By the way, I've finally started using a few Thunderbird extensions, aside from Web-Mail. The Delete Junk Context Menu is absolutely indespensible for me (faster and easier than having Thunderbird automatically move spam to the junk folder, then deleting them from there), and the Contacts Sidebar is a basic feature of Outlook Express that, for whatever reason, Thunderbird doesn't have.

Oh, one more thing. I noticed a few days ago that it's 2005, so I finally got an optical mouse. To avoid a potentially fatal shock to my nervous system, I did not buy the Logitech dual-laser gaming mouse glaring seductively at me from the top shelf. Instead, I went with a basic, but comfortable, IBM optical wheel-mouse. So now I'm faced with a new problem: what to do with my vast collection of ball-mice and mousepads.

Assorted Geekish Mutterings

Really tired right now. Stayed up too late yesterday finishing off The Sentinel by Arthur C. Clark. Earlier this month I read 2010: Odyssey Two and 2061: Odyssey Three. I'll probably go to a library this weekend looking for 3001.

Mac People have something to be excited about as Camino v0.9 alpha 1 was released tonight. You can read the absurdly long release notes here if you've got twenty or thirty minutes. And speaking of MoFo alphas, test builds of Firefox 1.0.5 are available for anyone brave enough to try it, according to the second post at the new Mozilla Quality Blog.

Over the past few days I've been playing around with DivX 6, Nero Recode 2, and ratDVD, looking for a high-quality and fast way to decode some of my movies to save HD space. DivX was just monstrously slow and produced a noticeably desaturated picture. Plus, in my experience anyway, it produced just a 35 to 40% compression rate. No thanks. ratDVD crashed almost right away the only time I've used it so far, and I haven't done much with Decode 2 yet. I'll let you know if anything blows me away.

My old bargain-basement keyboard that I found in front of an abandoned house stopped working last week, finally giving me the chance to go all-out on a new one. So I dropped nearly ten big-boys on a generic 112-keyer. That's right, you heard me. It's got "power," "sleep," and "wake" keys that don't do anything, and it didn't come with any software. It's only the most rad keyboard ever.

I have to go watch Aqua Teen Hunger Force now.

Webmail Without the Web

A nice little app called FreePOPs was listed on BetaNews yesterday. It's a freeware program that acts as a proxy for third-party email clients to access webmail services. I've managed to keep my Gmail account completely spam-free, but I have two Yahoo! Mail accounts that pull in a couple dozen spam messages a day. Thunderbird's junk filters are much better at filtering spam than Yahoo's, and now with FreePOPs I can bypass that horrible UI unless I want to send a message from a Yahoo address. Unfortunately, it also halves my connection speeds when active, so I don't recommend running it unless you only want to grab all your messages in one go.

A site called XPThemes.com has something I've been looking for for a while now: a frequently updated archive of WindowBlinds themes. One of my favorite WB themers from the old days, Essorant, has a ridiculously huge theme archive at XPThemes here.

And finally, an editorial by Joshua Micah Marshall called "Four More Years?" was published in last week's Memphis Flyer. I recommend you read it.

Internet Explorer Still Sucks

Microsoft triggered a massive blitz of idiotic, unintelligible forum posts this week by releasing an MSN toolbar that brings tabbed browsing to IE6+. Apparently the plan was to upgrade the worst web browser currently in existence by adding a simple UI feature invented roughly sixty years ago. Unfortunately, said toolbar is probably the worst browser patch ever created. Thanks to Asa for helping us keep the web right-side up.

Looks like a Simpsons movie is actually going to happen (via Slashdot). If I wasn't so sure that creative control of this film will be entirely in the hands of a labyrinthine hierarchy of Fox studio suits, I'd think this was long-overdue good news. But we all know that Fox can't let a potential money-maker like this one get out the door without shunting it through a few focus groups to make sure it properly plugs their prime-time lineup and shamelessly panders to the designated demographic. Again, I hope I'm proved wrong, because I love The Simpsons. But I won't be.

Our favorite mp3 player/playlist manager has been updated again. musikCube 0.92.5 can be downloaded here. All the bug fixes and UI changes are in the changelog

Thunderbird 1.1 and Virtual Firefox

A developers' pre-build of Thunderbird 1.1 has been released, and again, you shouldn't use it. I'm too possessive of my mail to try this one out, but the good news is that an improved UI is on the way, along with features like the ability to strip messages of attachments before opening them, in-line spell-checking, and Firefox's new pref window.

The Rumbling Edge has begun posting detailed changelogs for Thunderbird, starting with this one for 1.1 Alpha 1. A quick glance shows this will be the most significant Thunderbird update by far.

In Firefox news, this Slashdot article says that Second Life will be getting Firefox support soon. I'm not sure whether it will be Firefox-branded in-world web browsing or whether the Gecko rendering engine will actually be integrated with the game, but it's significant either way. I've never tried it myself, but I know that Second Life has a nice little subculture going. I suppose this is analogous to Pizza Hut's Everquest II deal, but less greasy and weird.