Stuff that doesn’t quite fit anywhere else.
It’s been an ongoing battle against spam on the blog lately — mostly, trackback spam. Our filter for trapping regular comment spam works pretty well, but people were able to sneak in several hundred spams a day using an attack on the trackback mechanism.
Grr.
So there I am in Outlook 2003, about to delete an email unread. Muscle memory kicks in, and instead of hitting CTRL-Q to mark it read, then Del, I hit CTRL-A, CTRL-Q, Del, a sequence I use many times a day when wiping out all the spam in a folder.
So I delete my entire Inbox.
After playing with the demo for a week, I just bought MaxiVista.
Basically, what this does is create a new monitor driver on your desktop that is actually a network connection to another computer. So you run it on your main machine, and then you run a client on your laptop, and boom, you have two monitors. In my case, my main desktop is a widescreen Viewsonic that runs at 1680 x 1050; my Tablet PC runs at 1400 x 1050. So now I have a 3080 x 1050 display. (Alas, the physical size of the tablet is smaller, so even though the resolution is an exact match, it’s not as cool as it could be if the screens were the same size).
But wait, there’s more.
Overall, I have been pretty happy with my Toshiba M405 Tablet PC. It’s a convertible tablet, so I have a keyboard when I want one (and in fact, that’s most of the time — I use the laptop above all for email when on the road). It has a DVD drive, so I can watch movies on trips, something I have done exactly once. It can burn CDs. It has a mediocre integrated Intel video solution, so I can’t do hardcore gaming on it, but that’s OK, because I find myself playing a lot of light weight and indie games recently anyhow.
But it does have stability issues.
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