Dan Weinreb’s blog

I just upgraded from Thunderbird 2 to Thunderbird 3 on my Vista machine, and I like it a lot. If you haven’t heard about version 3, I recommend that you upgrade. I have not yet tried it on my work machine, running the old version 8 (“Intrepid”) of Ubuntu; if you have experience with this, I’d appreciate hearing about it.

Some cool things:

Search is much faster, due to indexing. (When I first brought up version 3, it spend a long time indexing, but that’s because I have a huge number of saved messages. I was able to use it while it indexed.)

When you select several messages, it displays extended summaries of all of them: whom it’s from, date, and the first few lines.

If you double-click on a message in the summary line, instead of creating a new window, it creates a “tab” in the main Thunderbird window, a lot like Firefox tabs.

The operations on a message being read are now down where the message is, to the right of the header display. This seems a bit more intuitive, although I don’t think it matters much.

Archive: The new “Archive” command moves the message into a folder. The folder is the subfolder of a new top-level folder called “Archive”. The subfolder’s name is the year from the date of the message.

If you use the word “attach” in a message you’re composing, it brings up a fairly unobtrusive bar a the bottom saying “Found an attachment keyword: attached” or whatever word you used (you can control the set of keywords), followed by buttons for “Add Attachment…” or “Remind me later”. When I used Thunderbird 2, I had an addon called “Attachment Reminder” that would pop up a menu when you clicked “Send”, asking you if it was OK. That’s more obtrusive, which you might or might not like.

One bad thing:

There’s no more “Forward all as attachments”, which let you send a message that contained many attachments, namely everything you had selected in the summary pane. I have used that many times.

My favorite add-on is “Expression Search”, which provides a powerful and concise way to search. The best thing is that it saves you from having to use the mouse to select the type of search to do (the “magnifying glass” dropdown in the upper-right search bar).

I also like ConfirmFolderMove (helps prevent accidental “move folder” operations.

(I’m just starting to try MailClassfier, which would be very helpful if it turns out to work. But the first time I tried it, it was analyzing all of my mail, and at the end of this slow process, Thunderbird crashed. And when I restarted it asked again to analyze all mail, so apparently the results were not saved before the crash. I’ll keep trying to make it work.)

The Scalable Game Design project is aimed at getting computer science into middle schools, to get kids interested in information technology through their natural interest in games. A principal software tool of the project is AgentSheets, which lets you make your own simulation games without learning the syntax of a programming language.

If you know a kid in middle school who wants to make his or her own game, or just learn about programming, I recommend that you take a look at this!

The general concept is a bit like some systems you may have seen before, such as the visual programming languages provided with Lego Mindstorms. However, this requires no special hardware, and the specifics look a lot more interesting and flexible to me than anything I’ve seen along these lines.

An example of what you can do is the classic arcade game Frogger (developed by Konami for Sega/Gremlin in 1981). This tutorial shows how to do it in AgentSheets.

There is a three-minute movie showing kids using AgentSheets. It gives a good sense of the kind of game and the level of complexity that AgentSheets is suitable for (although it doesn’t demonstrate programming itself).

You can also read research papers about the project.

To try it out, you can download a free trial version with a ten-day license, for MacOS X or Windows. It costs $120 in single units, less for educators or if you get ten licenses.

As it happens, it’s written in Common Lisp, which is how I came to hear about it. But that doesn’t matter as far as using it is concerned.

The principal investigator is Prof. Alexander Repenning of the University of Colorado. He has worked at Xerox PARC and HP, and he has collaborated with researchers at the Epistemology and Learning Group of the MIT Media Lab, LOGO, and SRI to explore programmable LOGO toys. He has been involved in many other projects as well.

Thanks for telling me about this, Alex!

The Web abounds with valuable free services. Here are some of my favorites, entirely free unless otherwise noted.

Jott.com: You call their toll-free number. A voice says “Who do you want to Jott?” You say “myself”, or a name that you have registed on their web site. The voice says “Jott yourself” or the name of the recipient. You speak a message. That’s it. Jott sends email to the recipient, containing a transcript of what you said, plus a link to the audio recording in case the transcription isn’t good enough. My car has a voice-activated feature to make phone calls — it talks Bluetooth to my cell phone. So when I’m listening to the radio on my commute, and I hear something intersting that I want to follow up on, I just press the “speak” button on my steering wheel, say “Dial Jott”, and talk to Jott. It sure beats trying to scribble notes during red lights.

AdBlock: The AdBlock Plus extension for Firefox really works. I block ads because they take too long to download (making my effective browser response time much worse), and the animated ones are much too distracting. It’s easy to turn ad blocking off selectively.

Google Toolbar for Firefox: This Firefox extension has a command called AutoFill, that can fill in my name and address and such in most web pages that ask for it. It saves a lot of tedium.

Google Calendar: I use this to track all my meetings and appointments. I can get at it from work and from home. Sometimes it seems to be somewhat “down”, not allowing new entries to be made, but this is rare enough to be acceptable. The Ajax UI is done very well. (I used to use the Lightning plugin for Thunderbird, but sharing over the web is important to me.)

Pandora: You tell it what music you like, and it provides a “radio station” that plays the sort of music you like. It’s amazingly good at choosing what to play; I would never have believed it. It has found new artists that I like a lot and otherwise would never have heard of. I almost always have this on when I’m working at home.

Xconomy: A news magazine covering hi-tech in the Boston (and now Seattle) area, with very high quality reporting. I read it every day to keep up with what’s going on around here. (Full disclosure: Xconomy is a Common Angels company.)

LinkedIn: This is the only “social network” that I value. I use it to keep track of where all my old friends and co-workers are, what they’re doing professionally, and what their latest email address is. And when I hear about someone in hi-tech, I often look them up to learn more about them.

TimeBridge: A free service that helps you set up meetings between many people, finding times that are available for everyone. It’s very easy to use.

Carbonite: Automatic backup over the web. It’s very, very easy to use. (Full disclosure: Xconomy is a Common Angels company. The best competitor is Mozy, which my friends say is also very good.) It’s not free, but it’s well worth it.

AxCrypt: Simple file encryption and decryption. I mainly use this to send encrypted email to a friend with whom I share a passphrase. One of these days I’ll learn how to use the OpenPGP facility provided by the Enigmail Thunderbird add-on, if I find anyone else who is using it and with whom I have secrets to discuss.

MPEG Streamclip from Squared 5: This one is a free utility for MacOS X. I use my Mac to edit video (with Final Cut) into DVD’s, for the North Cambridge Family Opera Company. MPEG Streamclip can “rip” video off (unencrypted) DVD’s and produce virtually any format, including the one that YouTube likes.

Kindle tips: There are lots of source of free books (legal) and other resources for the Amazon Kindle on this page. My family is about to leave for a vacation trip in which we can only bring a limited amout of luggage. We usually bring big piles of books on vacations, but it’s impossible this time. So we got a Kindle. In fact, we got two (his and hers).

xkcd.com: My favorite web comic, and the only one I follow. “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” Computer hacking, too. Randall has more profound or funhy things to say about the intersection of science/math/technology and romance/relationships than anyone else. There’s an archive of all the past comics. He has three comics about Lisp, all hilarious. Buy stuff from his store: that’s his only source of income (no ads!).

Enjoy!