I’ve been running roughly the same mail system for the past decade, which uses procmail to dump mail into various folders based on rules. It’s server side and now using IMAP, so I don’t need to log in with my desktop / laptop just for filing… things just happen. It’s similar to what Exchange now does, without the annoyances of itty bitty quotas.

One of the downsides is that I don’t get “biffed” when new mail arrives… because every mail reader seems to assume server-side filtering is not going on, they only check the INBOX for new mail. Mine is always empty, as my INBOX is somewhere else. So, I decided to try and fix the problem… essentially renaming my INBOX so that it would point to my “important mail” folder so I’d at least know to look at things when they come up.

What I really wanted to find was a HOWTO to do this… I figure it must have been done before, as now everyone uses /var/spool/mail/userid for mail. Presumably, there’d be an easy setting for UW-IMAPd to do this.

Well… no. I spent a few hours finding partial answers to the problem. I discovered some semi-undocumented features for UW-IMAPd that I thought would do it, but don’t. I discovered the symlink trick (make /var/spool/mail/ a symlink to where you want), but was promptly flummoxed by procmail, which doesn’t like symlinks and kills them. I found documentation on procmail to prevent it from doing that, which didn’t take.

Blah.

Back in ‘95, when I was first doing MetaCrawler, I’d have done the same thing, probably found the same caliber of docs (most of the useful docs I found were via Google Groups ne DejaNews, although man did Google screw up the new UI). And probably ended right back where I am now… about to crack some code.

This has got me thinking a bit… I’m a believer that a list of web pages isn’t what you want when you’re trying to find an answer, but I wonder what is? Again, say a HOWTO to do what I want to do doesn’t exist. What would be the next choice, and how would that be stored for both myself and others to find later?

I’ll post replies in a day or so after thinking on this some more. I’m not convinced it’s similar to Answers such as MSN Search’s Encarta or Yahoo’s Wikipedia (or Google’s poor approximation)… but I’m not quite sure what it is.

So, MK and I just paid $73 for a copy of our marriage license that never arrived back in 2001, and two copies of Laura’s birth certficate. So nearly $25 for a piece of colored paper. But hey, here’s one better:

The People’s Republic of China is gonna let me go hang out in Beijing for a week… woot! This is actually my first visa, so it’s kinda neat. It’s just a sticker they (the Chinese Embassy) stick on your passport… and only costs $95 (well, for MS, as they’re sending me). $50 for the PRC for the sticker, and $45 for the agency to go to the embassy, stand in line, and get it stamped.

gah…

Just saw that my almost-old-employer, InfoSpace, signed with us (Microsoft) to use MSN as part of their search offering. So looks like MetaCrawler, my old project and thesis, is back to having the best of all worlds!

Sadly, I can’t seem to find the preferences anymore to select which engines to use… thus you could cull away the dreadful About, FindWhat (sorry Pete), and Overture ad links. But hey, for those on the cutting edge, this is something to (re)check out as you’ll get the best of three worlds!

Wow… Google is just raking in the money… pretty impressive. Part of the reason yours truly is working for The Man on a competing offering…

But hey, kudos to the fine folks at Google for work well done. Guess this means you’re all well on your way to having the company goals met and having all bonuses doubled for the fourth year in a row!

So, I started running through wedding photos and saving as JPEG. Big mistake. Seems what is required is the Digital GEM, which is the grain remover — as the JPEGs are very, very grainy. Plus, with the GEM, which makes the picures better, they also compress by another 3-4M! So, less grain = smoother color = better compression. So a win all around!

But this means I gotta re-scan a bunch of pages… blarg.

More on the Film Scanner.

Without doing much, scanning a 35mm slide at 16 bit resolution without changing anything else gets you a 120M TIFF file. Yes, 120M, as in 122,927,684 bytes. Seems like a lot for a single picture, doesn’t it?

So, I started to look at the sizes for other cameras and what to expect. First off, some comparisons between the scanner, a Canon S500 5MP camera, and an older Kodak 2M camera.

The key takeaway here is how impressive the JPG compression is… from 122M to under 8M — very nice! So, I’m busy scanning things to save as JPEG now, and I’ll be down-converting the few rolls of TIFFs I did into JPEGs…. should compress nicely.

The scanner dimensions are also weird…. that matters is the pixel density. The DPI and size of the page are just arbitrary… say I divide DPI by 4 to 1,000… then I can double the length and width of the image. Whatever.

One of the first rolls of APS film I scanned was also one I had Kodak make a photo CD of when I had them developed some years ago. This gave me a good opportunity to compare the raw scan to what Kodak does to what I can do with either the Nikon scan software or Photoshop.

First, here are the pics:

Kodak	Nikon Scan	Nikon Scan w/ Brightness +50 Contrast +30

Some observations:

The Kodak one (which is roughly equivalent to what a 1 (one) megapixel camera would take) is very pink — you can see from the clouds and shading of the wood deck. However, it is the one where the color does pop out and (IMHO) looks better. The middle one is the scan with no processing (besides the digital ICE). It’s also the darkest and most plain. The third is the scan with brightness cranked up +50 (on a range of -100 to +100) and contract to +30. This seems a bit better, but the colors are still very washed… although I imagine that may be more true to life.

The scan pictures also show the graininess more than the Kodak JPG, which is interesting. This may just be in the downconversion from the full scan (a TIFF file) to a JPG… time for some more scanning. But this does show pretty clearly that Kodak’s magic for processing does do a pretty decent job!

My Dad, brother, and I went in for a Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 ED, a film scanner. It handles slides, 35mm, and (with the adapter we forked out another $130 for) APS film. The plan is for Scott & I to scan in all our film prints, and then off it goes to Dad where he’ll spend quite some time scanning in all his film — mostly slides.

So far, I’m happy with the scanner, and less thrilled with the scanning software.

First off, a comparison. The scanner comes with this Digital ICE4 technology that essentially “fixes” errors on 35mm negatives. Here’s an example from the first batch of negatives I did. These were black & whites taken by a friend of ours on our wedding with a good camera:

(raw scan)

(with Digital ICE4)

Notice a lot of the dust (white specs) are gone. Also, check out the shoes in the upper right corner. Notice anything? Yup, the minor bit of hair is gone — magically imaged out. Sweet!

So far, I’ve done one roll of APS film and one set of B&W negatives. Initial thoughts:

• If you just scan files in, they’re big. The B&Ws were 60M each. Yow! Well, you do get 4000 DPI for your 60M, which if I did my math correctly is equivalent to a 20 megapixel camera. The APS (color negs) were 38M each. But hey, that’s why they invented 300G disk drives, right? (to save you the math, at 60M / image, 300G gives you 5000 60M images).
• Scanning isn’t just mounting the film and pressing scan. You have to crop the picture (there’s a white border around APS film, and a white / black border around 35mm — the black is between each frame, and the white is on either side). I need to see about ImageMagick’s convert which has an auto-crop as well.
• You also have to rotate the pics… on APS, I had to rotate every frickin’ one as for some reason, the scanner is aligned 90′ counter-clockwise. This means most of your portrait pics are upside-down and most of your normal pics need to be rotated. Blah.
• For each scan, you have to click the DigitalICE thing. Blah. Doesn’t seem to be a way to have default settings (at least for that feature).
• Scanning takes a bit. However, it’s not too bad on your CPU (I’m still on my dual 600Mhz, and it only seems to suck up half the CPU while scanning which is nice).
• APS is super cake.. you just dump the film cannister in, and everything gets scanned. Even though the film is something like 24mm vs 32mm, scanning is just so much easier. Although I haven’t seen how the slide feeder works yet.

Welp, more later… let’s see how long it takes to crank through the ol’ wedding photo album!

I got my first hit of comment spam today… four random comments posted to the oldest articles. Deleted ‘em all.

Now to see how much more comes…

Laura has been rather sick the past few days, actually vomiting. It’s very scary for a parent… I remember an old boss once told me that, but now it’s really hitting home. Right now, she’s sleeping, and hopefully she’ll kick this bug in the next day or two and get back to her normal bouncy self.

In the meantime, I’m purging too — old papers and rubbish, that is. I’m making a concerted effort to clear out old crap that I’ve kept around due to my pack-rat gene. Some things are interesting, and I twinge a bit when I pass them into the recycling bin, but really, they’re memories past. Like the layoff packet from FizzyLab when that went down… it included the list of people laid off and retained. Some named I haven’t thought of in years. Also went through a ton of old Merrill Lynch and Prudential paperwork that was lying around… I’m no longer a customer of either, so I thought about just recycling the lot. Then I looked… and yes, MK’s and my SSN was on about half the papers. Sigh. So, into the shred / burn pile it goes.

I’m also trying to purge old software… I was going to throw a ton away, such as various copies of Microsoft Anything 97. But it turns out on eBay, people actually buy Office 97 and the ilk for like $35… so, we’ll see if it sells. Otherwise, maybe I can use them for skeet or something.

So… for those who read this (hi Meg!)… any idea where you can go to destroy a bunch of paper? I was thinking of burning it, but that’ll require me to dig a firepit in the yard (not a big deal) but put some kind of ash grate on top (so I’ll have to find one). Or perhaps just dump them in one of Microsoft’s big shredder boxes at work and let the shredder people take care of it. Might work. But I like burning things myself.