* Gearhead: Saving on printer ink * Backspin: Usable products: Too much to ask? * The past 7 days on Gibbsblog
Gearhead: Saving on printer ink
Some time ago we needed to do some high-quality photo printing. After much research we decided on a Canon i9900 inkjet printer, which got great reviews and excellent user ratings.
To read Gearhead in its entirety, click here.
Backspin: Usable products: Too much to ask?
Bob just got a Treo phone, and he loves it. It does all the things he wants a phone, PDA and coffee maker to do. But he admits that as much as he likes the device, it does weird stuff – specifically, locking up randomly.
To read Backspin in its entirety, click here.
The past 7 days on Gibbsblog
April Spam Stats from OnlyMyEmail
I just received the following statistics on spam from OnlyMyEmail, a hosted anti-spam filtering service, for the month of April:
The good news from the Spam front for the month of April is that Phishing fraud emails are down substantially, to less than 2 per 1,000 emails; though Fraud emails in general have not abated much. It’s also worth noting that email distributed viruses are at exceptionally low levels (.063% of all email) as well.
However, spam continues to account for almost 93% of all email directed at domains protected by OnlyMyEmail’s MX-Defender, with increases especially evident in bounced spam from spoofed sender addresses.
During April, just short of 80% of all email sent to valid addresses on our network are spam of one form or another.Most troubling, however, is the continued increase in unwanted email from “quasi-legitimate” marketing firms that are often
hired by major brand-name companies, as they represent a potentially greater threat to end-users than any small time spam-operator ever could.
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Geek Toys #2: Build your own STM
Maybe twenty five years ago I read a couple of articles in Scientific American’s Amateur Scientist column (alas, not part of the magazine any longer) that described how to build a mass spectorgraph and a gas chromatograph.
I was absolutely fascinated by these two projects but I never got around to building either. Then today I stumbled across another amazing project: Build Your Own Scanning Tunnelling Microscope!
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A replacement for Acrobat?
In Gearhead this week, I write about Foxit. Have you tried it? If so, what do you think?
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SOAs for Emergencies
I just got a note from David Stephenson of Stephenson Strategies alerting me to his blog entry which points to an issue of my Network World Web Applications Newsletter titled Enterprise customers make good use of wikis to combat e-mail overload (whew).
David’s piece discusses how to build and emergency communications system and the reference to the Web Applications Newsletter is due to the discussion of an SOA called SocialText that several enterprises have used to mitigate the flow of e-mail.
The whole topic of systems to support emergency operations is crucial in IT but of course it is one thing to be thinking in terms of your company’s headquarters getting flooded and quite another to be dealing with the consequences of a hurricane hitting a city, county, or state as it happens …
