Email alias trick

Garth of Deadly Bloody Serious points out a cool technique for dealing with spam.

It’s easy for me to manufacture email addresses on demand for registration with web sites, subscribing to mailing lists and so on because pretty much anything sent to my domain ends up in my inbox.

Even if you don’t have a domain of your own, though, you can get much the same effect:

username+nameofpotentialspammer@yourdomain.org

For some reason, SMTP servers stop analyzing the address at the plus sign, so as long as what’s before the plus is your usual email address, the mail will get through to you. Your mail filtering rules, on the other hand, will probably be able to match on the full address including what’s after the plus. Easy, huh?

Four hours and 51 minutes with iCal

Not too shabby, especially for a v1.0 product. I’m impressed. Over the years I’ve gone through (in rough order) Dynodex, InControl, NUD, Claris Organizer, back to NUD, Palm Desktop, Chronos Consultant, Entourage, back to Palm Desktop after a Entourage database meltdown, and now to iCal. And out of all of these products, iCal is the first one that I’ve been more or less satisfied with out of the box (well, out of the .dmg file).

I think iCal’s real promise lies with being able to easily share events and schedules. The stuff up on Apple’s library is a nice start.

The one negative thing is that I’m *still* stuck with two calendar apps since work uses CorporateTime for scheduling. Bleh.

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ Flash fun

Cool collection of Flash movies by the mysterious Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. Kinda pretentious, but in a fun and playful beatnik sort of way. Start with The Struggle Continues (works best in French, but there is an English version) or Artist’s Statement No. 45,730,944: The Perfect Artistic Web Site