Tag: mail

Important research: was the Eudora “New Mail” chime from Ren & Stimpy’s “LOG”?

Inspired (obliquely) by this Metafilter post, I set out to answer a burning question.

LOG chime

This occurs from second 36 to second 38 of this video:

The chime when extracted without further processing, sounds like this:

(direct link: Original-Log-Commercial_The-Ren-and-Stimpy-Show.wav)

Eudora chime

I found a copy of Eudora Mail 1.44 for Windows (bundled up in an archive quaintly called “internet.zip”) here. The EUDOR144.EXE file is itself a Zip archive, and contains several files. The important one is WEUDORA.EXE (722,944 bytes; SHA256 checksum a35f2ef1e95242228381d9340fff0995f4935223f88a38b9200717107252dfb9).

This is a Windows 16 “New Executable” (NE) file, and I used panzi/mediaextract to scan and extract the RIFF/WAV data:

(direct link: WEUDORA.EXE_000a8200.wav)

They sure sound similar. But are they … the same?

Comparison

I made sure that both samples were set to the same rate, and I applied simple amplification in Audacity so that they both had a peak volume of -3 dB. Aligning the tracks as best I could, I got this:

Log audio on top, Eudora chime underneath

The Eudora sample is very slightly slower than the Log one. It might have been that the Eudora authors sampled the chimes from an analogue video tape. The match is remarkable, however, as they play together with only very slight phasing effects:

(direct link: Log_vs_Eudora-log_left-Eudora_right.wav)

Conclusion

Yes, the Eudora Mail “New Mail” chime did come from Ren & Stimpy after all.

How to select broken URLS from e-mail

(without resorting to TinyURL.com, xrl.us or is.gd when posting …)

Some mail clients wrap URLs in a way that breaks their ability to be clicked on. Trying to explain a method to fix this is tiresome, so here’s an animation that explains it:

a_handy_guide_to_fixing_broken_urlsBasically, it helps to select the URL from the end to the start. Once you’ve got all the text, copy it, and paste it into your browser’s location bar.

GO Transit, you suck!

I discovered last week that GO don’t have a central announcement system. That means that unstaffed stations like Kennedy and Exhibition always leave their passengers in the dark. Plus, the e-mail announcement system only alerts you if the train is more than 30 minutes late. I think by that time I would have gone home.

No sign of that train yet …

All the printers I’ve ever owned …

bird you can see: hp print test

  • An ancient (even in 1985) Centronics serial dot-matrix printer that we never got working with the CPC464. The print head was driven along a rack, and when it hit the right margin, an idler gear was wedged in place, forcing the carriage to return. Crude, noisy but effective.
  • Amstrad DMP-2000. Plasticky but remarkably good 9-pin printer. Had an open-loop ribbon that we used to re-ink with thick oily endorsing ink until the ribbons wore through.
  • NEC Pinwriter P20. A potentially lovely 24-pin printer ruined by a design flaw. Print head pins would get caught in the ribbon, and snap off. It didn’t help that the dealer that sold it to me wouldn’t refund my money, and required gentle persuasion from a lawyer to do so.
  • Kodak-Diconix 300 inkjet printer. I got this to review for Amiga Computing, and the dealer never wanted it back. It used HP ThinkJet print gear which used tiny cartridges that sucked ink like no tomorrow; you could hear the droplets hit the page.
  • HP DeskJet 500. I got this for my MSc thesis. Approximately the shape of Torness nuclear power station (and only slightly smaller), last I heard it was still running.
  • Canon BJ 200. A little mono inkjet printer that ran to 360dpi, or 720 if you had all the time in the world and an unlimited ink budget.
  • Epson Stylus Colour. My first colour printer. It definitely couldn’t print photos very well.
  • HP LaserJet II. Big, heavy, slow, and crackling with ozone, this was retired from Glasgow University. Made the lights dim when it started to print. Came with a clone PostScript cartridge that turned it into the world’s second-slowest PS printer. We did all our Canadian visa paperwork on it.
  • Epson Stylus C80. This one could print photos tolerably well, but the cartridges dried out quickly, runing the quality and making it expensive to run.
  • Okidata OL-410e PS. The world’s slowest PostScript printer. Sold by someone on tortech who should’ve known better (and bought by someone who also should’ve known better), this printer jams on every sheet fed into it due to a damaged paper path. Unusually, it uses an LED imaging system instead of laser xerography, and has a weird open-hopper toner system that makes transporting a part-used print cartridge a hazard.
  • HP LaserJet 4M Plus. With its duplexer and extra paper tray it’s huge and heavy, but it still produces crisp pages after nearly 1,000,000 page impressions. I actually have two of these; one was bought for $99 refurbished, and the other (which doesn’t print nearly so well) was got on eBay for $45, including duplexer and 500-sheet tray. Combining the two (and judiciously adding a bunch of RAM) has given me a monster network printer which lets you know it’s running by dimming the lights from here to Etobicoke.
  • IBM Wheelwriter typewriter/ daisywheel printer. I’ve only ever produced a couple of pages on this, but this is the ultimate letter-quality printer. It also sounds like someone slowly machine-gunning the neighbourhood, so mostly lives under wraps.
  • HP PhotoSmart C5180. It’s a network photo printer/scanner that I bought yesterday. Really does print indistinguishably from photos, and prints direct from memory cards. When first installed, makes an amusing array of howls, boinks, squeals, beeps and sproings as it primes the print heads.

look out!

I see that my company’s Outlook Web Access does much niftier things on IE than on FireFox:

outlook web access on IE

You don’t get those options of Firefox. Bah

But in true MS dunderhead fashion, when you quit the mail client, it clears all your cookies — including the ones of sessions on other sites. Microsoft, this isn’t DOS; people multitask these days …

mail from the city

The only downside about being part of the Billboard Battalion is that you get a lot of mail from the city. I get a separate letter for each variance contested, and sometimes duplicates, so I get between four and twelve letters after each community council meeting.
You would have thought they could have stuck them all in one envelope, or used e-mail, to save money and paper. But no; we’re a world class city, after all.

mailbox fool

Can you believe the Outlook mailbox limit at work? 60MB. Yup. I’ve been forced to tidy up every week.
I can’y believe a program as widely used as Outlook has so many critical limitations. Storing mail in binary archive files of limited size? Please; so 1989.

Standard Offer is Go – March 21

From OSEA:

The moment we have all been waiting for has arrived! The Ministry of Energy, the Premier, David Suzuki and OSEA will be announcing the Standard Offer Program on March 21st. We are organizing a celebration and press event in partnership with the Ministry of Energy that will take place at 3 pm at Exhibition Place, Toronto, home to Ontario’s first community wind turbine.

Please mark this date in your calendar and watch for further notices (via email and at www.ontario-sea.org) on details regarding location, speakers and entertainment.

This is a celebratory event – please everyone, let us celebrate the positive role the Standard Offer Contract program will play in Ontario for renewables, for community power, for cost effective power, and for our air quality and health!

Thanks to everyone for their efforts!

If the province has got this right, we really will see a lot more wind power in Ontario.

the cry of blackberryschmertz

My Blackberry mail server setup hasn’t been completed yet (it’s quite a shock to be on a computer with nothing above user privileges, I tell you). So I’m getting lots of blackberry.net messages which look a bit like this:
BEGINETP 10
AwUAAAAAAAAAAQ!!
ENDETP ...
Sums up pretty much how I feel about it: AwUAAAAAAAAAAQ!! AwUAAAAAAAAAAQ!!

first day new job

I had a good day. There was a lot of administrivia, setting up e-mail accounts, form filling, and learning about the network, but that’s all once off. The afternoon was mostly spent fighting with my new BlackBerry (a 7130e, you nerds), which works as a very nice phone, but the e-mail isn’t set up.

My cube has a view, and the transit is great. I’m happy.

manitoulin sunset

There was supposed to be a picture of a nice — if low-res and a bit squinty — sunset over McLean’s Mountain on Manitoulin Island here, but 1&1’s webmail isn’t too good on attachments.

Update: Here it is:—
manitoulin sunset
(The vertical lines are guy wires, btw)

What’s with the Council of Canadians, eh?

Every couple of months, the Council of Canadians sends me a large and visually unappealing (1986 called; they want their typewriter font back) mailing, ranting about how those pesky Americans keep stealing our water.

Close reading of the mailing (which is hard, given the woeful typography) shows that the initiatives being railed at are either:

  1. run by Canadian companies, or
  2. are part of legislation voted for by Canadians.

Like most environmental things, Canada has an appalling record of looking after its abundant water. I think we think that the rest of the world thinks better of us than they do, or maybe even frankly cares about Canada.

I’m a bit worried by the CoC’s use of the n-word — nationalist — since it has unpleasant connotations, like the BNP and SNLA. Also, at least half of the mailing could be summed up as The Maude Barlow Fanzine, with only slightly lower production quality than the average zine.

And anyway, pesky Americans haven’t been stealing our water. Catherine hasn’t been sneaking any more out of the house than usual …

best e-mail disclaimer ever

You’ve seen those page-long legal disclaimers that legal counsels require on outgoing e-mails? Well, I’ve been dealing with an Irish company that has the best one ever:

If this e-mail does not relate to Company‘s business then it is neither from nor authorised by Company

Short, to-the-point, and all you need.

fido sms e-mail

Looks like it’s down in some way; my daily condition monitoring e-mail didn’t get through to the fido.ca address, and neither did other subsequent tests.