So who here is anal about their email management? Seriously, do we even need to be now-a-days? With the “Jesus of Email” that Gmail is, how much do we need to manage? Since my switch to Gmail, I have come to value this service more than ever. Before I had to make sure that I had backs up my Outlook express folder incase the HD dies (and considering they only last 3-5 years now, this is rather important…). Not only that, when I see client with over a GB in an outlook folder, it makes me shudder. There is a technical limit to Outlook Express and how big you can bloat up it’s file to (2GB if you want the short answer) and given the number of picture and video attachments floating around, that adds up quickly if your email isn’t managed properly!
But wait, Google’s ‘limit’ is 8GB currently! And hell, do you think that it’s going to get smaller as time goes on? Sure HDs are getting cheap and the common place 1TB drive is just around the corner, but that still doesn’t change the fact that in 3-5 years it’ll have to be replaced. This is, of course, Windows doesn’t crash and you reinstall but forget to backup your email and it’s lost any ways….
So even though I switched to Gmail, there were still some emails left floating around in my old web-hoster’s mail system (1300 to be exact). So I decided to go through them. When all was said and done, I deleted 1200 of them! Wow, so much crap that gets ‘hung on to’. Maybe that ain’t a big number for you but another client of mine has over 20,000 emails and he won’t delete a single one. Hell, he’s building his own search engine and soon will obsolete Google 
Well, I’m pretty sold on Gmail and how easy it is to use and the SPAM filter is great. So between my web hoster spam filter and Gmail’s, I don’t see any of the 5-20 that ’supposedly’ comes my way every day 
If you haven’t switched yet to Gmail, then get to it! The sooner the better because when they start with their Network, soon to be followed by Desktops, it will all be so damned seamless and work just beautifully! I can see it with my Android-powered HTC Dream, am just itching for the Chromium OS!
Trying to get updated torrent to work
Since TPB has shut down their tracker and going with a more decentralized torrent tracker system, I decided to follow suit. Now still being relatively new to Ubuntu, this has become a bit of a challenge. I have been using KTorrent and been pretty happy with it. Nice interface and reasonably uncomplicated configuration overall. So I test out the ‘magnet link’ and firefox gives me an error with “Firefox doesn’t know how to open this address, because the protocol (magnet) isn’t associated with any program.” type message. Do some digging and find out how to setup the new protocol. Do so, restart FF and still same error message. More digging and many people are experiencing the same thing.
Then I find out that KTorrent does not support the ‘magnet’ protocol that is needed for the new decentralized tracker. Ugh. Ok, so lets go back to the BT client I used when I ran XP, uTorrent. Oh wait….there is no Linux version of uTorrent but here are some nice examples of how to get it working under WINE. 15mins later and still it just wants to keep installing/install does not complete. Ok, screw that, back ever further to Azureus.
I left Azureus when it had become just too slow and painful to run, seems that a lot of people don’t the Java-style program and that it chewed up a lot of memory. Also, when they went to that ‘vuze’ interface, that really annoyed the shit out of me. Luckily there are bright people out there and quickly a ‘no-vuze hack popped up and all was reasonably good again.
Ok, so let’s try Azureus now. Ok, it’s installed and working….had to tweak the port forwarding on my router (damn Azureus wouldn’t go as high as I wanted…..ugh). Ok, so I got it to work ‘normally’, without using the magnet link. Damn FF won’t recognize the protocol. I suspect it has to do with the version of FF I’m running (3.5.5). More digging….
20mins later and still no answer. Everything says to do ‘this’. And do it and triple check and still the error message happens. FF is one of those love/hate relationships. I’m gonna take a break from this for awhile.
