Silvermac

The …@hotmail.com.au domain is now available for Australians to use as an email address! However,  there is a little workaround needed to get there, but it works just fine:

• Go to www.hotmail.com
• It will redirect your URL to some ‘login.live’ etc. – note the end of this address is en-us (or en-gb, etc.)
• Change this ending to en-au.
• Let the page reload, and then ‘Sign Up’
• Now in the drop down box ‘@hotmail.com.au’ is available to choose!

For our friends and neighbours from New Zealand, just use en-nz to access hotmail.co.nz addrerss registrations.

Better get in quick, because names are going fast.

Google has finally fixed something I was looking for for quite some time, adding multiple attachments in one go. Say you want to email 5 photos to someone, you have to click on “Attach a file” navigate through your file manager to find the file, select it and click OK. And repeat this four more times.

Now when you click on “Attach a file” you can select multiple files and click OK. The next you will see is a list of files being attached and the upload progress bar for each.It works with both Gmail and Google Apps (GAFYD).

Referer spam is a technique that involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referer url that points to the site the spammer wishes to advertise. Sites that publicize their access logs, including referer statistics, will then end up linking to the spammer’s site, which will in turn be indexed by the search engines as they crawl the access logs.

This benefits the spammer because of the free link, and also gives the spammer’s site improved search engine placement due to link-counting algorithms that search engines use. [Wikipedia]

I have tried using several WordPress plugins but without much luck. However blocking the referer in the htaccess file has surely done the trick.

I have added the following to the .htacess file

SetEnvIfNoCase Via pinappleproxy spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer doobu.com spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer poker spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer casino spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer cazino spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer kasino spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer medici spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer medica spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer insur spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer roulet spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer virtuel spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer pharma spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer adult spammer=yes

Order allow,deny
allow from all
deny from env=spammer

… and the amount of referer spam has gone from several hundred hits per day to zero in three days. Fingers crossed.

After going through internet newsgroups, endless trials and nearly smashed keyboard, I finally managed to move my emails from my Gmail account to a new one. Actually the new one is the GAFYD (Google Applications for your Domain), but it’s the same thing, it works through Gmail interface.

The best of all is that the emails will retain the correct timestamp, so something I have received into my Gmail account on 28/07/2006 will arrive to my GAFYD account with the same date and time on it. Nice!

First, you need to log into your Gmail account and enable POP3 access. Click on Settings, Forwarding and POP and tick Enable POP for all mail.

Now go to your new Gmail (GAFYD) account and click Settings, Accounts, Add another mail account. In the window that opens type your old Gmail address and press Next Step.

You need to fill out the form on the next page by entering your old Gmail account username and password, and select “Other” for POP server, then enter 66.249.93.109 and press Add Account.

The setup will ask you if you would like to use this email address in a way that you are able to send email from your new account as you were sending it from the old one, very handy when replying to some emails sent to the old address. If you select “Yes” you will need to verify your old email address. It’s as simple as receiving a confirmation email and entering the confirmation code into the setup window of the new account.

That’s it! Just sit and wait and your old emails will slowly start popping up in your new Gmail (GAFYD) account after a while. Of course if you have few thousands of them, it may be wise idea to go and do something else for some time while this is being transferred.

Please note that you will not be able to transfer labels that have been applied to the messages on your old account. However, you can generate and automatically apply one for all emails that are coming from the old address.

Since Yahoo! mail also supports POP access, I haven’t tried it but I don’t see any reason why this shouldn’t work with their accounts, or any other POP accounts out there.

DiggUpdate gives you quick access to the front page stories of www.digg.com in your Mac OS X menu-bar. DiggUpdate will display a small icon at the top right of your screen. When there are new front page stories you have not seen, the lamp in the icon will turn yellow. Simply click on the icon and you will see the new front page stories in your menubar as long with a short description. You can click on any of the stories to visit them.

Download from VersionTracker or Mac Update

technorati tags: digg, diggupdate

After a few days looking for a theme for my blog and visiting numerous websites with theme switchers I decided to go with Cloudy, written by Mario Vercellotti. There have been a few other options but since they’ve all lacked support for a few pluging I’m intending to use it was an easy choice in the end.

One thing I didn’t like about Cloudy were … erm, clouds. So I removed them and replaced with a small one-colour jpg image that is actually page background. Not that clouds look bad, but they just don’t fit into overall picture of my blog.

I’m yet to add an image into the page banner but that’s, I guess, less important at the moment.

Anyway, thanks Mario for the nice theme, excellent work mate.

technorati tags: wordpress, cloudy, themes