“Gargling with Salt Water Actually Helps a Cold or Cough”

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Many old wives’ tales actually do have a basis in fact, and it’s not a good idea to dismiss them out of hand. For instance, it’s easy to dismiss your grandmother’s warning that you’ll catch a cold if you go out without a coat when it’s cold. The cold is caused by a virus, and viruses don’t work that way, says the modern scientific Westerner.

But Granny gets the last laugh: it has in fact been shown that large and rapid temperature changes sharply reduce the effectiveness of your body’s immune system, making it far more likely that you’ll become susceptible to one of the roughly three hundred strains of the coronavirus or rhinorvirus that cause the common cold, and that lurk almost everywhere when people are forced indoors by low temperatures.

You might well look askance at Granny’s advice, and with good reason at times — but ignore it at your peril.

“US military’s use of mythical monster for psy-ops”

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I find this amusing, from the perspective of a modern, logical, Internet-connected Westerner who knows that vampires are myths. But I have to wonder just how many mistaken beliefs I have, that could be used against me in the same way by a more advanced enemy…

(Fortunately, any “more advanced enemy” would almost have to be extraterrestrial at this point in history, and we haven’t found any. Yet.)

“How to record the cops”

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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? This isn’t a perfect society, by a long shot, so those who have authority must be held accountable for exercising that authority responsibly. And the best way to do that is to give everyone — especially their superiors and the courts — the ability to see their behavior first-hand.

If they don’t like it (and they almost never do), tough titty. Abuse of power is rampant in police work of all sorts. If this sort of thing ever becomes common, maybe those who are drawn to police work simply to gain power over others will look elsewhere for jobs. That can only be a good thing for law-abiding citizens.

“Intel slips anti-theft tech into hardware to deter thieves”

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I’ve always thought that computers could do more to protect themselves from theft. Even something as simple as full drive encryption, built into all hard drives, would at least prevent any thief from getting the data on a machine (and the data is usually worth far more than the machine itself). Apparently someone at Intel upped the ante; now if you steal the machine, you won’t even be able to use the hardware.

I’m not sure why they say it’s only good as “a deterrent against casual thieves.” Apparently they’re not doing this the way I would have, but I suppose that even cell phone signals aren’t available everywhere yet.

I love the logo for it, too. 🙂

“Ant death spiral”

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Wow… I always thought of bugs as little more than self-reproducing low-level biological robots, but I didn’t realize they had bugs of their own. 😉

If this happened in practically any other species, the entire group affected by it (and the genes responsible for it) would essentially cease to exist, because once locked into it they would never breed. In ants, it makes some sense though. A few hundred or even a few thousand workers lost in a screwup like this won’t affect the viability of the queen in a really large nest, so long as it doesn’t happen too often. And if it doesn’t affect the queen, the only source of genetic material in the group, then evolution won’t weed it out.

An interesting glitch in nature.

Claws E-Mail Client

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I switched to Thunderbird for my e-mail and RSS a few years ago, because it was cross-platform, open-source (so I didn’t have to worry about the company abandoning it if/when they decided they weren’t making enough money with it), and worked with GPG so I could still have my secure e-mail.

I have never been particularly happy with it, though. I’ve always found it very inflexible and confining, coming from The Bat! under Windows. But it got the job done, and from everything I was able to find, did it better than anything else that met those three criteria. I don’t use IMAP, so the problems that it has apparently had with it were irrelevant to me.

Unfortunately, it has been getting worse over the years, not better. It’s (supposedly) under active development, but you couldn’t tell by looking at it — I started with it at version 1.0 or 1.5; it’s now at 3.1, and the only real difference I’ve seen is that it has gotten slower. Known bugs persist for years (literally!), new ones crop up regularly, and it’s no exaggeration to say that I don’t recall a single new feature that I’ve ever had any use for. So when I read this article a few months ago, and saw that it suggested alternatives, I jumped at the idea.

Of the alternatives offered, Claws seemed to garner the best opinions around the ‘net (here are a couple examples). The only mention I’ve heard of it before was from Ploni (my formerly-Linux-using friend), several years ago, and he had problems with it then. But it sounded like all of those had been worked out, so I decided to give it a try.

I hate switching e-mail programs, with a passion. I’ve done it four times before this (Outlook Express -> Something-I-Don’t-Remember -> Calypso -> The Bat! -> Thunderbird), and every time has been painful, in one respect or another. I was bracing myself for similar levels of pain this time, but to my surprise, the process went very smoothly. I was able to import all of my Thunderbird e-mail with almost no problems, I just had to do it one folder at a time, and mark the messages read again after doing so.

The program itself operates nicely, and is extremely configurable. You can, for instance, redefine the hot-keys for any menu option, by simply pointing your mouse at it and pressing the key(s) that you want to use for it (though ones that correspond to menu commands themselves, like the plain old ‘m’ key, can apparently only be set by editing a configuration file). You can tell it that when you open a folder, it should automatically go to first new message, first unread message, last message looked at, or one of several other options. And when you hide messages that have already been marked as read, the ones that you’ve checked or locked remain on the screen — very useful.

There’s no automatic-purging of old e-mail, but you can set it up to delete certain mail from particular folders after a set amount of time. It always irritated me that Thunderbird only had delete-by-age or delete-by-number-of-messages, and when using them, would delete messages regardless of whether the message had been marked read or not. That’s not a problem here, for the small price of some extra work when initially setting up the system.

The manual-rewrap in the editor works oddly. You can rewrap a paragraph manually, by going to the end of a line, deleting the end-of-line character, and hitting the space bar, but it’s not obvious at first. There may be an easier way too, but that’s the easiest I’ve discovered — the menu items related to rewrapping a paragraph only seem to work under limited circumstances. And it might not be necessary, I haven’t experimented with just leaving the paragraphs wrapped oddly when sending the message. It might reformat them automatically before they go out.

The program is lacking in two areas though.

The first: no per-recipient GPG rules. I’ve got a few people I communicate with using encryption, and I want all messages to them to be encrypted and signed. There are many others that I just want to use signing for, but there’s one particular recipient (an automated support system that BigCo uses) that can’t handle inline-signed messages — it thinks that the line starting the signed part of the message is a signature line and discards anything after it. I’ve either got to remember to manually set the proper options every time I communicate with one of those addresses, or I’ll have to patch the program to add that capability. I don’t really have the time or interest to take on a project like that though, so I haven’t decided what to do about it yet.

The second: it does no multithreading, and doesn’t handle two things at once very well at all. When it’s fetching or sending mail, the user interface all but locks up until it’s done — you can’t even close the program. I’ve got four e-mail accounts that I check regularly, all using SSL, and it can take thirty seconds to fetch mail from all of them. That’s thirty seconds that I can’t do anything else, up to and including just switching to a different message. This would probably be a harder thing to fix… there may be a way to work around it, by setting up a background program to download e-mail and another to send it, but that’s quite a bit of work. I haven’t decided whether to try it or not.

That’s the story so far. We’ll see how it turns out.