Rogers (Internet, Cable, Home Phone, Mobile, Music Store, and, I think, fascist regime in a small part of South Asia) are pioneers when it comes to fucking their customers. They were one of the first ISPs to block (well, packet shape) BitTorrent Traffic, claiming it used up to much bandwidth.

Creative as pirates are, however, there was soon an easy way to encrypt your traffic and avoid the package shaping. Rogers, frustrated by the rights of their customers to use the service they’re paying for, decided the best way to solve this problem was to block all encrypted traffic. All encrypted traffic. Me, a paying Roger’s customer (with the most expensive plan), then get’s frustrated when my shit doesn’t work. Because of course, it’s not like they sent me an email about it when they fucked me over, no, I was left to be frustrated until I read about it on the internet.

Ok, rant over. Those fuckers make me angry though. I was going to wait till I moved to switch ISPs, but I don’t think I will now.

• TorrentFreak Article

Further Reading:

• List of bad ISPs
• SaveTheInternet.com
• SaveTheInternet.com’s video explaining Network Neutrality.
• Google on Network Neutrality

Gmail has recently opened up it’s door, eschewing the invite system. They also released some “adds”, if you can call them that.

• Act 2
• Act 3
• Act 4

A cool video about the new web.

I won’t deny, in the past I have been accused of not replying to e-mails fast enough. The problem was, I would check my e-mail quickly to scan for urgent e-mails at times when I wasn’t able to reply to anything lengthly. The e-mails would end up opened, but not responded to, and I would forget to go back to them. I tried several things, like using stars, and marking them as unread, but I always found that once an e-mail wasn’t in the top 10 or so e-mails in my inbox, I would miss it.

My solution: never have more then 10 e-mails in my inbox. An e-mail is only allowed to be in my inbox if it hasn’t been responded to. And no, I am not just deleting them, I’m archiving them. Archiving is a really nice system in Gmail. It essentially just moves your e-mail out of your inbox. After that, you can get it either by labels, search, or going to the “All Mail” link. Since I find sifting through all my e-mail ordered only by date to be a little arduous, I go with tags.

Now, at first I tried just applying labels to e-mails as I archived them. But I found it was too annoying to apply labels and archive. Really, anything that takes more then 4 clicks is not manageable for me. So I turned to filters for a solution.

The idea is firstly to make sure that only e-mails you want to read hit the inbox, and secondly to apply labels to those e-mail that do hit the inbox so that they can be easily found after their archived. Here are some examples from my filters:

If the subject line contains “fw:”, then skip the inbox.
I’m sure you can see the usefulness of this one already. I still except forwards, but they don’t hit my inbox, they get filed away under the name of the person why sent them (and that label will be bold telling me an unread e-mail in there).

If the e-mail is from [friend's e-mail address], then apply label [friends name].
This is also self-explanatory. I label e-mails according to my friend’s (and family’s) names. Obviously someone who has only ever sent me one or two e-mails won’t get one, but it’s really useful for those who send them often.

If the e-mail is from companyname.com, then skip the inbox and apply lablel Company Name.
I use this format for things like newsletters and things. For example the company that hosts my site, godaddy.com. I do want to read these e-mails, but perhaps not right away. I’d rather have them packed away somewhere so I can read them at my leisure, rather then getting them plopped into my inbox. Again, the label itself will display that there are new e-mails in it, so I can see it that way.

If the e-mail is from myself and to myself, skip the inbox and apply the label “note to self”.
I like this one especially. Most people, often for different reasons, send themselves e-mail from time to time. Whether to store an essay or make a note of some URL, it’s a handy thing. But we don’t want that in the inbox.

There are many possibilities for labels, and what you use will vary depending on what kind of e-mail you get. If you get it all going though, it works really well. Comment and let me know if you’ve found it useful.

I’ve been using Gmail for quite some time now. I realized just recently that over the years I’ve built up quite a complicated array of features to personalize my Gmail inbox. So I thought I’d post a series Gmail Tips and Tricks to share my experience.

Multiple Accounts

Google is a pretty generous company most of the time. In Gmail, they let you sign up for multiple account, and even allow you to use the same web-app to access them both. Personaly, I use this to maintain several spam-accounts, which I give out when I sign up for miscellaneous things online. My prime e-mail is for people only.

HOWTO: Simply send yourself an invitation, and open a new account. Once you have the new account, go back to your old one. Click “Settings” (top right) and go to the accounts tab. From here you can add your new account. You’ll have to log out, and back into the new account one last time to get the confirmation e-mail.

I generally like to create a filter that separates my addresses. Hit create filter (by the search bar), and enter the new e-mail in the from field. Hitting next, I chose to skip the inbox and apply a new label. This way that label will act as a separate inbox for the second address.

It’s a useful technique for avoiding spam, alone with others which I’ll discuss later. It’s very rare that I get spam in my proper inbox.