After my little rant yesterday, I’ve found some more information on KMail and it looks good.
I posted a question asking how to resolve my message archiving dilemma. And I got an excellent suggestion: use filters. Slick. KMail may turn out to be the first mail reader I’m truly happy with.
On the other hand, I’ve just seen it crash twice, once with SIGILL… Let’s hope that bug gets ironed out.
I’ve long been of the opinion that all mail readers suck. Some of them really suck. That’s why I wrote OfflineIMAP, after all.
Today I embarked on my periodic survey of mail readers to see what had changed. Things are encouraging but still not quite good enough. I have IMAP mail on two servers and I read it from four clients. I want to see the same mail on each client, and be able to work offline if I need to, and sync my changes back up later. I also maintain “Saved” folders for messages I want to archive indefinately. I want to see which folders have new messages and which ones have old messages. Finally, I want to be able to navigate entirely with a keyboard for all common functions.
Let’s take a look at how they all stack up.
First, there’s mutt with OfflineIMAP. Mutt by itself is not even worth mentioning; its IMAP support is so slow and buggy that it doesn’t even begin to make the cut. With OfflineIMAP, it’s actually pretty nice. I can easily create a macro to move messages to my Saved folder. I can also create macros to manage the two different e-mail account identities, using the correct one for replies automatically. So far so good. What mutt stinks at is the folder list. It just doesn’t have a good one at all. Also, since OfflineIMAP must be used, the integration is just not as clean as it could be.
Next, there’s the new KMail 3.3. This program has improved vastly recently. What was once a graphical client with more bugs than an entomologist’s lab is now a mostly reliable mail program. It integrates into the KDE or Gnome applet well for new mail notifications. It does everything I want with IMAP (with only one bug relating to non-selectable folders, which I can work around.) However, despite the khotkeys system, it is not possible to reliably script it to move a message to a saved folder or redirect it to my special storage address. Argh.
Then, there’s Mozilla Thunderbird. Another good contender, supports offline reading and all of that. Has nice junk mail features built in too. But its IMAP support is SLOW. When you delete a message, it goes out to the server (unlike KMail, which can cache this action). how do you like deleting 20 messages, having to wait 2 seconds after each press of Delete? Also, it suffers from the same scripting problem as KMail.
So it looks like I’m sticking with mutt+OfflineIMAP for now, but definately keeping a close watch over kmail.
Check out this interesting Associated Press story: Bush Insists His Administration Seeking “New Ways to Harm Our Country”
I’ve received two e-mails from people asking for an update on the MythTV project. So here goes.
First, concerning the issue with the Biostar motherboard: the Biostar motherboard was bad. The TV out on it was physicially inoperative. It did not include the TV out in the box, so I had to buy that and the SPDIF out from Biostar. The SPDIF out was coax only, no optical, and the TV out was broken. I returned the motherboard and purchased an Albatron KM18g Pro 2.0 motherboard instead. The Albatron is nice. The TV out adapter is included and works. The SPDIF adapter is still extra, but instead of one port, has three ports: coax in, coax out, and optical out. My only complaint is that the GPU has a cooling fan that sounds like its about to die.
On the digital video (DVI output) side, I purchased an ATI Radeon 9200 card for $64.50. Together with the Gefen cable, I get crystal-clear output to my TV. While the picture is sharper than anything else, the colors are just not quite right somehow. After doing some checking, I am led to believe that this is because the TV does not auto-correct digital sources the way it does analog. I’m still looking into it. The ATI card is nice, and has a TV out too, so I could always fall back to that if need be. I am using the Free Software DRI drivers for the ATI card.
I’ve had a few problems with the MythTV unit overheating. We put it in a new entertainment center, and occasionally it will do a thermal shutdown to prevent damage. I ordered a nice SilenX power supply to try to move more air through there, and at a quieter volume. I also ordered one of their fans to mount on the entertainment center itself for ventilation.
The high-definition TV has been nice overall, but has exhibited discoloration in one corner. A repairman should be out this week to check it out.
This may keep me busy for awhile :-)
There’s a very interesting piece up on Salon: John Kerry, Senator. It takes a deep analysis of his Senate voting record and also manages to catch Dick Cheney in an outright lie.
Prostitution and drugs are legal in the Netherlands, but they want to ban toe licking.
Friday morning, I wrote about the trouble getting accurate information about Kerry’s campaign stop in Kansas, and linked to an article that said it was uncertain if it would even happen. Well, it turns out that they said it would happen but it didn’t (CNN.com). Thousands of supports watched Kerry’s train whiz by at speed.
The story is that they planned to make the stop but didn’t tell the conductor. For those of you not familiar with how railroads work, the conductor is the one person that must know because he is the one that is responsible to clearing the train to start and stop.
I suspect that the problem is more deep — a miscommunication, perhaps?
This page is a fun read. Did you know that Kodak got its name because Eastman was enamored with the letter K? Or that Nokia started as a wood pulp mill?