Recently I upgraded a number of things. If you’re into technical stuff, you may find this interesting. Otherwise, you are welcome to skip.
MichaelPrewitt.com
I had been using JumpLine as my web-hosting company. It had been working well, but was somewhat expensive for the plan I had ($19.95/month). Plus it had limitations that kept me from growing my website. And it did not have a good web-based spam filter (at least not a free one), so I was downloading countless spam every month—an especially atrocious problem for an email device like the iPod Touch, which does not have any built-in spam filtering.
After some research, I decided to go with HostGator. The price is much cheaper (only $4.95/month), and at this point they provide everything I need. They use SpamAssassin as their spam filter, which seems pretty standard.
When it comes to server-side spam filtering, I prefer Abaca, which is what we use at 3ABN, but very few web hosting companies seem to offer it. SpamAssassin deletes a lot of junk without even delivering it, and marks other suspicious email as spam for easy sorting. This is OK. Abaca doesn’t deliver any suspicious spam, but holds it online, and it lets you sort the spam by the likelihood that it is spam, which is very, very convenient. With Abaca, at most I have to look at 5-10 messages, and I know everything after that is junk. With SpamAssassin, it is necessary to check each message in the spam folder, which thankfully isn’t that much after the obvious spam has been auto-deleted.
Email (IMAP)
Besides the spam filtering, I wanted to simplify my email system. I had multiple email addresses I wanted to consolidate. In short, I wanted to be able to manage all email through a shared account (IMAP), so that when I read or delete a message on one computer or on my iPod Touch, it is marked as read or deleted when I check my email on another computer; and when I send a message from one computer, the sent message can be accessed on the other computers. It was pretty easy to set up on HostGator, and it has made my email communication so much better, more fluid. It is also web-based, so that I can check it from a browser if necessary, from anywhere in the world.
Reinstalled XP Pro
I have Windows XP Professional on my Dell desktop computer, which I think had been installed 4-5 years ago. It had become very sluggish, so that even opening a web browser took a lot of time. I decided it was time to reinstall. It is working much better now (snappier, as the geeky types like to say). However, I am finding that Ubuntu meets most of my needs very well (too bad you can’t run Adobe software under it), so I’ve been spending more time with that lately, which is also installed on the same machine.
iPhone 3.0
I don’t have an iPhone, but iPhone 3.0 is the name of the software that runs on the iPod Touch. I just did the upgrade, and while I don’t yet notice any dramatic differences, it does have some very nice features (copy and paste, notably; and push notifications) that I look forward to using more.
HostGator sounds nice. Due to our slow Internet here I have avoided online IMAP (though Google Mail provides it for free, as well as the option to consolidate multiple mails via forwarding or automatic download into one account).
My setup looks like this now: Google mail handles my domain email, forwarding all messages to my private box. It cleans out spam quite well, leaving me only an occasional spam to delete manually. Since Google provides both IMAP and POP access, I have set up small (128 Mb ram, 500 Mhz, $120, from Norhtec) appliance computer running Ubuntu. It downloads my email from Google mail and provides an in-home IMAP server (which I can also access remotely if needed, though that is infrequent).
On my in-home IMAP I can store private info I would never trust to Google as well. I use it as my information file system. In addition, all the regular email that came through Google is still available online from any computer on the web.
As for my personal OS, I too have found Ubuntu to be very satisfactory for most of my needs. I use VirtualBox to run WindowsXP as needed, within Ubuntu.
Incidentally, when people ask me for computer support, I usually avoid using Linux since I don’t want to become their only support option (too much work for me). But recently I was forced to choose between Ubuntu, or an illegal Windows installation (they had no disk and the machine was virus-ridden). So I’m giving it a try. Hope they will be happy…