I didn’t make the ludicrous pilgrimage to the Holy Land (aka FutureShop) this year to partake in the maddening shopping spree that is Boxing Day. I sent my father instead (sorry Dad). He didn’t get the HD DVD player he was after, but he did snag me the GPS I wanted.

It’s the LN735 from LG. I used it on my trip home from my parents, and I’m pretty happy with it. It gives spoken street names and numbers which is a nice feature for a GPS in this price range (~$350.00, although I got it for $140 on sale).

I’m definitely not going to need this on a day-to-day basis, but it’s a really nice gadget to have, and it was about the only thing I could think of that I hadn’t already bought.

I hope you all got the loot you were wishing for!

28

At work, we use IMAP for our email service. This is great because I can get my email no matter where I’ve logged in, but Outlook doesn’t play nice with IMAP (probably because Microsoft wants us to use an Exchange server). So, I use Mozilla Thunderbird (or Thunderchicken as a friend of mine says).

Thunderbird is the best IMAP client that I’ve ever used, but like most email clients, it occasionally has problems with attachments sent from Outlook users. Outlook has a tendency to send attachments in the Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format (TNEF). So, if you’ve ever seen a winmail.dat attachment, this is why.

Fortunately for Thunderbird users, there’s an extension called LookOut that allows you to open files inside the winmail.dat attachment.

Crisis averted.

Other solutions for the winmail.dat problem.

Environment Canada makes all weather data shown on their website freely available for anybody to use as long as credit is given to them, and no affiliation is assumed. I wrote this script because I wanted to get emails whenever a weather warning was issued in my area, and as far as I could tell, there wasn’t a free service like this out there.

It’s still in beta, and I haven’t done too much QA on it, but I think it’s ready for public consumption. The site is a bit rough, but I’ll get to that in time. My main concern was getting it up and running.

I use a PHP script and a CRON job to act as a daemon, and that posed a couple of problems when it came to sending emails. In retrospect, I should have just written a perl script to do the job.

You’ll have to supply a valid email address to get the service, but I will NOT use it for any purpose other than sending you warnings. I also, have no plans to make this a commercial service.

If you have any comments or suggestions, or you find any bugs, please leave a comment here, or email me at chris@chriscraig.net.

Check out the Weather Warning page to subscribe.

I hope you find this service useful.