I’ve looked but can’t find the Thunderbird bug report where I added my “I hate this too!” comment a few months ago, but I’m pleased to report that I’ve found a workaround.

Your specific mail filtering details will likely differ from mine, but the basic idea should be the same. For the sake of following what is below, here’s how I filter my mail.

1. On my mail server I use Spamassassin which scores messages and inserts various message header lines before delivering them to you. One of these header lines is X-Spam-Flag: with a value of either YES or NO.
2. In Thunderbird, I filter “all messages with a X-Spam-Flag YES” into a folder called Spam. Traditionally this has caused a new mail alert (in my case sound).

The solution:

1. Edit the existing filter mentioned above.
2. In addition to the action for filing the message into the Spam folder, add another action for “Mark As Read”

That’s it! Bear in mind that you will no longer see a “new message count” next to the folder you’re filing into. That is, Spam will end up in the Spam folder but you’ll have no notice that there are messages in there until you select and view the contents of the folder.

Coincidentally, he was sitting in the same booth as this guy (but it wasn’t the same person).

Can you spot the dull area in the picture? Luckily it is only noticeable if you position yourself oddly in my kitchen.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By “play” I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is.

Continue reading if you dare.

1. The now-defunct shareware editor “Lemmy” which I’d licensed
2. The port of Elvis to Windows
3. and finally, when I’ve been able to tolerate it for very long, Vim

I’ve always been ecstatic that Vim exists. I’m more ecstatic lately that I stumbled across Cream (for Vim).

The name was inspired by the convergence of several ideas. The initial thought came from my coffee drinking habits as I usually don’t prefer my coffee “black.” It reminded me of my opinion of Vim at the time–despite its inherent sophistication–I needed something to soften it.

Vim has a steep learning curve. It was not primarily designed to be easy to use, favoring performance and technical flexibility instead. Because it is so different, learning to use Vim takes time.

Cream shapes Vim into an interface you probably already know (sometimes called Common User Access [ext.link] ). Whether you are writing emails or developing large software applications, Cream saves you time and gets you up and running quickly.

If you, like me, are just looking for a vi clone for Windows that has syntax highlighting, I highly recommend Cream instead of plain Vim. Just download, install, configure your preferences (they auto-save), and get to it. You should note that Cream’s default behavior is not like traditional vi (insert/command modes), but it’s easily changed so don’t freak out.

OneLook’s reverse dictionary lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be a few words, a sentence, a question, or even just a single word.

Check out the example’s at OneLook’s reverse dictionary page to see the useful stuff you can do there (Found at Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools site.)

WRONG: I could care less.

RIGHT: I couldn’t care less.

When you use the phrase, you mean to say, “It means nothing at all to me. I am at my lowest level of caring about the topic. It is not possible for me to care less about the decision or topic.”

That is all.

I found myself back at Lucida Console, again, until today when I came across Bitstream Vera Sans Mono in 100% TrueType format. If you’re looking for a nice monospaced font for programming and such, give it a look.