* First of all, please don't forget the Computer Donation Drive next Saturday July 26th at the Oak Island Recreation Center from 10 AM to 2 PM. See you there!
* I have discovered ebooks.
Oh, I have tried ebooks in the past, but with mixed results. I have had book files on my PC that I could read with Microsoft Reader for years. But I have to confess that I am just not comfortable sitting in front of my PC screen to read. Besides uncomfortable, its inconvenient - holding that big, heavy CRT monitor above my face while lying in bed can be really tough on the complexion when you fall asleep and it falls on you! Only kidding, of course, but it illustrates the problem.
I also had an e-book reader on my old Palm III hand-held unit. But its screen was monochrome, and not very bright. I got eyestrain even after just a few minutes of use. The local library has ebook machines that you can borrow - these are about the size of a hardcover book and have much better screens. But they are still somewhat inconvenient to hold, and the screens are not up to par with the latest LCD screens.
As I wrote about in previous columns, I have now purchased a new Pocket PC - specifically the HP iPAQ h2215. Although palm sized (as they all are), the diminutive size of the screen was not a drawback as it was so bright and crisp.
So, I decided to try to get back into ebooks again. There are basically two kinds of ebooks - free and expensive! If you look around on the Internet, you will find lots of free ebooks for downloading in one of the three major formats (Microsoft Reader, Adobe Acrobat Reader, and Mobipocket Reader). Most of the free stuff is old, public domain classics, but this is a chance to read up on all those old classics you missed, or stuff you read as a kid.
Microsoft is sponsoring a summer ebook reading program, in which they let you download some really good books for free. See www.Microsoft.com/reader
The major online book vendors now sell ebooks online in addition to hardcover or softcover books. But the prices aren't much cheaper. The advantage, of course, is that you don't have to allocate literally board-feet of shelf space to hold them. As a matter of fact, most ebooks are less than 1 megabyte in size - so you can store lots and lots on today's removable storage, such as Compact Flash cards. If you get, for example, a 256MB CF card, you could hold 250 or perhaps more books in the space taken up by a thick postage stamp.
Now, as far as actually reading them goes, I am very comfortable with using my PocketPC for that. I can easily read in bed, and the PPC is as light as a paperback book. Plus I can take them with me anywhere I go, along with stored MP3 music files.
I suggest you check this out.
* About spam, it seems that the closer we get to legislation to limit the spam email onslaught, the more spam keeps coming. I have tried a few of the spam fighting programs, and find that they don't work very well. The best technique, I have found, is to use the supplied filtering capability in Outlook Express to search for certain words.
It's a little hard to give a complete cookbook on how to do this, as it varies in different OE versions. First, add a new email folder and call it Spam. Go to Tools and then select Mail Rules. Create a new rule to check for certain words in the subject line and in the body of the email. When found, take the action to move the email to the Spam folder.
Now, ever time you receive a spam email, look for words which would almost never appear in proper email (such as "sexy" or "enlargement") and then add these words to the bad word rule list. I would like to publish my list of bad words, but I wouldn't want to publish anything so vulgar here. After doing this for a while, you will find that you can trap a high percentage of the spam.
Now, what do you do with it? The problem is that occasionally a valid email may get caught. You have to look at the spam folder before deleting the items. But, at least, you need to do it perhaps only once a day, and you find that it is pretty easy to scan the list quickly. Good luck and happy spam hunting!
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport / Oak Island area. You can visit his website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail him at bsc@bobseidel.com).