Brain Assassin

Recently, a few Mail User Agents (MUA) — com­monly referred to as email client — have been updated, mainly Thun­der­bird, Sylpheed, Claws Mail, and eM Client. Dur­ing the next days (pos­si­bly weeks) I will take a look at them and their fea­ture sets to decide whether switch­ing from Thun­der­bird to another con­tender has its advan­tages or not. Last time I did some­thing sim­i­lar, I decided to go with Thunderbird.

I’m not going to write a review for every email client I’ve picked for closer exam­i­na­tion, nor will I cre­ate a check list. My plan is to install them all and then just use them. I want to see how they dif­fer in their fea­ture imple­men­ta­tions and how intu­itive their user inter­face is. Because I want to remain open-​​minded about any­thing, I decided against a check list.

Do you have some sug­ges­tions or want to tell me how you chose your email client? Don’t hes­i­tate to leave your opin­ion and enlighten me.

Obvi­ously, the 8001050F PSN error fixed itself when the inter­nal clock date changed from Feb­ru­ary 29^th to March 1^st UTC. If the time dis­played on the XMB is still incor­rect, you can fix it by adjust­ing time set­tings man­u­ally or via the inter­net. I just took a quick look at it before going to work and I could sign in to the PlaySta­tion Net­work with­out expe­ri­enc­ing any error mes­sage. I’ll have to check whether I’ve lost any data but I don’t think so because I really couldn’t do anything.

If you started a game while this hap­pened your local tro­phy col­lec­tion may be blank. Just get a new tro­phy and your local list should be refreshed and alright. If it doesn’t work, you’ll have to wait until Sony makes an offi­cial state­ment regard­ing this issue. Have fun once again.

Just a few hours ago I said that you couldn’t fix the error 801050F on your own. Looks like I was wrong. Some guy claims that you only have to open your PS3, dis­con­nect the bat­tery for a few min­utes, stick it back in and you’re fine. Sounds very nice if you’re adven­tur­ous and don’t care about open­ing your PS3 sys­tem. I don’t know for cer­tain but I’m pretty sure you’ll lose your war­ranty so it is safer to wait for Sony’s fix to arrive. If you absolutely can’t wait, that seems to be the way to go!

By the way, if you try to fol­low the link only to see a mes­sage about the board being down for the moment, try Google’s cache. When the site has loaded, press the Escape but­ton or click the Stop but­ton in your browser’s toolbar.

The PS3 error code 8001050F is wreak­ing havoc on the Playsta­tion Net­work. Appar­ently, this prob­lem is caused by a bug in the clock func­tion­al­ity and affects mod­els other than the new slim PS3 (120÷250 GB mod­els). Accord­ing to some reports in a num­ber of forums some »fat« PS3s have worked ok.

If you are affected, date and time set­tings have been re-​​set to Jan­u­ary 1^st, 2000.  This pre­vents you from sign­ing in to PSN with the error mes­sage »An error has occurred. You have been signed out of PlaySta­tion Net­work (8001050F)«. Your tro­phies will also not dis­play cor­rectly or fail to sync.

You can’t fix it. Sony prob­a­bly stores some form of date in UTC for­mat, then mod­i­fy­ing it accord­ing to your time­zone to get what­ever you see on your on-​​screen clock. If it won’t fix itself, we’ll need a firmware update which we will prob­a­bly have to install man­u­ally from USB stick (I don’t really think so but always expect the worst). Chang­ing the sys­tem date man­u­ally won’t change any­thing at all.

What did Sony have to say about the issue? Not much but they do advise us to »not use the PS3 sys­tem, as doing so may result in errors in some func­tion­al­ity, such as record­ing obtained tro­phies, and not being able to restore cer­tain data«.

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Long time no post. Yeah. Let’s just say that it’s sum­mer, the weather is fine and I don’t wanna spend more time in front of my PC than nec­es­sary. Besides, I had some busi­ness to take care of. Any­way, a few peo­ple asked me to return to writ­ing more reg­u­larly. I picked a topic that has really vexed me over the last few days: Cal­en­dars and MUAs (Mail User Agents, com­monly referred to as mail clients).

I’m cur­rently using Out­look XP and I wanted to change some­thing. Frankly, Outlook’s IMAP sup­port sucks and it’s really bloated. All I wanted was a well per­form­ing MUA that sup­ports IMAP. After I did a lit­tle research I found that Sylpheed exactly fits my needs. It’s small, it’s fast, it doesn’t need much mem­ory, and it sup­ports IMAP. Unfor­tu­nately, Sylpheed doesn’t sport a cal­en­dar. That can’t be much of a prob­lem, I though. Lit­tle did I know that look­ing for a cal­en­dar appli­ca­tion would eat up a lot of my spare time.

I dis­cov­ered some PIM (Per­sonal Infor­ma­tion Man­age­ment) soft­ware that would fit my needs but almost every appli­ca­tion had a major draw­back. First of all, I didn’t want to pay for it. Oth­er­wise, Essen­tialPIM would’ve been my first choice, even though they charge you twice: Once for the Pro appli­ca­tion and once for the plu­gin needed to sync with my Google cal­en­dars. Well, I took a look at the Chan­dler Project but that has a lot more to offer than I want. Next, I tried Mozilla Sun­bird. In com­bi­na­tion with the Provider for Google Cal­en­dar 0.4 exten­sion it did actu­ally work. After some exten­sive test­ing I real­ized two things. First, the exten­sion didn’t always work sat­is­fac­to­rily and Sun­bird has a mem­ory foot­print of about 35 MB.

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You tend to fill your Desk­top with a lot of icons and use is like a clip­board? You like the the sim­plic­ity of drag­ging stuff onto the Desk­top for later pro­cess­ing and it serves as your prime down­load folder? If that’s the case, you might want to check out Bump­Top. Accord­ing to the web­site Bump­Top is »a fresh and engag­ing new way to inter­act with your com­puter desk­top«. I can assure you that it sure is. This piece of soft­ware tries to mimic your real-​​life desk and it does so in quite a nice way. You can push, pull, toss, pile, and sort your doc­u­ments with sim­ple ges­tures. Sound like some real cool stuff. Check it out:

To my mind, how­ever, man­ag­ing the desk­top only is the first step. You see, with an appli­ca­tion like that you don’t wanna restrict your­self to your desk­top. Pro­vided that they can seam­lessly incor­po­rate Bump­Top into your Win­dows there’s one place I’d like to see it: It would be way cool if they man­aged to inte­grate the soft­ware into the Win­dows Explorer. I can almost see it in front of me — on the left hand you have your usual tree-​​view and on the right hand you got Bump­Top fea­tur­ing a 3D view and all the afore­men­tioned fea­tures. That would be awe­some. I hope they think of some­thing like that.