Back in March I started look­ing for a new mail user agent, com­monly referred to as email client. Dur­ing the last few days I had a lit­tle time at my hands and I tried Claws Mail, eM Client, Post­box and Sylpheed. Regard­ing Post­box I went for the 30-​​days trial of the full ver­sion after I’ve com­pared the two edi­tions (Post­box and Post­box Express). I set up a few IMAP and POP3 accounts and then I just used each client for a short time.

Once again, I’ll stay true to Thun­der­bird. To be hon­est, I liked Post­box a lot but it’s not that much supe­rior to Thun­der­bird espe­cially if you con­sider the add-​​ons sit­u­a­tion. What I liked best about Post­box was the way they orga­nized the accounts. That’s where Post­box really shines. So, instead of wast­ing more time with other clients I just went ahead and did what I wanted to do for a few years – I finally cre­ated a nice User.js to store some help­ful pref­er­ences. I thought I’d share a few of the most impor­tant set­tings that I found with you:

// Thunderbird 3 adds a disk cache. Activate it to cache any remote content.
// Messages and attachments are now cached for IMAP accounts as well.
user_pref("browser.cache.disk.enable", true);
// Grant 50 megabytes of storage
user_pref("browser.cache.disk.capacity", 51200);

Now, let’s move on to the IMAP set­tings. Read more…

With the debut of a short Mor­tal Kom­bat film titled Rebirth spec­u­la­tion has run ram­pant on the inter­net yes­ter­day. The nearly eight-​​minute clip fea­tured a very inter­est­ing and dark and gritty take on the fight­ing fran­chise. The short is directed by Kevin Tan­charoen and fea­tures a cast that includes Ian Anthony Dale (Scor­pion), Lateef Crow­der (Baraka), Mat Mullins (Johnny Cage), Jeri Ryan (Sonya Blade) and Michael jai White (Jax). Accord­ing to Jeri Ryan’s twit­ter­ing Rebirth isn’t a live-​​action trailer for the next Mor­tal Kom­bat game and it’s not a trailer for a new MK movie. Looks like an inde­pen­dent pro­duc­tion to sell Warner Broth­ers Tancharoen’s reimag­in­ing of the franchise.

So, there’s no guar­an­tee that there will be a reimag­in­ing or if there is that the same actors will play the char­ac­ters in a fea­ture film ver­sion. Despite all that, the ‘teaser’ looks like a huge suc­cess online. Lots of talk here and there and I have to admit, I like Tancharoen’s vision more than the first two films and I def­i­nitely like it more than that sorry excuse for a series titled Mor­tal Kom­bat: Con­quest. Any­way, enjoy the trailer:

Per­for­mance results for the tested URL shorteners

The guys over at Watch­Mouse did a really inter­est­ing com­par­i­son: The set a bunch of URL short­en­ers against each other to see how good they really are. Watch­Mouse mon­i­tored 14 pop­u­lar URL short­en­ers for a month and took a long, hard look at avail­abil­ity and speed. Inter­est­ingly enough, only goo.gl and twt.tl were always avail­able dur­ing the test­ing period.  In terms of speed, Facebook’s fb.me ist by far the slow­est of them all and goo.gl reigns supreme.

Also, it seems that only a few of the short­en­ing ser­vices opti­mized their DNS servers for inter­na­tional use. If you’re in the same coun­try as some of the ser­vices have their servers stashed, you can look up the IP address half a sec­ond faster than an inter­na­tional vis­i­tor. In addi­tion to these find­ings, Watch­Mouse fig­ured out that bit.ly’s pro ser­vice – a paid ver­sion offer­ing more options – is slower on aver­age than the free counterpart.

Per­son­ally, I don’t use URL short­en­ers because I like to see where a link gets me. There are a few add-​​ons and/​or user­scripts for Fire­fox to keep you on the safe side though, by expand­ing short­ened URLs. Any­way, if you can’t avoid the use of such a ser­vice check out the new web­site the guys from Watch­Mouse have set up: the site pro­vides real-​​time sta­tus reports for URL shorteners.

A few min­utes ago I stum­bled over an inter­est­ing arti­cle over at Life­hacker. The new beta at Bubbl.us allows users to do some pro­duc­tive brain­storm­ing by offer­ing a free, web-​​based and sim­ple to use soft­ware. You can start to pro­duce good-​​looking mind maps with­out reg­is­ter­ing. If you want to save your mind map though, you should reg­is­ter. It’s free and they don’t want your e-​​mail address.

Bubbl.us is very easy to use and you will intu­itively grasp its options. Most options are very stream­lined and can be accom­plished with­out ever need­ing your mouse. Best of all, apart from print­ing your mind map, you can export it to JPG or PNG. If you did reg­is­ter, you are able to share your mind maps with oth­ers. It’s very speedy although it took me a while to prop­erly save a mind map I created.

It’s good to know that there is a free, web-​​based solu­tion out there that’s easy to use. If you are not into web-​​based prod­ucts, take a look at Free­Mind which is a mind-​​mapping soft­ware writ­ten in Java. Free­Mind offers some attrac­tive fea­tures licensed under GPL. Let’s get to work and sketch out your ideas for world domination!

I don’t really have time to fix my user­script Tweak Game­trail­ers but I just did any­way. The lat­est changes over at Gametrailers.com intro­duced a new flash player and ban­ished Quick­Time and Win­dows Media Player. In addi­tion with few mod­er­ate changes in the nam­ing scheme my script didn’t work any­more. Now it’ll work again and it’s even smaller than before.

Ah, just to let you all now: Obvi­ously, the guys over at Game­trail­ers made some big­ger changes. Effec­tive imme­di­ately you only need to reg­is­ter to com­pletely bypass the age ver­i­fi­ca­tion. Of course, my script still will take care of that annoy­ance. Have fun!

So, dur­ing the last few weeks I’ve been look­ing for a pass­word man­ager. I recently stum­bled over Robo­Form which is a quite inter­est­ing prod­uct if you’re look­ing for a pass­word man­ager that runs in your browser and acts as a form filler. I tested it for a few days but I didn’t really like it all that much. Robo­Form is con­ve­nient but it only works within your browser. I’d like to have my pass­word man­ager avail­able to me all the time, though. Plus, you absolutely have to pay for Robo­Form after a trial period  of 30 days or it will become seri­ously crip­pled in its functionality.

That’s why I once again turned to KeeP­ass which I’ve used for a short while a few years ago. So, I installed KeeP­ass on my sys­tems and dropped the heav­ily encrypted data­base in my Drop­box account. After con­fig­u­ra­tion I imme­di­ately dis­cov­ered the awe­some poten­tial of a fea­ture called Auto­Type: Just set the focus on the con­trol accept­ing your user­name, press your defined short­cut and the magic hap­pens. KeeP­ass logs you in with the cre­den­tials you pro­vided. Nice, you might think. Well, it didn’t work all too well in the browser. I dis­cov­ered a few scripts on Userscripts.org but not one of them worked as I wanted them too.

No prob­lem, I thought. Just cre­ate one your­self … and here it is: KeeP­ass Auto­Type Enhancer. This script sets the focus on any user­name field it detects on a web page. You can con­fig­ure the script to even focus con­trols that are out­side the view­port so that the browser scroll as nec­es­sary. If you don’t, it will ignore con­trols out­side the view­port. I’ve imple­mented the short­cut CTRL+ALT+S to man­u­ally focus on the user­name field. The short­cut will always set the focus on the appro­pri­ate field even if it isn’t inside the view­port, thus ignor­ing the switch pro­vided in the script. Enjoy!