Shame on you, Toshiba

A big thumbs down to Toshiba for their negligent decision to not offer any refunds to people who trusted them enough in the last couple of years to buy one of their HD DVD players.

Reject those nosy email messages

MS Outlook uses a “tracking option” which enables the sender of an email to determine when the recipient has actually read it. If, like me, you find this “feature” an intrusion of privacy, you can do something about it.

I simply use the following regular expression pattern in my spam filtering software:

REJECT = ^disposition-notification-to: .*

While someone requesting a “read receipt” doesn’t technically make it spam, the end result is good enough for me; their email just gets deleted before it gets into my inbox.

Jacob’s gift

Jacob Nielsen has a free gift for all web designers, business analysts, information architects and usability evangelists. Finally, something interesting to read at the beach.

We’re taking a few weeks off and have no intention of going anywhere near a computer for a while. Enjoy your time off, whatever that may amount to!

Internet speed test

These folks have the best web-based tool which measures the actual speed of your internet connection, for downloads and uploads. Although it’s restricted to connecting to only a handful of servers in the US, it should be sufficient to get an accurate and reliable estimate of your actual internet connection, as opposed to what your ISP charges you for.

Google moves into top gear

Will Google’s collection of business office tools, combined with their brand new offline web application technology, make the operating systems on our PC’s irrelevant?